Tolkien’s Oxford: the video

 Isn’t it nice to have constructive advice from a grandchild? And to act on it. My writing activities have entered the doldrums this year. Two books that I intended to self-publish have been hanging about like abandoned children with no home to go to for some time now, and my book on South Asians who attended Oxford University ... well, I could write another book on the ups and downs of its long trail to publication. But there is light at the end of that trail just now so I’ll save that for a future blog.  Then we had Covid which caused a welcome regression to my smallholding days and a cessation of my Oxford guiding. And then what?

I think it started with an attempt to make two videos on the streets of Oxford: one a trailer for the aforementioned Indian book and the other for the Guild of Guides. Both were failures to my mind, partly due to traffic noise, wind noise, ineptitude and poor equipment. Then I began to think about all of the film sets I had seen in Oxford over the years: Morse, Harry Potter, The Mummy, Brideshead Revisited and so on and on. Some of these interfered with my life: on one occasion I could not purchase a puncture repair kit because they were filming an episode of Endeavour in the bike shop! Often whole streets were closed and a vast crew employed, some of them ordering us to be quiet at key moments. How could I compete with that? My asset was my knowledge of Oxford; my weakness was the wherewithal of professional filming.

The noise problem was simply solved: film all commentary in a quiet room and back it up with photos and silent motion clips. That said, I then need a video editor to bring it all together. I chose Shotcut as the package and me as the operative. The learning curve was long, often frustrating, and yet strangely rewarding. I still have a lot to learn but, frustrations aside, I like it. It’s creative.

Then the subject. This is where my grandson came in. Robin is an internet entrepreneur, he is very young but already has a team of more than ten and a YouTube channel subscriber base exceeding seven million. Out of his advice came Tolkien’s Oxford, honed by comments from good friends, including the excellent musical theme contributed by one of them. It was released this week on my YouTube channel which is called Rob’s Oxford. It’s free but I do need you to subscribe so that I can reach my aim of at least one thousand subscribers and after that to catch up with my grandson (some hope). So have a look, click on the links above: enjoy, comment, like subscribe.

Oh, and if you want to see what Robin does here’s his channel. Subscribe to that too. You’ll be in good company.

 

Goodbye to Oxford – again

  So here we go again, back into lockdown in England. I am fortunate, it doesn’t bother me that much. Ensconced in Stow on the Wold at the top of the Cotswold Hills I have plenty to do and plenty of space, so I left Oxford with some relief since the city was not its normal self. There were no lectures, no live music, and the pubs had for me lost the allure of social intercourse - the restrictions had turned them into restaurants.

On my last guiding day, the 31^st of October, I led two tours knowing that they would be my last for some time, perhaps forever – who knows? The midday one was curtailed by the restrictions already in place. It was not possible to enter colleges or university buildings, but Oxford in its externalities has enough to satisfy the eye of a visitor and I have plenty of stories that hopefully help to bring the buildings to life. Visored and distanced, I felt hoarse by the end of that tour and took a spoonful of honey to ease my vocal chords into the evening tour: a ghost tour.

All fourteen ghost hunters were young, predominantly students and mostly female. Owing to the distancing I had little opportunity to talk to any of them individually, though right at the beginning a French student from St Edmund Hall asked me if she would be frightened by my stories. Unable to answer the question I explained that this depended more on her than me and left the question hanging. For me, the object in delivering the stories is to ensure that they are interesting, have enough detail to make them believable if you want to believe, and include that essential ingredient of strangeness. Besides, Oxford at night is a spiritual experience, of sorts. They applauded at the end, but what does that mean? Relief, herd response, pity, a chance to warm their hands? Wahtever, I do hope that they enjoyed the experience.

I walked home alone, resisting the gravitational attraction as I passed four pubs. They were busy and I knew that, even if I did find one that would admit me, I would not enjoy the experience unable to take up my usual stance at the bar.

On my very last day in the city the weather was at first splendid, though chilly. I ran around the University Parks admiring the autumnal yellows and occasional reds. I even collected a few leaves from the ground. Do you know those leaves? Their shape is quite unique; they are from the tulip trees which form an arcade along the southern pathway of the Parks. There is also a flower in the picture but that is not a tulip and is not, of course from the tulip trees. Nice to find a flower at this time of the year though.

Later I took some photos for my next project: my lock down project. And, of course, it rained. Still at least the rain was not continuous and the sun broke through the clouds at times.  I enjoyed the journey in which I retraced the route C S Lewis would have taken on his regular walks from his home in East Oxford to Magdelan College. I then drove the made-in-Oxford red mini to the Cotswolds and started on the real priorities: the action list> A leaking central heating system, dripping bathroom, cheerless chickens, and so on. Keep well.

Tenth Anniversary

 

An old friend and colleague from the past spotted this astounding fact as he browsed through old blogs (don’t know why, bit like raking through the dust in someone else’s attic I suppose: an attic that is open to all). Yes, it really is ten years to the day that I launched my bookshop, robsbookshop.com, onto an unsuspecting, puzzled and mostly unaware public.You can see the original announcement here. This blog was initiated just a little earlier than that.

I cannot pretend that it has been a roaring success, though I did enjoy building the Literary Pub with all of its silly bars and I still find them funny. Last night I went out to the real pubs of Stow on the Wold and found them unreal during this covid-19 pandemic: we were refused entrance three times owing to lack of free tables; we were granted entry to two and sat there isolated as a vizored waiter failed to communicate with me; the range of ales available was pretty much unity and the atmosphere was lunar. So, in sympathy, I have taken a dump of robsbookshop.com with a view to removing the Literary Pub entirely – soon there will be no virtual pub unless a computer virus reinstates it, which is unlikely. Besides, the links were wearing out and maybe the humour as well.

I guess my most successful book is still Spread Spectrum: Hedy Lammar and the mobile phone though I am not sure how much robsbookshop.com contributed to that success, if at all. My fiction has not done well, though my own favourite novel, Shaken by China, did have an early spike. At first I actually sold and delivered paper books through the site, but that proved impractical and it is now mostly a repository for all of my titles which then passes sales on to, mostly, Amazon.

I think I’ve added six books to my list since the launch and there are three more ‘in the pipeline’. During that time I have put up nearly 200 blogs, roughly 20 per year with a peak of 26 in 2014. Why do I do it? Perhaps the answer lies in a quote from the novel I am currently reading (The Gustav Sonata) where Lottie asks Gustav ‘Why do you have to do anything. Couldn’t you just be?’ Maybe.

Fun Foods

 

My granddaughter eats chickens’ feet! Doesn’t that demonstrate just how diverse we have become as a family? Not really.

I have never eaten a chicken’s foot. I cannot readily think of a more revolting snack even if I try: rats’ ears perhaps or boiled toenails of an aged person maybe. But chickens’ feet disgust me. They are horny and clawed and have spent most of their lives scratching around in offal, or worse. There cannot be much meat on them so people who do eat them present a nibbling, ratty like appearance as they consume. The whole thing is quite revolting, but it is very popular.

And yet, people eat a lot of chickens, According to the Vegetarian Calculator the average person in the USA consumes 2,400 chickens during their lives. That’s 4,800 feet which, if not consumed, are wasted. Surely that’s not good for the planet!

When I kept pigs I read a lot about them. One of the anecdotal stories suggested that a farmer’s wife could use every bit of a pig bar its grunt. It was a silly statement because dead pigs do not grunt, but you take the point. My daughter had a taste for pigs’ trotters, though I always suspected she ate them for effect rather than satisfaction and I can at least excuse this indulgence since there is considerably more meat on a pig’s trotter than a chicken’s foot.

Many people in the world eat insects and in China we saw a great variety of exoskeletal treats proffered at market stalls. I did not try them because I do not like them, even though I have not tried them. In Cambodia I watched a young lady vending grubs. I did not see anyone buying them, but she liked them. Every minute or so her hand strayed towards her display, plucked a nice fat grub and popped it into her month and then munched contentedly. The grubs were rather fat, like overfed maggots – and so was she.

There’s more on the insectivores. This blog has led to the discovery that my daughter-in-law is partial to the odd insect. With certain conditions she has allowed me to include a photograph of her munching a scorpion. At first I thought the creature was floating towards her willing mouth, but if you look closely you will see that the creature is on a stick – like a lollipop or scorpionpop. 

When I was a boy we used to go levering. Elvers, I’m sure you know, are baby eels. To catch them we had first to dig up lots of worms. Then we, rather cruelly, sowed the worms onto threads, tied then all together in clumps and finally to a weight: this we attached to a stout rod with a strong cord. We then went forth to the Pill, a tributary of the River Severn, at the correct season of the year and dangled our worm clumps into the freshwater inlets that attracted the baby eels. They would hook their mouths onto the worms and we would lift them out and wipe them off into a bucket, time and time again. Might it have been simpler and equally nutritious, I now wonder, to eat the worms?

Back home my Mum would fry the elvers for breakfast and they were rather nice. Oddly, whilst writing this piece I picked up a BBC article with the headline: “Illegal elvers worth more than caviar on black market”. We could have been rich! And in a way we were, we also ate adult eels and flatfish that we caught and moorhens eggs that we stole from their nests, always leaving two behind. My mother always claimed that I and two other boys had eaten a dead seagull during one summer holiday. I have no recollection of that, but we were all three seriously ill later that year, missing almost a year’s schooling.

It is said that you are what you eat and I feel happier being part elver than I could ever feel about being part chicken foot. But what else can be done with the feet of so many chickens that are killed to provide Sunday roasts and chicken cutlets. I have a solution. When we had a small holding I killed our chickens as humanely as I could, then plucked them and removed their feet exposing the ligaments that had given the chicken control of its leg movements. I then chased our children around the farm whilst pulling on a ligament so that the foot seemed to be grabbing them. It was something to do. The chicken did not mind. It had passed into chicken heaven where its legs were extra long and fat edible grubs grew plentifully on trees.

(P.S. My son claims that he and I once did eat a chicken’s foot in Taiwan for a dare. I have no recollection of that and may have been drinking that country’s chicken soup laced with very strong rice wine at the time.)