I suppose one might wonder whether it is worth it to go on half-day trips like my six hours in Manchester, or this one: an afternoon in Oxford, out of London.
The short answer is YES.
I have posted about Oxford before, but usually I spend most of my visit in the Bodleian Library. This time my friend Jane and I went just for fun. Best deal was the X90 bus, at £16 return (that’s round-trip for Americans). Takes about 90 minutes, but the parts near Oxford are quite pretty, even from the road. The sight of the Grenfell Tower, blackened when I first saw it three days after the fire but now wrapped in white plastic, is eerie and horrible, and a reminder of human hubris and greed.
This visit was just to see a few sites again, places I knew I liked to go. Priority was the Natural History Museum and the attached Pitt Rivers Museum. The latter has a massive collection, naturally originating in the Victorian era, of items from around the world — it’s a huge cabinet of curiosities. I have said before that the curation emphasis is on the commonality of humankind. There are entire cabinets of looms, or amulets, or masks, from everywhere. They don’t have room for all of it. The spears, for example, are up on racks above your head.
As I looked around, I realized that despite categories as specific as “animal heads made of wood used for worship”, there was no collection of sexual aids. Where were the dildos? Well, of course I had to ask. I should have known, of course, that such a display might be inappropriate with all the children who come there for the Natural History Museum. Here, for example, children watch a museum worker feed a cricket to a stick bug.
Our society (most unfortunately, in my opinion) doesn’t talk about sexuality in the same way as everything else. But the guide I asked was willing to show us a couple of objects that one might not notice, the most interesting of which was this, which we all agreed was someone copulating with a lizard, for whatever reason.
The thing about museums is, however often you return, there’s always more to see and enjoy.
And the Oxford Natural History Museum I love just for the Victorian look and the insistence on pedagogy: it’s impossible not to learn something, even if it’s just what a fox feels like.
Other obligatory stops were to Blackwell, one of the best bookshops on the planet, and The Eagle and Child pub, where you go for the atmosphere and the fact that the Inklings (CS Lewis, JRR Tolkein, and Charles Williams, whose name I can never remember but whose books I like every bit as much as those of the other two) drank and worked there. It’s taken me three or four visits for it to occur to me that the food isn’t that good, and they often have nothing darker than Guinness, even in fall.
Yes, it’s a long drive and there isn’t enough time to see everything. But it’s still totally worth it.
