Last month I spent four days in Oxford, staying in rooms at my old college, became a student again, a slightly surreal experience. My rooms were in the same quad, the same staircase, though not the same rooms I had in 1953. The bathroom looked much the same as it did when I shared it all those years ago with the Earl of Longford. I think in those days he was called Lord Pakenham. As I booked in to the porters lodge I found myself standing next to Robert Winston, sorry Lord Winston. Then on my way to my rooms I passed one of the Dimblebys. You meet all these illustrious people all the time in Oxford.
Staying in college is better than staying in a hotel. You get two large rooms, a bedroom and a study sitting room, with a desk to work at, with internet access. There is no television, but I didn't really want that at a literary festival, dd I? In fact to some extent I'd gone there to escape TV. My front window looks out at the quad, but my rear window is above an enclosed garden with daffodils in full bloom. It costs £55 per night and includes breakfast in the Great Hall of Christ Church, which was used as Hogwarts Hall in the Harry Potter films.
Sunday morning was Joanna Trollope, charming, witty and incisive as one would expect. Interesting to me as a writer was the discovery that she writes all her novels longhand. She says that she sees her subject matter as a series of pictures in her mind, so the act of writing is like scribbling as fast as you can a description of a film while you are watching it. I bought her latest book which she very kindly signed for me, not just her name, but a three line message, but then she does write in longhand.
Sunday afternoon in complete contrast it was Dr Brooke Magnanti, otherwise known as Belle de Jour, author of "The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl" portrayed by Billie Piper in the recent television series. As I was queueing up to get in I found the person infront of me was Annika Rice. I recognised her from behind of course, but later confirmed from the front view and her voice, that my assumption was correct. I can report that close up Anneka is as lovely as ever. But back to Dr Magnanti. Surprisingly, most of the questions from the audience were about writing rather than prostitution. She was asked about her experience of sudden fame. She said she was not often recognised because there is nothing very distinctive about her appearance. She sits on a tube train in London wondering which of her fellow passengers looks most likely to be a hooker. She says in any carriage there are likely to be two or three, but she is not one of them. She is in fact a research scientist, very smartly dressed. I have to say I found her very sexy indeed. I am sure she was a success in her other chosen profession. If I ever found myself in a brothel being offered the choice of a line-up of attractive ladies, it is more than likely I would choose Dr Brooke Magnanti rather than Billie Piper.
I am actually writing this blog as I walk along the river bank. Being Oxford, no one is surprised to see an elderly gent walking by the river, among the snowdrops and spring daffodils, speaking earnestly into a hand held voice recorder, probably a professor composing his next lecture. On the other hand the recorder does look a bit like a mobile phone. I did not much like Oxford when I went there as a student, being the only boy in Christ Church who came from a state school. But these days it has become one of my favourite places. I go to Oxford at every opportunity and it feels like coming home.
Being Sunday I decided to have Sunday lunch and being a poor pensioner, the most economical place to have it, available until 10 pm, was Wetherspoons. The Oxford Wetherspoons is called The Four Candles after Ronnie Barker. Fantastic value, roast beef, lamb, pork or chicken with all the what nots for £6.59 including a pint of this that or the other, or a glass of wine. And it was superb. The beef was not as rare as I would have liked it, but slow cooked and so tender you could separate it with a fork. And the wine is good quality and good value. If ever I find myself in a strange town I look for a Wetherspoons. Their breakfasts are excellent. Is this an advert? Unfortunately not, or I would be getting paid for it.
University towns have a greater concentration of young people than most places. There seem to be many more pretty girls than I am used to. When I was young in the forties and fifties, girls generally wore skirts and dresses. You could see their legs from the knees down and imagine the rest. Then came a long period when they wore what we used to call slacks, then came trousers and jeans. Now suddenly they're not exactly showing their legs again, but encasing them in black woolly tights with skirts so short their legs go right up to the bum. I was overtaken by an exceptionally tall young girl in Broad Street and as she passed me, her delicious little buttocks, fashionably encased in their black tights, were bobbing up and down right in front of my eyes, enough to put an old age pensioner off literary festivals for ever.
On my way back to college, in St Aldates was a large black slip-on shoe, not a very fashionable design, but it looked brand new, lying on the pavement by a bus stop. How can anyone lose one shoe? And did he get on to a bus still wearing the other one? Alas we shall never know.
When you are old and within reasonable sight of death, and if you do not believe in an afterlife, it is very salutory to be reminded that even though we do not survive as individuals, the human race does survive, and some of the thoughts and ideas of those who have died live on in the minds and hearts of those who follow. Walking across the quad in the moonlight I thought of my tutors Robert Burchfield, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Professor J.I.M Stewart who wrote detective stories as Michael Innes, both now departed this life, and earlier that day along cobbled streets between ancient walls, I was conscious of all the others who have taken similar steps over the same stones, over hundreds of years. I once lived in the village of Eyam in Derbyshire. Walking home from the pub I knew I was walking the same village street as the people of Eyam who in 1666, locked themselves away from the world, letting no-one enter or leave their village for more than a year, to prevent the spread of the plague to the rest of Derbyshire. Nearly half of them died, but their deaths are all recorded on little plaques on the walls of the cottages they lived and died in, still in use today.
But this is supposed to be about the literary festival. Of course I went to other talks and seminars and readings and chatted to some authors and poets, but there is time in between to walk by the river, be a tourist, go to the pub and chat to interesting people. Not in the pub, I met Julie Summers author of "Stranger in the House" about the experiences of women whose husbands returned home after an absence of four or five years in the Second World War. She is writing a new book about the experiences of children who were evacuated in the 1940's. I am going to meet her sometime soon to talk about my experience.
In the White Horse in Broad Street, excited people bark and chirp. I listen and realise they are American men trying to speak Spanish, to chat up two Spanish girls. They seem not to have noticed that the girls speak excellent American. One of the Spanish girls who clearly knows the law, asks the waiter if she could please use the candle on their table to light a cigarette? Looking a bit doubtful he says yes. He looks alarmed when she lights her cigarette from the candle still right in the middle of the pub. He need not have worried. She knew the law all right. She inhaled deeply so that her cheeks bulged with the smoke, then rushed for the door so that no smoke was exhaled inside the pub. She didn't notice she had blown the candle out, but she knew the law.
The law banning smoking in pubs was passionately opposed by millions of smokers, though welcomed by some other millions of non smoking pub users. But from the day it became law, it was adhered to and complied with almost universally. Nobody smokes in pubs. They stand outside and suffer even if it is raining. Shortly after it was introduced, I was in my local pub when a very old man walked in smoking a cigarette. He went up to the bar still happily puffing away and ordered a pint. The hubbub in the pub had become an aghast silence. The barmaid was horrified. "Put it out! You'll lose me my job." The whole bar remained silent with shock that someone had smoked. There are not many controvercial laws which achieve that level of immediate acceptance. Look at the ban on driving a car while using a mobile phone. You see people flouting that law every day.
Oh yes, I did go to lots of other things at the Festival. I was there for four days. But you don't really want to know about all that. Heavy stuff and very literary.
