Exploring

'I should see the garden far better,' said Alice to herself, 'if I could get to the top of that hill: and here's a path that leads straight to it -- at least, no, it doesn't do that -- ' (after going a few yards along the path, and turning several sharp corners), 'but I suppose it will at last. But how curiously it twists! It's more like a corkscrew than a path! Well, this turn goes to the hill, I suppose -- no, it doesn't! This goes straight back to the house! Well then, I'll try it the other way.'
--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

The reports of the Stanford House have not been exaggerated. It's an old brick building--actually, three houses built together with connecting doors--with a red front door facing right on High Street. Inside, it feels coiled around on itself, up and down and around in terrible snarls of stairway. Clearly this place was built from end to end and back again over a couple of centuries without the planning foresight of an earthworm. A room would be finished, and the next tenant would say, "By jove, I've always wanted to have a kitchen in that corner. A pity the bedroom's in the way." And the foreman would reply, "Not to worry, sir, we'll just bung a stairway in around back. "That's jolly, but I'd really like it to be midway between the levels of the two floors." "On the nose, old chap; my thoughts precisely. If we come at it from beneath, I think we can wrap it around the alcove while hardly cutting into the library's ceiling at all." "Right-ho, my good man. Capital, what."

They built rooms around, on top of, and through each other every which way and tied the whole package together with snaky little halls and stairways. If you walk from one end of the so-called "first floor" to the other, you traverse about a dozen undulating staircases. I've been lost twice, the first time when Dan the junior dean was showing me to my room. The clearance is low everywhere; I've knocked my head four times so far, and instated a universal maxim: Never back through a doorway.

Oxford is the same thing on a grander scale. Since my circadian rhythm is still in cut time (more like 11/16, really), I woke up at about half past four this morning. After unsucessfully dozing for a while, I left the house at sunrise to go exploring. The streets are built on the same principle as the Stanford House's corridors, but with a bit more versatility in the width department and not quite so many staircases. You never know whether a road, lined with stone walls, or shopfronts, or gothic (pardon my architectural ignorance) churches, colleges, museums, and libraries, will suddenly twist into a car park or a blind alley, or open into a thoroughfare, or be blocked by an iron gate, or drop off into the Cherwell. I wandered down Merton Street, then cut north through a crack of an alley and crossed High Street into Radcliffe Square. I gawked at the Radcliffe Camera, a great circular domed thing, and rambled northward and eastward through the streets past all sorts of wonderful buildings I don't know the names of, until I found myself smack against the Cherwell. After poking around a bit I found a footbridge, and crossed over into some great meadows that extend I don't know how far. So I walked along overgrown pathways around these meadows, on the banks of the Cherwell where ducks and swans and little black and white ducklike birds that honk to each other like old bicycle brakes [J.R.--the tour guide this afternoon told me they were coots].

The parks and meadows stretch much farther than I guessed when I first saw them. When I started my walk northward I saw a biggish lawn out to my right, and thought it would be nice to walk around it and head back. Some time later after having followed roads that more or less paralleled the edge was when I crossed the Cherwell, only to find the bit of green extending in every direction--I wandered around "that bit of green" for more than an hour, i'd guess, and never spied the east end of it. By this point I had set the Magdalen bridge back to the west side of the Cherwell as my eventual destination, but it turned out to be more difficult to attain than I'd expected, between paths and gates and trees and lots of bits of water with sporadic footbridges twisted up together. At one point I thought for sure I'd reached it, and suddenly found myself with fifteen feet of water separating me from the arch of the bridge as the path bent back like a horseshoe. I followed this new tributary looking for a bridge; at last I found one, only to confront a notice:

Magdalen Fellows' Garden
Visitors are welcome to the Fellows' Garden, but they are advised that there is no way out at the other end. Please do not pick the flowers.

I did eventually find my way out, not by way of the Magdalen bridge, but a footbridge a bit upstream, through the college itself. The journey involved climbing around an excitingly closed gate in the middle of a bridge, and returning to the street sheepishly stepping past a sign reading, "Closed to visitors until 12pm". It seems that somewhere in my ramble I inadvertently got behind the "stay out"s, which added immeasurably to both the beauty and the excitement.

Among the parks I also saw the Magdalen deer park, and met a cheerful man who was picking up conkers from the ground--according to the internet, the american term is "horse chestnuts". "I love conkers," he said, tossing them across the fence to the deer (blithely ignoring the "Do not feed the deer"). "The deer love 'em. Those deer'll eat about anything that doesn't eat them first." It wouldn't have been anything to write home about, except that he was so friendly and his accent so charming (so be sure to read his lines with a charming accent). I'm a sucker for a good accent. Wonderful country, this.

[Note on the parks: evidently their original reason was that the rivers' seasonal flooding made the land not much good for building on. But even with today's tremendous property values, Oxford has kept a high value on preserving these acres of beautiful meadows, lawns, woods, and gardens in the midst of the city. Some of them are still used as pastureland. So I've got loads of trail and green space within a couple minutes' walk to the north, south, and east of here, even being in the heart of urban Oxford.]