Colleges and Choirs

It's the end of the school year, and everywhere we went there were students stacking bags, crates and suitcases onto the footpath and parents, generally mothers, rolling their eyes as they attempted to squash them all into the family car to take them home. A few students still have some exams, but most have finished, and the evidence of their over imbibing is all over the footpaths around the city.

Walked down some of the roads further out of the city centre, then joined the 11am walking tour with a very frenetic German tour guide who ran us all around, and talked without taking a breath. At one stage one of the tourists politely asked if this was a good time to interrupt with a question.

The advantage of being with a guide was that we got into a few places that are normally off limits to visitors, including the dining room at Jesus College complete with portraits of benefactors that included Queen Elizabeth I and Lawrence of Arabia, musician's gallery, and High Table. We visited the chapel and quadrangle at Oriel College, then the old original university areas of Oxford University Press, Radcliffe Camera and the Bodleian Library all from the 14th century.

During the rest of the day we visited numerous colleges and grounds, the original garage where William Morris started making cars and built a whole industry, the Carfix Tower, Oxford Castle, and Alice's Shop about which a student in a college across the road wrote Alice In Wonderland.

Spent an hour or so lying in the sun on the Christ Church Meadow later in the afternoon while waiting to go to Sung Evensong in the famous Christ Church Cathedral, complete with choir and 8 part harmonies. Sat in the stalls side-on to the aisle next to the choir which was fun. Even more fun was that there was no sermon. The irony was that the hymn books used in the service were printed by Cambridge Press.

It's a bit hard to describe Oxford. Yes, it's a group of 39 residential colleges interspersed with university faculty buildings, but they are not like Australian universities. All of them are hundreds of years old, and almost nothing is modern. The best I can describe it is to say that, in Melbourne terms, it's like having 39 Scotch Colleges all next to each other, and you can't walk on the grass in any of them.