Chasing Harry Potter

Before I detail another decadent adventure, a short story from my English classroom:

Me: I'm going to give each of you a card. Write down your name, your birthday, and your favorite book on the card.
Student: (Raises hand politely)
Me: Yes?
Student: Is Vogue a book?

Ah, children. Ever on the cutting edge.

Fortunately, I was able to spend the weekend in a booklover's mecca. Five of us, freed from Saturday class, took the student coach from school and traipsed around Oxford for the weekend.

We got to be the only patrons at an Indian restaurant in Jericho (a neighborhood slightly northwest of the main city center). We wrote postcards to friends and family. A few of us purchased the necessary Oxford-logo clothing to prove our travels, and of course yours truly just couldn't resist buying a book of poems at a shop on Broad Street called Blackwell's.

We explored everything on foot, and we were rewarded with a Saturday where the sun shone as we explored Christ Church Colllege, the Oxford Museum, and the Bodleian Library (really only the Divinity School examination room, but it was beautiful and historic and at least one scene from Harry Potter was filmed there).


On the drizzlier Sunday, we browsed the Ashmoleon museum of art and artifacts. I spent most of my time wandering around the Italian Renaissance exhibit, growing slightly weary of Madonnas-and-Children, but I perked up when, in the rooms dedicated to pre-Classical Aegea, I recognized names I had learned about in Greek Mythology class. Eventually, though, I faded and required a visit to the museum cafe.

It's hard not to feel like a museum dunce when you'd rather go to the cafe than look at another hunt scene or miniature sculpture of Hercules-in-combat-with-the-Nemean-Lion. But, as my mom would say, I'm a grown-ass woman. I could do as I liked. I sipped my latte with confidence.

When, with similar confidence, we were taking goofy pictures posing in the ramparts of New College, I remembered how I love for an old building to keep getting used.

As I loved the Dome Room at U.Va. for the dinners I ate there with the Guides, I admired the wood-panelled dining Hall at Christ Church for the bustling kitchen immediately adjacent. We wandered through C.S. Lewis's Magdalen College, and I loved glimpsing hideously patterned, fire-retardant curtains behind the old windows. Venerable though these buildings are, they mean nothing without the real, live students who are learning, eating, and setting things on fire there.

The banalities of undergraduate life could be seen nearly everywhere you looked.



An ivy-covered wall may loom over a courtyard, but at eye-level a grubby little placard reads "bicycles stored here will be confiscated." (For the record, Oxford is home to approximately 100,000 bicycles). The peace of a sunken garden (probably intended to encourage scholarly reflection) was broken by a guy in a sweatshirt singing "I'm Into Something Good" to himself as he slouched along. And at night, on the winding medieval mews that have been the thoroughfares of whip-smart dons and scholars for 800 years, girls in their shortest skirts and sky-high heels tottered along to a nightclub.

Try as I might to stick Oxford into another realm of contemplative integrity, it seems it will remain a colllege town. Well done, kids; I say well done. Keep the ole place on its toes.