good morning world
The ghostly fog of the past few days seems to have lifted; at least, I can see out the kitchen window this morning. But it's just damp and grey. Yesterday I took the Oxford Tube to Oxford (of course) and it was very beautiful then: low frosty mists rolling along grass, rolling alongside the coach - first in Hyde Park, among the black cabs and cyclists, and then again once we got further north. On the way back in the evening the Oxfordshire hills were beautiful, with a blood-orange sunset behind them that went on for ages, the sky just getting imperceptibly more mauve... and the aura of a thousand years hanging over them. Travel is all tantalus, isn't it. Smoke and mirrors, there is Roman Britain over the crest of that hill, and here you are in your seat! Even were you standing on the hill you couldn't be IN it, which is what I think we want when we go to places like that.
I didn't really have any time to myself in Oxford itself, just five minutes in which I nipped into the Oxfam Bookshop, where I bought Byron's letters, letters and essays of Wilde in a lovely old Pelican edition, and a large Collected of Yehuda Amichai for too much money. Then there was, at least, a very fast walk - I was with two tall guys - struggling to carry all these books, plus of course my laptop etc - through a golden Oxford, the air sunny but still with a trace of uncertainty round the edges, scurrying past the Bridge of Sighs, and blossoming blossom along the river, sighing as we passed, and then the bus. Too tired to stay on by mtself. I read the Amichai on the way home.
Naturally, leaving at that time, there was traffic. Then in London there was traffic. Then at Victoria there was an accident or something and we were all advised to get off at Hyde Park Corner - me with my bags of books, plus laptop, vibrating slightly all over because of the coach. Oxford Street was heaving, it was pure hell, with shrieking gangs of unbelievably stupid and unpleasant girls, and nothing could move at all: it took me an hour then to get to Warren St, where I gratefully sank into the Tube, and got home at 8pm having been travelling for four hours. The vibrating didn't stop for hours.
Today, a gantlet of meetings, and things I need to a) organise and b) edit, to say nothing of c) do, which I can't because I will be in these meetings. And I've slept five hours.
February 14th: the birthdays of my friend Sinead, and my first high school boyfriend. I might go to the Camden Head tonight, where Tim Wells and Niall O'Sullivan are reading.
4 comments:
never heard the word gantlet used in that sense before.
You were in Oxford? How come? You were lucky to come up yesterday, it was the most beautiful day, today is miserable again.
That's just very odd, as I too was in Oxford yesterday! From 8.30am to nearly midnight, in fact, though I was hidden away in the Oxford Union for a number of hours - downing several pints of coffee and working on my ms, nothing glamorous.
I walked past the Oxfam Bookshop (St Giles) in the late afternoon, on my way to the Cont. Ed. library. Didn't see you, but maybe you'd gone by then! There were the usual homeless bods on the corner there: a 30-something man selling the Big Issue, whom I'd seen yelling drunkenly at traffic earlier in the day, and a young woman huddled on the pavement, staring at passers-by from under a rough pink blanket. It was getting quite chilly by then, dusk falling, and I felt very sorry for her.
Oxford is such a beautiful city, full of so many privileged and educated people, yet there's always this shadowy other world beneath it all ... and not even an invisible one, though I'm sure it must feel like that to them at times, poor sods.
Slightly amazed we didn't bump into each other.
Di, that's the only meaning of the word. Often people say "gauntlet," which has two meanings: the loose glove worn in chivalry and modern falconry, and the ordeal we now speak of figuratively - which is where a soldier would be punished by having to run between two rows of his fellow-soldiers, who wold be beating him with the flats of their swords.
Obviously our current usage of this word is figurative! It must have been lots worse than a mere meeting.
And Eloise and Jane, yes, I was just there for work, and if I had only KNOWN, Jane, we could have grabbed a coffee!! Well, next time I'm in that neck of the woods I'll think to let people know.
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