 |
| The Fourth Plinth |
It's an old residence. Graffiti in the desk drawers dates the furniture back to at least 1982. One of the students from around that time carved his name and the date and a claim to being an 'international megastar'. I Googled him out of curiosity; he isn't.
In the hallways, there are fire doors every few metres, so the air just sits there and soaks into the walls and carpets, giving the place an extra-strong version of that stench of undergraduate life that all university residences have. There are dim yellow lights and pale, yellow-green walls. I don't know what the name of this colour is, but it is an Institutional Colour. Like the colours of hospitals and prisons, it says "the business of this place is not to make you happy". The particular colour and lighting in Carr-Saunders make everyone look like they have liver disease. Maybe this is to break the spirits of the students. Maybe it's to discourage binge drinking.
My room overlooked a central courtyard, where there's a small car-park and a noisy construction site. Mysterious construction noises began the first morning at 7:30AM. Strange noises -- I couldn't figure out what they were, or, if I could, what they had to do with construction. Every time I started to doze off, someone would start hitting an oil drum with a wrench or drop a dumpster full of maracas down a flight of metal stairs. In quiet periods, the workmen played music. They liked 80s pop. Or they'd talk, which was actually very interesting, because it's one of the few times I've heard real working-class English accents.
I always like being in London, but it's also the most exhausting and disorienting city I know. Especially on weekdays, it's an ants' nest of wandering roads and hurrying people. The streets are in no hurry to get where they're going, but the people are. And while it's impossible to get lost in, say, Manhattan, because the streets are a sensible numbered grid, in London it's hard to keep any sense of direction, because only a very few major streets run in a straight line, the rest following paths beaten by medieval cows, possibly drunk ones.
I don't know what else to say about London, apart from the fact that I'm now 0 for 4 (maybe 0 for 5) on turbine hall exhibitions in the Tate Modern. The last time I was here, they were unwrapping giant spider's legs for an upcoming display, but that's as close as I've gotten to actually seeing something in there.
Thursday, I went to Bath, and Friday I went to Oxford. Of the places in the area I haven't been to before, they're the two most obvious tourist destinations, and I wasn't feeling very imaginative. In Bath, I met up with Alex, an old friend living in Bristol, who walked around with me and made up lies about the sights. I was stuck in Bath until 10PM, because of issues with getting train tickets which, even by the amazingly low standards I've set, aren't really interesting enough to describe. It was kind of interesting, though, to watch the tourists leave and the centre be reclaimed by locals -- drunk teenagers, mostly.
I had dinner in a fish and chips shop, which was a mistake. First, it was a bit nasty. Second, it left my clothes smelling like fish and chips, which is kind of a disaster when you've only got one sweatshirt for the next three months and weren't planning to do laundry any time soon. Finally, the guys who ran it turned out to be cartoonish xenophobes, and from where I sat I could overhear parts of their conversation about refugees.
Oxford is one of those towns that has such a surplus of old and beautiful buildings that some that would be the centre of a modest tourist industry elsewhere are completely ignored. Near the train station, a delicate-looking Tudor house droops out over the road. Inside is not a museum, but a chain sandwich restaurant (Pret a Manger).
I went to the Ashmolean Museum, but spent most of the afternoon in the Parks and in the quiet Holywell Cemetery. I didn't visit any of the colleges. I was tired, and some of them weren't open anyway, because it was Open Day, which doesn't mean what you might think. The school was Open to prospecive students and their parents. So there were a lot of teenaged future Oxford students around. Some so pale and young and with such bad hair they had to be math prodigies, others in tailored clothes who talked to their parents like they were strangers, probably because the sons had spent their childhoods at Eton and the fathers were always at their club or at the House of Lords, wrangling about fox-hunting or trying to bring back serfdom.
Anyway -- Istanbul tomorrow, and the first flight of my round-the-world ticket.
