etnobofin

“England to me is my mother tongue / And what I did when I was young.“
W.H. Auden

“…J’ai souvent eu l’occasion de répondre, à ceux qui me posaient des questions sur mon origine, que mon pays c’est d’abord et avant tout l’enfance, puis, en second lieu, ma langue.“
Daniel Ducharme

Birmingham, 3rd January 2009

Dear Everyone I’ve Ever Met,

On New Year’s Eve, I was back in Oxford.  Stepping off the train into the cold grey afternoon was like breathing a sigh of relief.  Everything was once again familiar.  The Business School’s copper ziggurat , the low forest of bicycles arrayed outside the station (none of which seem to have moved since I left), the signs on the front of the buses lead towards familiar places… Abingdon, Wheatley, Temple Cowley.

Avoiding the streaming traffic and noise of Frideswide Square, I slipped through the churchyard of St Thomas the Martyr, with its gravestones and 12th century priest’s door, and turned into my old street.  Nothing’s changed much in three months, of course.

That night we played old-time jazz in the village pub in Cassington, and saw in 2009 with a New Orleans-style rendition of Auld Lang Syne.   The pub had good ales on tap, the village was built of Cotswold stone.  The local accents burred westwards as the night went on. Strangely, it felt like I was home.

Although, at the same time, I am not “home” at all.  I’m a New Zealander.  The place where I put my feet is an obscure south-east corner of the Hauraki Gulf, with its particular configuration of water, tides, rocks and islands.  NZ writer Emma Hart, blogging this weekend at Public Address, talked about her own turanga waewae – the highway south of Christchurch that is the “back-bone of my childhood” :

…it’s how a landscape should be. That’s where I feel I stand strong, with the sun on my face, the sea on my right hand, and the mountains on my left.

Our emotions and memories are so often bound up in landscape: places where significant things happened, places linked to people we love, or places where we return to gain strength. But our memories of those places are twisted.

As we remould our memories, adding new layers of meaning, it seems we quickly reach a point at which our image of a place no longer resembles its reality. What we are left with is language: words that attempt to evoke the importance of certain times and places.

Last year in May, I returned to wander around my old school, a place where so much growing up took place.  Suddenly, it seemed the school was strangely small, that it couldn’t live up to the significance I’d given it through repeated exercise of memory.

There’s a sense now of being burdened by the clutter of places that make up a personal history. Like a refrigerator covered with so many postcards that you can’t tell its a fridge any more.  There’s pictures of dining tables in Basel, a view of Lake Taupo from my grandfather’s house, a snapshot of desert in Arizona, a place near Queenstown called Paradise, snow-covered ridges in the Vosges, cloisters in Oxford.

Is there a point at which our spiritual scrapbook gets too full? Is it possible to cherish all these places and yet still keep adding more pivot points to your life?  Can we stretch our roots too far?

In just over two weeks, I leave the UK to live in France.  Once again uprooted, pushing onwards into a new place.  It’s exciting. But at the same time, there is a little voice asking if it is time to settle down.  I’ve still got a whole bunch of old postcards to sort out.  At the same time, I’m still writing new ones.

Hope everything is going well in your parts of the world!

Lots of love from,
Richard xoxo

(Sorry, if this post comes across as self-regarding waffle, that’s because it probably is.)

Four views of Merton College Chapel…

April 9th, 2006 (the morning after my arrival in Oxford)

December 22nd, 2006 – in winter fog

April 8th, 2007 – another spring

April 6th, 2008 – after snowfall

September 21st, 2008 (the afternoon I left Oxford)

Alongside Radio 4 and Simon Amstell, a weekend afternoon ale (or cider) with mates at a pub is one of the great delights of living in this country. Pubs form such an important part of British life and you can’t (and shouldn’t) avoid them.

Somebody told me that Oxford boasts something like 100 pubs inside the ring road.  It’s amazing how many of them you can manage to visit over a couple of years without really trying.  So the pubs listed below are just the ones I like, or they’re at least notorious enough to merit their own wikipedia entries…

The Eagle and Child : (aka “The Bird and Baby” or “The Fowl and Foetus”) on St Giles. This is where C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkein used to hang out. Not my favourite, but the snugs by the front door are the perfect venue for a friendly argument on a winter evening.

The Bear: Serving beer to thirsty students since 1242, the Bear is notable mostly for its age (old even by Oxford standards), a framed collection of 5000 ties and its inconceivably small size.

The Hollybush Inn: situated on Osney Island, this unpretentious local pub is where Radiohead (and the Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band) played their first gig.

The Head of the River: at Folly Bridge, by the Isis in the centre of town. Chow down on a good solid pub lunch while watching tourists fall out of their punts.

The Hobgoblin: one of the only pubs I can remember on Cowley Road (after an evening on Cowley Road many people don’t remember much). Sponsored by Oxfordshire’s Wychwood Brewery, it’s one of the few places in the city you can rely on getting a pint of Hobgoblin. Yum.

The Jolly Boatman: another waterside pub on the Oxford Canal near Kidlington. Good but not outstanding food and a reasonable beer selection. The real attraction of this pub is that it’s an easy 7 mile cycle trip up the canal path from the city – the perfect activity on a cool summer’s day.

The Trout Inn: a nice 30min walk up the Isis to Godstow brings you to rightly famous Trout Inn (mentioned in Brideshead Revisited). Popular, and hard to get a table. In summer, the Aspalls Organic Suffolk Cyder is highly recommended. In winter, try their venison hotpot.

The White Hart: A good alternative to the Trout, in the nearby village of Wytham. Fantastic menu. In summer, you can play the traditional Oxfordshire pub game “Aunt Sally “

Jude the Obscure: A late contender for best pub in Jericho, without the chi-chi atmosphere of some of the other Jericho bars. Revolving selection of ales.

The Turf Tavern: Nestled down an alley between Hertford College and New College, the Turf is impossible to find for Oxford n00bs, but worth the effort. It’s good fun elbowing your way past the crowds of undergrads to access the bar and its exceptional rotating menu of real ales.

The Lamb and Flag: owned by St John’s College, but don’t let that stop you. It’s cosy and unpretentious, and empty out of term. Try the Lamb and Flag special ale if it’s in season.

The Kings Arms: at the far end of the Broad, this pub is all-student, all the time, and most of the leading politicians, lawyers, writers and scientists of the realm have propped up its bar at some point.  It’s old, uncomplicated and most of the really serious work of the university takes place here.

The Wheatsheaf: Wheatsheaf Passage, just off the High near Carfax. Lots of bands, good jazz nights on Thursdays with rotating UK/international artists. Go for the music, not the beer.

The Jericho Tavern: Walton Street, Jericho. Local bands play here, and it’s where Radiohead and Supergrass first gained a following in the early 90′s. Ridiculously popular on Friday nights. Unless you’re a Jericho resident, you’re likely to only ever come here if you want to hear the music.

Which are the best of these? Well, if you had just one day in Oxford, I’d definitely take you to the Turf. Unless you were a favourite aunt or a parent, in which case I’d reserve a table at The Trout or the White Hart for dinner.  For a quiet everyday pint away from the tourists and students, Jude the Obscure ticks most boxes in terms of atmosphere and drinks selection.

Remind me again, why the heck am I leaving Oxford?

*This blog supports responsible drinking. Respect alcohol, respect yourself. Enjoy local pubs in moderation.

If you avoid the 16 licensed kebab vans that appear nightly in the centre of town, there are some really good places to eat out in Oxford. Before I move to another city and forget them all, here’s a list of favoruite Oxford restaurants, mostly for my future reference, but it may be useful to any readers who visit sometime:

Al- Shami: an unusual location for a Lebanese restaurant – opposite the synagogue, in a residential street in Jericho. Great food, reasonable prices, lots of vegetarian options, always full.

Aziz: Beside Folly Bridge. Upper range dishes from the subcontinent, with a terrace overlooking the Isis

Chiang Mai Kitchen: Kemp Hall Passage, off the High. If you think that eating Thai food in 16th century Elizabethan townhouse is too bizarre, you’ll be won over by the food. Book to ensure a table!

Chutneys: Cnr New Inn Hall Street and St Michael’s Street. Good Indian place with great vegetarian options, although it often seems overrun by students from St Peters and Brasenose Annexe.

Edamame: Of all Oxford’s secret corners, Edamame is one worth discovering! By far the best Japanese restaurant in the city, Edamame also has the strangest opening hours. So count yourself lucky if you manage to arrive when it’s open and when there’s a table free.  Go on Thursdays out of term for sushi night – delicious!

Jamie’s Italian: George Street. Jamie Oliver’s new Italian restaurant. Excellent Italian food at very good prices. No reservations – turn up and queue. The perfect venue for a thirtieth birthday party!

Qumins: St Clements. Hands down the best Indian place in town, a short walk south of Magdalen Bridge. Great place to burn the tongues off American visitors.

The Gardener’s Arms: Plantation Road in Jericho. Down-to-earth pub that also happens to be Oxford’s best vegetarian restaurant, but long waits for service on Sunday afternoons.

GBK: George Street. A little slice of Aotearoa. They serve Mac’s Gold and burgers, kiwis-style. This is all you need to know.

Mortons: Great takeaway sandwiches. They have three outlets in town, in the Covered Markets, on New Inn Hall Street and on the Broad opposite Trinity College

Noodle Bar: Gloucester Green. Cheapest good eating in town. Fast service, and always full of everybody.

Anchor Inn:  unpretentious pub restaurant at the north end of Jericho, at the end of a nice evening walk up the canal – very popular and good food.

Next post: The Pub Guide

Update 13.9.2008: Added Edamame after Mari pointed out that I had missed it out!

In a couple of weeks I leave Oxford for another English city … Oxford’s provided a special place and time in my life, and I’ll be taking many memories on board (hopefully along with a few bottles of Wychwood Hobgoblin) when I drive north up the M40. So I made a Youtube “photo essay” as a tribute to the place.

The aim was to make a montage of a ‘different’ Oxford from what the tourists see, but it turned out I took most of my best photos in the historic centre of town (I live near the city centre anyway). Hopefully video still gives a flavour of what it’s been like to actually live in a city like Oxford with its traditions, water meadows, river walks and all the lovely people I’ve met here.

The music is by a local Oxford band, Danny and the Champions. Their self-titled album is available through Amazon UK or iTunes.

The River Cherwell at Mesopotamia

After living in Oxford for two and a half years, it becomes easier to take the city for granted. You become oblivious to the tourist hordes sweeping up Cornmarket. Ancient college walls become a peripheral, sandstone-coloured blur in the rush through town to Boots to buy shaving gel and new razors, weaving your bike between the queue of buses on the High. The Oxford of legends and ghosts, the Oxford of et in Arcadia ego and the youth of Empire seems buried beneath the bustle of the day-to-day.

But just occasionally, Oxford hints at deeper traditions that grind on at tectonic pace. Like the rare, furtive swish of geisha’s kimono hurrying down a back alley in Kyoto, small scraps of mythological Oxford reveal themselves, for a briefest of moments. Blink and you’ll miss them.

Radcliffe Square

A harried don cycles up Catte Street in the early evening, sweating in full sub fusc and robes that billow behind, perhaps late for his pre-prandial sherry at All Souls;

It’s 9.05pm and you happen to be passing up St Aldate’s as Tom Tower intones its bell 101 times, as it has done every day since the time of Henry VIII;

An island among the tourists, a small group of pilgrims pray in a circle around the paved cross set into the Broad where the Protestant martyrs were burned at the stake by the Catholic Queen Mary in 1555 and 1556. (Thirty years later, half a mile away outside Magdalen College, under a protestant Queen, Richard Yaxley and George Nichols were hanged for being Catholic priests);

New College

While queuing for sushi at Edamame, a chattering crocodile of miniature undergrads in black duffle coats and mortar boards rustles up Holywell Street, led by a porter in bowler hat – it’s the New College choristers heading back to school after evensong;

After a few ales on the Cowley Road, you glide agreeably back towards town, pausing on Magdalen Bridge at midnight where you wonder if a young Oscar Wilde or T.E. Lawrence ever watched the moon pass behind a cloud above the slack, muddy Cherwell.

The priest’s door at St Thomas the Martyr

In most ways, modern Oxford is like any other provincial city in the south of England – suburbs, factories, narrow streets choked with traffic and the usual clustering of chain stores. But in small scraps of time – at midnight, or when the light is just right, or on the sidelines of your daily routine, you sense that a more ancient rhythm still plays onwards.

Zorbing – Stornoway
From Letters From Lewis EP: Hatpop/Independent [iTunes]

Last weekend’s Arcane Festival at Tetsworth was a lucky opportunity to hear a live performance by Stornoway, surely one of the most interesting bands currently working in Oxford. Their deceptively simple, pentatonic-based melodies are filtered through folk-rock and various bits of electronics with trumpets, violins and banjos.

Smart lyrics hide a few coy winks to their home town – the title of the song posted above refers to “zorbing through the streets of Cowley” – and one suspects that the river that runs through the centre of their song On the Rocks might just be the Cherwell or Isis as they wend their slow way towards the English Channel.

You can hear a lot more on their myspace page, and see more photos in their Flickr group.

Photo by Platform3

Eustache Du Caurroy – Sanctus

Eustache Du Caurroy – Benedicamus Domino

From the Missa Pro Defunctis by Eustache Du Caurroy
Performed by the Choir of New College, Oxford
From Eustache du Caurroy: Requiem Mass & Motets [emusic] [amazon]

Listen to this music. The writing below does no justice to what you hear. Listen to the music. Ignore the rather pretentious words that follow, words that grasp towards a sincere expression of wonder, surprise and gratitude, but fall far short. Instead, listen.

If you lived in New York, you might write more about jazz or hip-hop. In Dakar you might’ve written about mbalax. As it’s turned out, living in Oxford has offered the gift of (re)discovering choral music. In particular, the New College Choir has featured numerous times previously on this blog.

Last Sunday night was the end Trinity Term and the last sung evensong at New College before I leave Oxford, (yes, I’m leaving – perhaps a subject for a separate post sometime). I don’t depart for another couple of months, but I already know that of all the magic of this strange city, I will miss most of all the evenings spent in New College’s mediaeval chapel.

Photo by Lawrence OP

When they sing at their best, this choir makes the planet stop turning. Their music sounds like falling backwards forever through a stained glass universe, Lux æterna.

When Eustache du Caurroy wrote the Missa pro defunctis for the funeral of Henry IV of France in 1610, the Choir of New College had already been singing in Oxford for more than 200 years.

It’s been a mysterious and wonderful privilege to participate, if ever so peripherally, in a continuing tradition of music and worship that stretches back so far into our past. Thank you, Dr Higginbottom and the boys and clerks of the choir. May others continue to find inspiration in your work and singing. Floreat Collegium Novum.

I had to post this video by John Kelly, because it sums up so much of what fascinates me about the English attitude to tradition, (and more specifically the more stubborn Oxonian sub-species of tradition, which seems impervious to both change and logic).

I did go to the 2008 edition of May Morning this year, but Beating the Bounds is probably an even older and possibly odder ceremony.

Every year or two, the parishioners of St Michael at the Northgate in central Oxford walk around the historic boundary of their parish and beat the boundary stones with willow rods. Of course, being in the centre of a modern city, many of the boundary markers are now inside shops, in carparks or basements. But this does not stop the intrepid parishioners of St Michaels…

The short documentary does a good job of explaining what is going on. You get to see a lot of the places I go shopping – Cornmarket, M&S, the hideous Clarendon Centre and the Covered Markets.

Lewis Taylor – New Morning
From The Lost Album [Buy] [emusic]

This weekend marks two years since I arrived in Oxford. So this morning I went out and took a photo of the chapel at Merton College, as I did in April 2006 and April 2007. The unexpected snowfall overnight offered an unusual mantle of peace to the city.

24 months is by far the longest I’ve been away from New Zealand. Europe still suits me as a space for making mistakes, adventure, working and exploring. A permanent move back ‘home’ still seems to sit out somewhere in the middle-to-long-distance.

I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learnt in two years as an “expatriate”. Given how clueless I still am about most things, it’s good to recognise that certain life-truths have become apparent, or at least been reinforced.

1. You’ll never lose your kiwi accent. Somehow I had this crazy notion I’d end up talking like a Thames Valley native. It hasn’t happened yet. Despite living among English people and being bombarded by Radio 4, I still speak Noo Zild, albeit inflected by a few dialect-isms (I catch myself saying “lorry” instead of “truck”; “yawright?” in place of “how are you?” and “hiya” rather than “hi”).

2. I will never understand the English or be one of them. Despite ancestry and a British passport, there are some things about English culture I just can’t track. Social class pervades everything you do here, and much casual conversation seems to be about categorising where you fit on the ladder. This may be why the English talk about the weather so much, because meteorology is class-neutral.

And the English are so reserved in their dealings with acquaintances – kiwis, even at their most diplomatic, come across as being blunt, over-eager and slightly clumsy. Making friends with English people is HARD (or maybe I’m just a nasty person who nobody wants to know).

3. Ale served at room temperature is, in fact, a drink. It took 18 months, but English beer finally makes sense. So it’s my round next time any of you are up in Oxvegas.