Notes From a Small Island (14 page)

inscription. He was shown holding a model of an early bi-plane, which made him look rather like King Kong swatting away attacking craft. There was no indication of what his local connection might be. The Monmouth Bookshop on Church Street had a book of mine in the window, and so of course gets a mention here.

I had it in mind to do another little walk while the weather was fine, so I didn't linger. I bought a pasty in a baker's and ate it as I found my way to the Wye. I picked up a riverside path by the town's handsome stone bridge and followed it north along the Welsh bank. For the first forty minutes, I was accompanied by the ceaseless roar of traffic on the A40, but at a place called Goldsmith's Wood the river bent sharply away from the road and I was suddenly in another, infinitely more tranquil world. Birds fussed and twittered in the trees above and small, unseen creatures plinked into the water at my approach. The river, sparkling and languid and framed by hills of autumn-coloured trees, was very beautiful and I had it all to myself. A mile or two further on, I paused to study the map and noticed a spot on a nearby hill called King Arthur's Cave. I couldn't pass that up, so I lumbered up the hill and poked around among likely spots. After about an hour of clambering over boulders and fallen trees, I found it, to my mild astonishment. It wasn't much - just a shallow chamber hewn by nature from a limestone cliff-face - but I had a pleasing sense of being its first visitor in years. At any rate, there were none of the usual signs of visitation - graffiti and abandoned beer cans - which may make it unique in Britain, if not the world.

Because time was getting on, I decided to take a shortcut through the hilly woods, but I neglected to note that I was at the uppermost of a very tight band of contour lines. In consequence, I found myself a moment later descending a more or less perpendicular hill in an entirely involuntary fashion, bounding through the woods with great leaps and outflung arms in a manner oddly reminiscent of George Chakiris in West Side Story, except of course that this was Wales and George Chakiris didn't shit himself with terror, before eventually, after several bouncing somersaults and an epochal eighty-yard slide on my stomach, ending up on the very lip of a giddy precipice, with a goggle-eyed view of the glittery Wye a hundred feet below. I cast my gaze back along my suddenly motionless body to find that my left foot had fortuitously snagged on a sapling. Had the sapling not been there I would not be here.

Muttering, 'Thank you, Lord, I owe you one,' I hauled myself tomy feet, dusted twigs and leaf-mould from my front, and clambered laboriously back up the hill to the path I had so intemperately forsaken. By the time I reached the riverbank another hour had gone. It took another hour or so to hike on to Symonds Yat, a spacious wooded bluff at the top of a formidable hill, with long views in many directions. It was exceedingly fetching - a hang-glider's vista over the meandering river and an Arcadian landscape of fields and woodland stretching off to the distant Black Mountains.

'Not bad,' I said, 'not bad at all,' and wondered if there was anywhere near by where I could get a cup of tea and possibly change my pants.

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   TWELVE

THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS THAT YOU HAVE TO BE BRITISH OR AT LEAST

older than me, or possibly both, to appreciate: Sooty, Tony Hancock, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, Marmite, skiffle music, that Morecambe and Wise segment in which Angela Rippon shows off her legs by dancing, Gracie Fields singing 'Sally', George Formby doing anything, Dixon of Dock Green, HP sauce, salt cellars with a single large hole, travelling funfairs, making sandwiches from bread you've sliced yourself, really milky tea, allotments, the belief that household wiring is an interesting topic for conversation, steam trains, toast made under a gas grill, thinking that going to choose wallpaper with your mate constitutes a reasonably good day out, wine made out of something other than grapes, unheated bedrooms and bathrooms, seaside rock, erecting windbreaks on a beach (why, pray, are you there if you need a windbreak?) and taking an interest in by-elections. There may be one or two others that don't occur to me at the moment.

I'm not saying that these things are bad or boring or misguided, merely that their full value and appeal yet eludes me. Into this category, I would also tentatively insert Oxford.

I have the greatest respect for the university and its 800 years of tireless intellectual toil, but I must confess that I'm not entirely clear what it's for, now that Britain no longer needs colonial administrators who can quip in Latin. I mean to say, you see all these dons and scholars striding past, absorbed in deep discussions about the Leibniz-Clarke controversy or post-Kantian aesthetics and you think: Most impressive, but perhaps a tad indulgent in a countrywhere there are 3 million unemployed and the last great invention was cat's-eyes? Only the night before there had been an item on News at Ten in which Trevor McDonald had been radiant with joy to announce that the Samsung Corporation was building a new factory in Tyneside which would provide jobs for 800 people who were willing to wear orange boilersuits and do t'ai chi for a half-hour every morning. Now call me an unreconstructed philistine, but it seems to me - and I offer this observation in a spirit of friendship - that when a nation's industrial prowess has plunged so low that it is reliant on Korean firms for its future economic security, then perhaps it is time to re-address one's educational priorities and maybe give a little thought to what's going to put some food on the table in about 2010.

I remember once years ago watching a special international edition of University Challenge between a team of British scholars and a team of American scholars. The British-team won so handily that they and Bamber Gascoigne and the studio audience were deeply, palpably embarrassed. It really was the most dazzling display of intellectual superiority. The final score was something like 12,000 to 2. But here's the thing. I am certain beyond the tiniest measure of doubt that if you tracked down the competitors to see what has become of them since, you would find that every one of the Americans is pulling down $350,000 a year trading bonds or running corporations while the British are studying the tonal qualities of sixteenth-century choral music in Lower Silesia and wearing jumpers with holes in them.

But don't worry. Oxford has been pre-eminent since the Middle Ages, and I am sure that it will remain so long after it has become the University of Oxford (Sony UK) Ltd. The university, it must be said, has become infinitely more commercial-minded. At the time of my visit, it was just finishing a successful, five-year, £340-million fund-raising campaign, which was most impressive, and it had learned the value of corporate sponsorship. If you look through the prospectus you'll find it littered with references to things like The All-New Shredded Wheat (No Added Sugar or Salt) Chair of Eastern Philosophy and the Harris Carpets Why-Pay-More Thousands of Rolls in Stock at Everyday Low Prices School of Business Management.

This business of corporate sponsorship is something that seems to have crept into British life generally in recent years without being much remarked upon. Nowadays you have the Canon League, the

Coca-Cola Cup, the Ever-Ready Derby, the Embassy World Snooker Championships. The day can't be far off when we get things like the Kellogg's Pop Tart Queen Mother, the Mitsubishi Corporation Proudly Presents Regents Park, and Samsung City (formerly Newcastle).

But I digress. My gripe with Oxford has nothing to do with fund-raising or how it educates its scholars. My gripe with Oxford is that so much of it is so ugly. Come with me down Merton Street and I will show you what I mean. Note, as we stroll past the backs of Christ Church, the studied calm of Corpus Christi, the soft golden glow of Merton, that we are immersed in an architectural treasure house, one of the densest assemblages of historic buildings in the world, and that Merton Street presents us with an unquestionably becoming prospect of gabled buildings, elaborate wrought-iron gates and fine seventeenth- and eighteenth-century townhouses. Several of the houses have been mildly disfigured by the careless addition of electrical wires to their facades (something that other less intellectually distracted nations would put inside) but never mind. They are easily overlooked. But what is this inescapable intrusion at the bottom? Is it an electrical substation? A halfway house designed by the inmates? No, it is the Merton College Warden's Quarters, a little dash of mindless Sixties excrescence foisted on an otherwise largely flawless street.

Now come with me while we backtrack to Kybald Street, a forgotten lane lost amid a warren of picturesque little byways between Merton Street and the High. At its eastern extremity Kybald Street ends in a pocket-sized square that positively cries out for a small fountain and maybe some benches. But what we find instead is a messy jumble of double- and triple-parked cars. Now on to Oriel Square: an even messier jumble of abandoned vehicles. Then on up Cornmarket (avert your gaze; this is truly hideous), past Broad Street and St Giles (still more automotive messiness) and finally let us stop, exhausted and dispirited, outside the unconscionable concrete eyesore that is the University Offices on the absurdly named Wellington Square. No, let's not. Let's pass back down Cornmarket, through the horrible, low-ceilinged, ill-lit drabness of the Clarendon Shopping Centre, out on to Queen Street, past the equally unadorable Westgate Shopping Centre and central library with its heartless, staring windows and come to rest at the outsized pustule that is the head office of Oxfordshire County Council. We could go on through St Ebbes, past the brutalist compound of themagistrates' courts, along the bleak sweep of Oxpens Road, with its tyre and exhaust centres and pathetically under-landscaped ice rink and car parks, and out onto the busy squalor of Park End Street, but I think we can safely stop here at the County Council, and save our weary legs.

Now none of this would bother me a great deal except that everyone, but everyone, you talk to in Oxford thinks that it is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with all that that implies in terms of careful preservation and general liveability. Now I know that Oxford has moments of unutterable beauty. Christ Church Meadow, Radcliffe Square, the college quads, Catte Street and Turl Street, Queens Lane and much of the High Street, the botanic garden, Port Meadow, University Parks, Clarendon House, the whole of north Oxford - all very fine. It has the best collection of bookshops in the world, some of the most splendid pubs and the most wonderful museums of any city of its size. It has a terrific indoor market. It has the Sheldonian Theatre. It has the Bodleian Library. It has a scattering of prospects that melt the heart.

But there is also so much that is so wrong. How did it happen? This is a serious question. What sort of mad seizure was it that gripped the city's planners, architects and college authorities in the 1960s and 1970s? Did you know that it was once seriously proposed to tear down Jericho, a district of fine artisans' homes, and to run a bypass right across Christ Church Meadow? These ideas weren't just misguided, they were criminally insane. And yet on a lesser scale they were repeated over and over throughout the city. Just look at the Merton College Warden's Quarters - which is not by any means the worst building in the city. What a remarkable series of improbabilities were necessary to its construction. First, some architect had to design it, had to wander through a city steeped in 800 years of architectural tradition, and with great care conceive of a structure that looked like a toaster with windows. Then a committee of finely educated minds at Merton had to show the most extraordinary indifference to their responsibilities to posterity and say to themselves, 'You know, we've been putting up handsome buildings since 1264; let's have an ugly one for a change.' Then the planning authorities had to say, 'Well, why not? Plenty worse in Basildon.' Then the whole of the city - students, dons, shopkeepers, office workers, members of the Oxford Preservation Trust - had to acquiesce and not kick up a fuss. Multiply this by, say, 200 or 300 or 400 and you have modern

Oxford. And you tell me that it is one of the most beautiful, well-preserved cities in. the world? I'm afraid not. It is a beautiful city that has been treated with gross indifference and lamentable incompetence for far too long, and every living person in Oxford should feel a little bit ashamed.

Goodness me! What an outburst! Let's lighten up and go look at some good things. The Ashmolean, for instance. What a wonderful institution, the oldest public museum on Planet Earth and certainly one of the finest. How is it that it is always so empty? I spent a long morning there politely examining the antiquities, and had the place all to myself but for a party of schoolchildren who could occasionally be sighted racing between rooms pursued by a harried-looking teacher, then strolled over to the Pitt-Rivers and University museums, which are also very agreeable in their quaint, welcome-to-the-1870s sort of way. I trawled through Blackwell's and Dillon's, poked about at Balliol and Christ Church, ambled through University Parks and Christ Church Meadow, ranged out through Jericho and the stolid, handsome mansions of north Oxford.

Perhaps I'm too hard on poor old Oxford. I mean, it is basically a wonderful place, with its smoky pubs and bookshops and scholarly air, as long as you fix your gaze on the good things and never go anywhere near Cornmarket or George Street. I particularly like it at night when the traffic dies away enough that you don't need an oxygen mask and the High Street fills up with those mysteriously popular doner kebab vans, which tempt me not (how can anyone eat something that looks so uncannily as if it has been carved from a dead man's leg?) but do have a kind of seductive Hopperish glow about them. I like the darkness of the back lanes that wander between high walls, where you half expect to be skewered and dismembered by Jack the Ripper or possibly a doner kebab wholesaler. I like wandering up St Giles to immerse myself in the busy conviviality of Brown's Restaurant - a wonderful, friendly place where, perhaps uniquely in Britain, you can get an excellent Caesar salad and a bacon cheeseburger without having to sit among pounding music and a lot of ersatz Route 66 signs. Above all, I like to drink in the pubs, where you can sit with a book and not be looked on as a social miscreant, and be among laughing, lively young people and lose yourself in reveries of what it was like when you too had energy and a flat stomach and thought of sex as something more than a welcome chance for a lie-down.I'd impetuously said I would stay for three nights when I booked into my hotel, and by mid-morning of the third day I was beginning to feel a little restless, so I decided to have a walk to Sutton Courtenay for no reason other than that George Orwell is buried there and it seemed about the right distance. I walked out of the city by way of a water meadow to North Hinksey and onwards towards Boar's Hill through an area called, with curious indecisiveness, Chilswell Valley or Happy Valley. It had rained in the night and the heavy clay soil stuck to my boots and made the going arduous. Soon I had an accumulation of mud that doubled the size of my feet. A bit further on the path had been covered with loose chippings, presumably to make the going easier, but in fact the chippings stuck to my muddy boots so that it looked as if I were walking around with two very large currant buns on my feet. At the top of Boar's Hill I stopped to savour the view- it's the one that led Matthew Arnold to spout that overwrought nonsense about 'dreaming spires', and it has been cruelly despoiled by those marching electricity pylons which Oxfordshire has in greater abundance than any county I know - and to scrape the mud from my boots with a stick.

Boar's Hill has some appealing big houses but I don't think I could happily settle there. I noted three driveways with signs saying 'No Turning'. Now tell me, just how petty do you have to be, how ludicrously possessive of your little piece of turf, to put up a sign like that? What harm can there possibly be in some lost or misdirected person turning a car round in the edge of your driveway? I always make a point of turning round in such driveways, whether I need to or not, and I urge you to join me in this practice. It is always a good idea to toot your horn two or three times to make sure that the owner sees you. Also, while I think of it, can I ask you to tear up your junk mail, particularly when that mail invites you to take on more debt, and return it to the sender in the postpaid envelope? It would make a far more effective gesture if there were thousands of us doing it.

I reached Abingdon by way of a back lane from Sunningwell. Abingdon had one of the best-kept council estates I think I've ever seen - huge sweeps of lawn and neat houses - and a handsome town hall built on stilts as if somebody was expecting a forty-day flood, but that's as much as I'm prepared to say for Abingdon. It has the most appalling shopping precinct, which I later learned had been created by sweeping away a raft of medieval houses, and