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.