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.)

 

 

 

The Sky

 

This is the view from my ‘library’ in Stow on the Wold, the room in which I often write when I wish to unplug (no Wi-Fi there). The panorama is dominated by the sky and looks NNW. The hills that you might just be able to see in the distance delineate the horizon: these are part of the Cotswold escarpment which drops steeply down into the Severn Valley. We are on the very edge of Stow, overlooking our own field and down towards the village of Longborough. It is a pleasant landscape, however the aspect that moves me most just now is not the land, but the sky.

The orientation of the house is such that when I sit in my usual armchair in the lounge I can, with the slightest movement of my head, glance from the TV screen to a broad section of the sky centered on the setting sun, and most evenings the latter is by far the most interesting. Those sunsets are so varied, so spectacular, so colourful, so expansive, so inspiring, so moving that I fear that I do not have the vocabulary to adequately describe them. Anyway, what would be the point of a word picture depicting a natural phenomenon that everyone experiences hopefully many times in their lives? I could take a photograph of an especially exceptional sunset of course, and I have, but the equipment I possess never quite captures my own experience, and I guess that everyone’s experience of sundown is subtly different anyway.

During the Covid lockdown I saw many spectacular sunsets and, perhaps as a result, this reawakened a dormant interest in what follows: the sky at night. I think that my reawakening was also stimulated by the Elon Musk’s Spacex rocket used to carry two men up to the International Space Station (ISS). Interesting to see that space travel is now a commercial, rather than government funded, venture and intriguing to see the ISS pass through the night sky with those two men aboard.

We knew roughly where to look from a website so we stood in our field watching the sky to the south on the night after the launch. Margaret spotted it first: it was very bright and moved through the heavens quickly, leaving no doubt about what it was. It was rather humbling to think that there were people up there. This event then seemed to lead naturally to spotting the planet Mercury which appeared just after dusk and quickly passed beneath the northern horizon. Though just a pinprick of light it was exciting to watch the Sun’s nearest planet move through the sky.

I found Mercury with the help of a mobile app and this progressed to the location of Jupiter and Saturn in the southern sky. I learned that Jupiter is at its brightest for us just now and, as the most massive of the planets, is - apart from the moon of course - one of the most luminous objects in the night sky. I have been watching it rise and fall for a couple of months now together with Saturn which seems to follow it across the southern hemisphere. Lately Mars has risen in the east and I have been able to see all three from the south facing window of this room. Together with sightings of Venus, the brightest of all, that completes the planets nearest to our Sun. The more distant ones, Uranus and Neptune, are harder to see, but I do hope to spot them soon.

As if to underline my admiration of the infinity that envelopes us, the mid-August night sky put on a special display recently. The evening was dry, hot and humid and there was little cloud cover, just a few large formations in the north-west. As darkness fell these began to glow intermittently with a soft inner light reminiscent of an incandescent tube flickering into life. This display of intra-cloud lightning endured for some hours, and to add to the eeriness of this sight there was a complete lack of sound - a sure indication that the storm was a considerable distance away and that we gardeners wouldn’t be getting any rain. I was disappointed that I did not see the expected meteor shower that night, but those luminous clouds were enough.

Then, on the very next day, we did have a thunder storm. We were walking to a pub in a nearby village  to do our bit for the Eat Out to Help Out scheme. It was warm and humid with barely a breeze as we strolled down a sun stroked lane towards Broadwell, then, very suddenly, a fierce wind ripped through the woodland at our side almost blinding us with air born debris. The sky darkened quickly and a few drops of rain fell. We still had a few miles to go towards our destination, but good beer and food beckoned so we pressed on. At one point we had to shelter in a copse as the rain belted down. When it lessened we had to cross a wide, recently harvested field feeling very exposed beneath the looming thunder clouds. Suddenly a brilliant streak of lightning forked down straight ahead of us as if creating a short-lived pointer to our destination, and this was immediately followed by a deafening crack of thunder so this time we were near the eye of the storm. I did get quite wet (Margaret had the umbrella), but it was well worth it: both to experience the angry sky and the welcoming inn.

I’m sure that most of you have seen many beautiful sunsets, witnessed impressive thunder storms, and also spotted the planets. But for all of that, I felt a strong need to share my wonder, awareness and enjoyment of the sky. It may be so terrifyingly grand as that it diminishes our individuality, but it can also expand our minds.

 

Oxford: tours and pubs

Although the Visitor Information Centre in Oxford has closed it doors for good (unless the city council comes up with a rescue plan, which seem unlikely), it seems that the guiding side of the business is not quite dead. In fact, I actually had a booking in my diary for a tour on the 23^rd of July.

I dutifully drove to Oxford on that day after carefully studied the rules of guiding in a post lock-down scenario.  However, soon after letting myself into our flat I glanced at my phone only to find that I had two emails a couple of missed calls and a voicemail. All of that made it quite clear that the tour had been cancelled for the simple reason that no one had booked onto it. Oh well.

That afternoon I caught up with some Oxford related business and glanced at my usual source of what’s on in the city. It did not take long. Virtual stuff, which can be viewed from anywhere, anytime aside, the answer was nothing. No live music, no lectures, no concerts – not a thing. No great surprise there. But, I thought to myself, there’s always the pub.

Rather than visit my locals that night I decided to take a look at the pub situation in the centre of Oxford on the assumption that it would be livelier than the Cotswolds. As I cycled towards the centre I passed the famous Eagle and Child – closed. And on the other side of the road one of my favourites, the Lamb and Flag – closed. In Oxford’s busiest street I found that the newest pub to open, the Plough, was closed. My heart began to sink and my wallet flexed its expansive muscle.

But I found an open pub – I usually do. It was the Chequers, another of my favourites lurking in its fifteenth century glory just off the High Street. Now, the last time I had set foot in the Chequers, just before the lock-down, it had been deserted and I immediately blamed the impending Covid restrictions. However, it soon filled up – in fact there had been a power outage.

This time it was almost empty, just one table was occupied by a lively, isolated group and it did not fill up. As I sat alone near the entrance I mused: the beer is good, the price reasonable and there’s a darts match on the TV - so what’s the problem? Quite simply the pub had the atmosphere of a burst balloon. Then one of the key players of the local CAMRA branch came in, ordered a pint of cider and we plunged into a spirited conversation on pubs and their possible demise, on beer, on travel, and on the virus.

Later we visited two more pubs, both closed, then to the pitifully name White Rabbit aka Gloucester Arms, aka Glock. Getting in was a little difficult but once inside I found that it had barely changed from, oh, ten years ago when it was the headquarters of the Oxford rockers, had the loudest, meanest juke box in town, and anyone without a tattoo was looked upon with deep suspicion. On the night that I suggested barmaids in suggestive tatters roamed around but did not approach us; the two old tattoo less males. At the bar itself there were only two cask ales available apparently, but I was given the other one from a pump with no label. A golden beer, very refreshing and the best of the night. My friend who is an infinite source of knowledge on the subject of beer told me that it was Golden Citrus from the Turpin Brewery and the long bearded landlord told me that it was his favourite beer, just as one of the keg beers had been earlier! The pub buzzed, it was alive. There is hope yet that Hilaire Belloc’s prediction “When you lose your inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England" may not come to pass. By the way I was recently asked to choose an object that I could take with me as a castaway on a desert island - can you guess my answer? Click on the pub below to find out.

Next night I went, with a friend, to my main local, the Rose and Crown. It is a small, loveable place and though there were not many there it had, as ever, atmosphere. Its balloon was inflated by the irrepressible landlord, Andrew, who has the essential gift of linking strangers together then stepping back to enjoy the show. And the beer – Golden Citrus again! Long live the Rose and Crown and pubs like it. You know the tune, join with me to sing:

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk into England’s great pub scene
And was the holy grail of ale
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

The pub again – at last

Running around Stow-on-the-Wold on the morning of the important date of Saturday the 4^th of July (lockdown up) I deliberately ran past all of the pubs (there are eight – plus a social club) in preparation for a pub opening adventure that night. The first that I encountered, The Queen’s Head, had a notice proudly stating that they were opening at 12pm that day which threw me into such confusion that I wavered on my way. Did they mean noon or midnight, must be noon yet that follows 11.59 AM. Best to say 12 noon or 12 midnight to avoid confusion. Another pub on the square was opening on the Monday (why wait?) and yet another, The Bell, was waiting until the 20^th. Others did not commit.

So the Queen’s it had to be. But hang on, though I like the pub very much, the beer is not to my taste. It is a local beer from the small but delightful Donnington Brewery with its lake, black swan and water wheel. I should like it, I know I should and I once did but, well, let’s just say it is not my favourite tipple and I wanted a beer that I savoured to celebrate the end of lockdown.

So we went to the nearby village of Oddington where the Horse and Groom serves a good pint from one of my favourite breweries: Wye Valley. This place is more of a restaurant than a pub to my mind, a bit corporate perhaps, but very well run and welcoming.

Looking back to pre-lockdown, the last pub that I visited was the Harcourt Arms in Jericho, Oxford, a regular port of call on a Sunday since it has the ‘best open mike night in Oxford’ and is not in any way corporate. The Oddington place could not be more different to the Harcourt, but it does serve a cracking pint. That night I had two delicious pints of Butty Bach and really enjoyed them.

Covid set the rules of course. My name and telephone number was taken for contact purposes, there were rather attractive ‘one way’ markers on the floor, and it was table service only. The place was not very busy, but peeping around the corner I saw and heard a group of about eight drinkers who all came from the same household judging by their proximity. They were quite rowdy and gave a bit of atmosphere to the place – and the beer was top notch after months of mostly bottled beer.

Then back to Stow, only to find that the Queen’s had closed at nine! What was that all about? Perhaps they had opened at 12 midnight after all and were whacked. Instead we went to the White Hart (recently renamed The Stag, but locals still call it the White Hart) which is hotel and hence a bit corporate, but welcoming. Same Covid arrangements and here we were given a table which a couple had just vacated. The seats were still warm, isn’t that a bit…oh well. I needed to visit the toilet, but was faced with a notice outside stating that only one person was allowed inside. This confused me. I stood at the door not knowing if there was a person inside or not. There was. The door opened and he and I did a little social distancing dance as he left and I entered.

Much of the conversation here centered around how many people had turned up on this first day out of lockdown – lots at lunchtime, fewer tonight - and how many people were still afraid to leave their homes. I felt a little uncomfortable to be out and about myself after all these weeks and the atmosphere generally was a little surreal. Added to which we did not meet anyone that we knew, but that, no doubt, was because I chose good beer over local society.

It’s funny you know, I thought that I would really miss my regular trips to the pub, but I did not, not much. And I also thought that I would suffer withdrawal symptoms owing to lack of real ale, but I did not, much.  But it was great to be back: especially drinking those two pints of Butty Bach.

Thoughts on editing

Though I set up this blog to write about my writing, I rarely do that. The subjects covered are wide ranging and mainly stimulated by happenings in my day-to-day life and often focus on travel. So, back to books for a change and to that great improver of one’s writing – editing.

When I decided to write about this topic, one which is so close to the soul of anyone who writes, I happened to be reading Bill Bryson’s Troublesome Words where he remarks that whenever anyone writes about editing there will always be an elephantine abuse of English somewhere in their text. So look out!

The professional editor’s basic role, as I see it, is to remove grammatical errors and typos, clarify unclear English and impose the house style of the publisher (things like the use of inverted commas, capitalisation, use of numbers such as 100 versus one hundred, use of slang, etc). Even this can cause problems between the editor and the edited.  When I wrote technical books they were mostly published by US-based publishers and it was one of these that changed the verb following a word I used extensively (data) from singular to plural: where I wrote ‘data is’ they substituted ‘data are’. However, general usage had settled on data as both singular and plural and the singular (datum) was little used. The publisher tried to insist on ‘data are’ so I checked out five previous books that they had published – all of them used ‘data is’ extensively. Other battles were not so easily won.

Many years ago, I met my first self-proclaimed lesbian in a bar in Georgetown, USA. The conversation began because she had a broken leg and her plaster cast occupied the stool between us, but that is by-the-by. It occurred around my ‘data is’ period just mentioned and I needed a shoulder to cry on, so I told her about it. She then confessed that she was not only a lesbian, but also an editor. However, her writers called her the ‘stealth editor’ because when they read the edited manuscript they could not detect what had changed, yet proclaimed that the outcome was better. I wished then, and many times since that she could edit my writing.

Before that incident, in fact years before I published my first book, I met an editor in a bar in Ipswich, UK he was, actually a sub-editor of the local newspaper. I was a minor contributor to that rag at the time through the correspondence column and my activities as chairman of the local branch of the Campaign for Real Ale. We were talking about beer and I asked him if he had read my latest article. What he said surprised me: “Oh no. I don't read content when I’m editing, if I did then I would miss the errors”. That’s the sort of editor I like, I thought.

Later, when I started up on my own, I launched a newsletter called VINE which stood for Voice in Europe. I wrote all of the content and felt very exposed since I had no one to check it over before printing. Fortunately, my old boss, Hugh Daglish, had retired just then and was at a loose end and agreed to layout each issue for printing and to check the grammar. His mother had been an English teacher, he had written a book on fonts and he knew little and probably cared little about the content. Perfect qualifications, and it worked well until his sudden death in Israel. I sold the newsletter soon after that.

Nowadays, I have two stalwarts who valiantly read through the books I write before I let anyone else see them. And, though we occasionally disagree about things like capitalization and starting a sentence with ‘and’, the process is amicable and enjoyable. And I am entirely grateful to them for spotting typos, grammatical errors, and so on. They also make useful suggestions about content which I often act upon. You know who you are, so thank you.

What has really spurred me into writing this blog is this: the editing of my latest book has been hell. The first phase went reasonably OK, though there were minor problems about English usage and so on – all exacerbated by the fact that the publishers were based in India. That done there was then an unexpected and very long second phase where a committee was formed to overview content. Now, admittedly, I was writing on sensitive subjects including potted histories of various famous figures from the Indian sub-continent, but my sources were all identified and I had no axe to bear in recounting their lives. The committee had axes! Whole swathes of the book were rewritten in a florid style completely unlike my own and including opinions, in my name, that I did not hold and could not justify. I was horrified and indicated that, despite my own considerable time and money expended on the book, I could not agree to its publication.

In the end, of course, compromises were found, tempers cooled and the book was completed (as I write it is yet to be published). But it will never be mine, not in the way that my others are. And I still dream of that stealth editor with the broken leg.