July 12, 2005 – Finding My Muse in Oxford

July 12, 2005 – Finding My Muse in Oxford

It’s Monday February 15, 1982. I’ve rented a car and I’m now driving out of London en route to Oxford. I manage to get out of the city without getting lost. This is remarkable for me since I’m by myself. The first time I drove in the UK in 1978, my wife IM navigated and she always managed to get us to where we were going. I’m now on my own having to go by instinct and what I remember from my study of the London map, early this morning over breakfast at the Royal Lancaster Hotel where I’m staying while in London. I’m being extra cautious trying to get a feel for being on the opposite side of the car, shifting with my left hand. I head west on Bayswater Road from the hotel then left onto Glouster Place north to Marylebone Road where I turn left. Marylebone Road turns into a flyover that will become the M40 heading west toward Oxford, which along with places like Harvard, the Sorbonne, Stanford, have become synonymous with hard-core schooling.

If you look at a map of Great Britain, both Oxford and Cambridge are completely absent motorways—the British name for freeways. The M-40 bypasses the main part of Oxford as it streaks toward Warwick and its motorway terminus at the M-5. The M-11 ends at Cambridge. Oxford sits in triangle formed by the M1, the M6, and the M40. Due north from London the major Motorway is the M1 that takes you to Leicester, Nottingham, and Leads. Just south of Leicester, the M1 joins the M6, which heads north and west to Birmingham, Manchester and on into Scotland. Due west out of London, the major motorway is the M4, which races to Heathrow, Reading, Bristol, and onward into Wales through Cardiff to Swansea. This will be my first trip to Oxford, the beginning of a decade-long relationship, the demise of which, I still lament. My wife IM and I were back two years ago, but it’s different when you go to a place to meet someone than when you don’t. In the first case you feel like a guest, in the second you feel like a tourist. I much prefer the former, which is what I am today.

I arrive 30 minutes late having gotten lost on at least two different roundabouts coming into the city. TP my host is unfazed by my late arrival—or out of courtesy overlooks my tardiness, attributing it to my being a Californian. My wife IM, who, having been born in Scotland and educated in Catholic Schools, puts a very high premium on punctuality, something as British as the art of queuing up ordering for boarding buses, entering school, etc. She has been early for every appointment she has ever had. And after these many years together, I’ve adopted her ways and have made it a point to be on time. It’s an easy way to show respect for others, IM would say—and it is.

TP says we should go to lunch as he has reservations for 1315 and it’s now 1300. The office is on Banbury Road a short drive from the city center and we make it at our appointed time after happening on a parking space near the restaurant, close by the Oxford Covered Market. It’s actually a pub that serves food and we are seated and served. TP has a lager; I have a glass of red wine. I’m not much into beers or distilled spirits, but have imbibed both in a pinch. TP and I know a good deal about one another having spoken on the phone quite often and we always manage a bit of social conversation in addition to business. I have committed to produce a manuscript on hard drives for Elsevier and we’re discussing the outline of the book and TP is offering advice on what I should include and what I should avoid. Since I write for a U.S. technical magazine, TP is of a mind that I can sell the book to magazine subscribers and has asked if my magazine might help publicize the book—I say they probably will and they do.

We wonder around the Oxford Covered Market after lunch. The place resembles a farmer’s market—with green grocers, fishmongers, butchers, and fowlers, that has been hijacked by a flee market with merchants in their stalls selling everything imaginable. There’s been a market at the block along High Street in the city center since the mid 1700s if not before. I get the distinct impression that some of those working the many stalls of the market might have sprung from descendents of those early 1700s merchants. The city is such a contrast for someone like me from California where the oldest building is barely 100 years old. Indeed, California as we know it only came into being since the middle of the 19th century. Oxford by contrast can claim its founding in 900 AD. Its existence is recorded in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle of 912. Oxford’s many structures dating back 100s of years unnerve my sense of reality accustom to being surrounded by modern architecture. The routine of Oxford’s everyday life is also bewildering. Since everyone drives on the left side of the road, approaching pedestrians also pass on the left and I have to consciously remember to go contrary to my normal instinct. It is also this cultural disorientation that forces me to see the world from an entirely different perspective and I always invariably see something I had overlooked or never saw before.

The other great place in Oxford that I’ve had a great affection for is Blackwell’s Book Store on the north side of Broad Street. It would be the one bookstore that carried the book I would write. If I needed a muse to spur my effort to put this book on paper, I had found it in Oxford and specifically in Blackwell’s.