Oxford Month 2
Given how busy the terms are at Oxford, both this post and the last have been backdated. I wrote them while sitting at home in the Czech Republic on the 20th of December, occasionally dodging my memory by consulting the photographs still on my hard drive (goodness, I really need to migrate those to my external hard drives already).
As the
photos remind me, the first of November was a beautiful day, so I battled it
out with my guilt over wasting a productive Monday morning and hiked to South
Park. I had by then figured out a more satisfying balance between my schoolwork
and leisure time. My strategy now was to finish my essays/assignments and half
of my readings for one week in advance by Monday. This way, I could finish the
rest of my readings by the end of the week, start working on the next essay/assignment
on Friday, and repeat the whole process.
Having met
my goal and exceeded it that week, I did not feel too guilty for taking a nice
walk. It took about half an hour to get to South Park, though the sun never
rose much higher than where it was at around eight o’clock. Winters in the UK
are truly something else. I have learned to wear sunglasses every time I need
to walk south on a sunny day (which, given I live in the barren steppes of North
Oxford, happens quite frequently).
The
following day, I took my camera out again. It was the last day my class would have
our seminar at Christ Church before being assigned a different professor for our
next block. As the weather was sunny (two days in a row! What are the odds?), I
arrived half an hour early to take some pictures of the college. It is
difficult, even as a student at another college, to sneak in without a good
excuse or a friend from Christ Church to lead the way, which is why this trip
had a real sense of urgency to it. Afterwards, one of our classmates invited us
to have lunch in Exeter College, so I explored two colleges in a single day.
I would
make several more trips to different Oxford venues throughout the month. One
week, I asked a friend to show me around Magdalen College, one of the most
picturesque colleges in town. Particularly famed for its deer park, it is
probably the college with the largest directly adjoining grounds. The following
week, my housemates and I went to Port Meadow to see the last of its autumn
foliage. We walked all the way to Godstow Abbey, a former nunnery that has been
in a state of dilapidation since the monasteries were dissolved in the 1530s.
I decided
to skip lecture on Monday the 22nd and watch it online the next day.
Instead, I visited London with one of my housemates to get a reader pass at the
British Library and see some sights. The pass was suspiciously easy to get; I
had booked a slot, but I was allowed to log into the registration system on
site ten minutes before, and I was waved through without a single problem. We
spent the rest of the day walking southwards while looking for good restaurants
and taking pictures.
Towards the
end of the month, I visited Somerville college, where the second block of our
seminars was held. I would only set foot within its walls once, as covid forced
the seminar to be held online three times out of four. A female-only college
until 1992, it was the alma mater of Margaret Thatcher, whose bust looms over
the seminar room where we had our lesson. The following day, I went to see a
friend graduate from the Sheldonian – the lateness of the ceremony owing to the
pandemic, as all things that go wrong nowadays.
My last
trip of the month took me to Christchurch again. It was the first truly snowy
day I had seen at Oxford, and I saw a pair of deer silhouetted against the snow
in the distance.
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