End of an era in Oxford

Just recently I was asked to write something about being a walking tour guide in Oxford by the local Guild of Guides. The unexpurgated version of that article follows and provides a brief account of my transition from the world of telecommunications to that of guiding some fifteen years ago. As explained there, most of my work came through the vistor information centre in Oxford and today I heard that the centre is to close its doors for good: an early victim of Covid-19.

At one time the information part of the centre’s activities was funded by the local council, as most of these things are. That funding has run down over time and the centre then had to derive most of its income from the provision of walking tours. Apparently finances were not in a good state and, as with many marginal businesses, the pandemic has provided the final cut.

It is sad for me. I got to know many friendly and helpful people who worked in the centre and really enjoyed leading the so-called public tours with an audience made up of a variety of people from all over the planet. Still, nothing lasts forever and new blooms flower on the earth enriched by the old. Here’s the article I wrote, it may be my valediction.

Images of a tour guide vary so let me start by saying this: I only carry an umbrella when it is raining, I do not invent everything that I say (in fact I am not capable of that) and finally: I do not work for nothing – who does?

I started on the buses. I aspired to be an official walking tour guide in Oxford, but soon found that entry into the Guild of Tour Guides was not easy. Aspirants had to take an examined course and there were none scheduled at that time. Later I learned that courses are only run when a sufficient number of older guides had passed on so, short of arranging early demises for existing guides, I had to wait. So I started guiding on the buses: green ones at that time and labeled Guide Friday, presumably chosen to create an image of Robinson Crusoe’s native guide on his desert island rather the day of the week.

For that I was paid £5 per hour and was whipped around Oxford in that hour. This was a tad less than my rate as consultant in telecoms at that time, but hey, this was about changing my life, not about the money. The job was a bit repetitive, but had its challenges. At times we were racing around at a breakneck speed of twenty miles an hour, at others the bus was ensnarled in Oxford’s dense traffic or stationary whilst a crowd of tourists embarked each paying the driver in cash. This certainly improved my ability to précis stories or to lengthen them. I became an elastic band of sorts. More exciting still were the sudden re-routes to avoid closed streets, accidents, etc. Suddenly I would find myself in a part of Oxford that I barely knew and one that often had no buildings of historic interest, in fact of any interest. So, I learned to improvise – but no, that still did not mean making things up.

I was back-packing in Turkey when I heard that the Oxford Guild of Tour Guides were planning to run a new course, presumably a sufficient number of older guides had expired at last. The course fee was quite a lot, I would have to pass an interview and there would be exams and test walks. All that was OK, but did I really want to do it? After my experience on the buses I wondered if, and this may sound arrogant, the role was stretching enough. I need not have worried. The course was great. I learned so much about Oxford that this in itself was worth the fee. And then the scope of the city’s history is so enormous that any attempt to master it is arrogance in itself. There is such a bottomless well of stories, characters, events and buildings in Oxford that the elastic band will always be stretched.

My very first walking tour, led just by me with no back up, no notes and no printed imagery (my own choice), was stretching. I was challenged just before the tour by an employee of my pimp – the then Tourist Information Centre.

“Where’s your badge,” she demanded crossly, “you must have a blue or green badge to lead the official tours.”

I tried to explain that I had passed the course and was now a member of the Institute of Tourist Guiding, but the badges had not yet been made. She was not impressed and I was discombobulated, but marched out to do my duty.

Outside a group of around fifteen people quickly assembled around me and I began my introduction, but was quickly interrupted by a large American lady.

“Will there be much walking on this tour? She asked, adding “I cannot walk very far”.

Nothing in my excellent training course had prepared me for this, so I answered, rather lamely, “Well, it is a walking tour.” Then, recalling that customers are always right, added, “but Oxford is a compact city. I’m sure you’ll be fine”.

One of the skills we were introduced to was crowd control, especially drawing in the group when the guide is speaking. Soon after my first public tour I led a private group, a group of policeman who were attending a bonding course of some sort. For all my efforts they insisted on standing well away from me and each other as if they had anticipated social distancing.

“What’s the matter?” I asked with a smile. “Don’t you like each other?”

“No,” they replied in unbonded unison.

I’ve been an Oxford guide for many years now and do regard the job as a profession. Through it we probably meet a greater diversity of people than in most other trades and I hope they are as enriched and amused by our brief encounters as I am.

Rb’s CV diaries 9: The last entry

Now that the lockdown has been extended in the UK and I have spent a month under its strictures it seem a good point to bring these regular CV diary reports via my blog to an end. There is, in any event, a surfeit of news on the ongoing crisis so normal service will henceforth be resumed in the blog. Future entries will be about, well, whatever stimulates me to write one. In other words - business as usual.

Whitey (you can see guilt in her eye)

Looking back at my own experience during this period then, aside from a few frustrations, it’s been a breeze. The weather could not have been better, I have had plenty to do (most of which has been outdoors). My garage is reasonably well organised (I have even discovered a long forgotten lathe and am bringing that into use), plants are growing in the vegetable garden and pests are attacking them, the last bit of wilderness in the flower garden has been tamed and the pond is greening. Two of the chickens are now in lay and the other two are under investigation for egg eating (I suspect Whitey, but no confession extracted yet). Saturday night specials have become an institution at Iverley House, the most recent being an exciting game of shove ha’penny. And, thankfully, supplies of essentials like beer and bananas have been maintained.

Living here through the spring (we’re usually in Spain) has been a joy. Though we’ve had our hands dirty for most of our adult lives it’s still a revelation to watch established plants burst into life and little seedlings pushing up their tiny green tendrils to rapidly become plants themselves. I am keeping a daily watch on the beech hedge between us and our new neighbours that I planted last year. At first I thought the effort had been wasted as our other hedge, a well-established beech itself, burst into life with not a stir from the new one. But day by day in the last week I have spotted the odd bud swelling and turning green and at least one has now burst forth as an unfolding leaf.

I do feel fortunate to be on the very fringes of this epidemic, and also feel somewhat guilty for that. However, I can’t help but observe that some in the public eye are not helping at all. The Corona pandemic should not become some sort of blame game between politicians, the media and scientists. Nor should it be a platform on which to project worn out views on our nation’s future, the green agenda and the challenge of climate change, or the pursuit of egalitarianism. However, on a more positive front it has provided a vehicle to spotlight the selflessness of many who are usually off the media radar, both in the NHS and elsewhere.

There is, reputedly, an old Chinese curse which states ‘May you live in interesting times’. Well, we certainly are, and there is also little doubt that the current crisis originated in that country. But despite the loss of many innocent people I think that we are still in the ‘phony war’ phase of this battle, the truly ‘interesting’ times are still to come as the dangerous depths of the economic ramifications  caused by the lock down become clearer. Still, at least we are all right for eggs.

I wish you all well, wherever you are. Keep your distance if you can, but continue to associate through modern media which, I suppose, this blog is part of.

Rob’s CV diaries 8: Tadpoles, the lock-down and China

I’ve mentioned in a previous blog a foray into a local pond to collect weed for my own. It’s an interesting side hobby from the vegetable gardening and something else to watch now that I am permanently at Stow. However, when Margaret mentioned walking to Upper Slaughter, one of the very pretty local villages, as a child and seeing tadpoles in a pond there, I realised that my pond lacks something - life. So, off I went to the Slaughters on my bicycle with jam jars at the ready in my backpack.

The day was lovely and the springtime Cotswold scenery both beautiful and dramatic. What is more the roads were almost devoid of traffic. I found the pond, it was large, edged with bulrushes and overlooked by a magnificent Cotswold stone mansion – but there were no tadpoles there. I then followed the delightful River Eye down to Lower Slaughter and turned towards home on the Fosse Way.

I think it was the sparse, but furious, traffic on that main road that made me turn off at the base of the steep hill leading up to Stow for another dose of Cotswold splendour and a last search for tadpoles in the Dickler at Hyde Mill. There were none, but I did grab some interesting weed before pushing my bike up the hilly footpath towards Stow. It was then that I received a phone call from a lady associated with Cotswold Friends. I had volunteered to help with telephone befriending during the isolation and she wanted some details from me. At the end of call she said that she was sorry to bother me and I said not at all, I’m only out looking for tadpoles.

“Tadpoles,” she cried, “we’ve got load of them in our pond”.

And so, the very next day, I went to her home in the nearby town of Moreton in Marsh and returned with two jars of tadpoles – and a frog. That was great, though social distancing at her pond-side was difficult. It turns out that she runs three of the local Men in Sheds initiatives. Good job she didn’t see my shed – still a work in progress.

We have been isolated, locked-down, in Stow for four weeks tomorrow and the time has glided by. I’ve been busy in the field, in the garden, and in my ‘shed’ most of the day time. In the evenings I put the chickens to bed, write this blog, read a little (Roger Scruton and Adam Smith mostly at present, plus a novel) watch a bit of TV and so on. Hence the news of a three week extension to the lock-down had little impact on me. However, I do try to imagine what it would be like living in a small flat or bed-sit in a city just now. For someone in that position, especially someone who has limited income which is further curtailed by the virus driven cut backs, life must be very hard to bear, and this extension of the lock-down is yet another blow, but it has to be done. I know of no other solution right now, though I do puzzle over the success of Greece, Taiwan, and South Korea in dealing with the outbreak.

Every week during the crisis, the director of my branch of the Samaritans (Oxford,) sends out an email report – and it leaves me feeling guilty as he congratulates all those who have continued to do their shifts despite the lock-down. And, of course, he is right to congratulate them. The people who do call Samaritans are likely to be more disturbed than most by the threat of the virus and by the warnings regularly broadcast over the media about it, so they need support. Meanwhile, I have self-isolated in Stow and am quite enjoying the isolation. The director does, of course, also emphasise the need for Samaritans to protect themselves from this scourge, but the fact remains that in doing so I am also scrimshanking (to use one of my little known but useful words). In short, I do feel that I am enjoying this isolation and that I shouldn’t. Still I hope to undertake this telephone befriending role locally and salve my conscience that way.

We are still trying to keep Saturdays special and so last weekend we did a prowl into the past via photographs and in the company of some very nice malbec wine. It was a special day since this was my second son’s birthday so we had earlier linked with him and his two kids in Australia for a happy birthday song ‘around’ the chocolate birthday cake his mother made for him. We had candles too, and though for Fergus and his family the cake was virtual – I got to eat it. Very nice. Possibly made with our own eggs (the two greys have now laid seven, the black and the white zero).

Many of the photos featured Christmas’s and other celebrations with the family, but an even larger number of them covered our first teaching visit to China, the source of our current woes. It was a great experience, but one photo in particular starkly reminded me of the real (rather than relative) poverty in which many people lived there some thirteen years ago. It is a picture of communal toilet used by many people. The toilet is made of a rickety framework of rough sticks covered by ragged tarpaulin. There is no sewer connected to it, the sewage oozes out of the base and then slowly down a slope gradually sinking into the ground.

Not a nice note to end a blog on, so back to tadpoles. Since releasing them plus some spawn and the frog, into my pond they seem to have vanished. Compared with their previous home I suppose my field pool seems like an ocean to such a tiny creature. But it is a little disappointing that, though I survey the pond regularly, I have only seen two lonely tadpoles and no sign of the frog at all.