The non-Potter Shambles

There are actually only a few Harry Potter-oriented businesses on the street, and it is authentically medieval, with some of the buildings dating from the 14th century. It was once known as the Great Flesh Shambles (shambles meaning stall or bench) because it was where all the butchers had their businesses. The jettied floors overhanging the street kept it cool and shady, better for keeping the meat fresh.

The Society of Alchemists

I avoided The Shop That Must Not Be Named and The Potions Cauldron, but did go into this shop, thinking I might find a suitably New Age-y gift for a friend of mine. It seemed more Halloween than New Age, with skull candles and jars of sweets with ghoulish names, but I did like the giant dragon guarding the door.

More Shambles reflections

Just because there isn't any real connection between the Shambles and Diagon Alley is no reason not to sell all the Harry Potter merchandise you can. There are at least two Harry Potter stores in Oxford and tourists can't even visit most of the locations where scenes were filmed.

Saturday reflections

A shop window in the Shambles, a medieval street in York that was reportedly the inspiration for Diagon Alley in Harry Potter, although J.K. Rowling said she'd never been there.

Anyway, it looks like it could have been.

Stonehenge in black and white, plus clouds

Last year's sky with all those clouds works much better in black and white than this year's cloudless blue skies.

Stonehenge in black and white

The Heel Stone

Most of the pictures I took at Stonehenge are unsurprisingly very similar to the pictures I took last year, but I didn't get close enough to the Heel Stone last year to get a good picture. This one is much, much better.

Avebury sheep

More Avebury

The UK is having their fifth heat wave of the summer, and I wish this kind of summer day for all of them, with cool breezes and maybe some much-needed rain. (It was actually quite warm the day I took this picture but it looks more like a classically English summer day than it actually was.)

I love Oxford but I am happy to be back in the land of strong coffee and air-conditioning any time I want it.

Back to Avebury

I was having a bad knee day and walking on the uneven ground was difficult, though I stuck it out for as long as I could. I was just happy to see these remarkable stones again, and this time on a bright sunny (though uncomfortably warm) day.

Pink sky at night

One of the few pictures I took at Merton this summer. I had skipped dinner because I was sick to my stomach, but this sky, after the only rain we'd had, distracted me enough to grab the camera.

The RAF Bar

The ceiling of the rear bar at the Eagle is covered with graffiti. RAF and USAF airmen stood on the tables and used candles, lighters and lipstick to write their names and squadron numbers on the ceiling.

Since we'd been to the cemetery earlier, I couldn't help wondering if some of the Americans who wrote their names on that ceiling may have ended up buried far from home only a few miles away.

Cambridge American Cemetery

Slight sidetrack here. On the way into Cambridge we stopped at this cemetery, where 3800 Americans killed in World War II are buried.

It's a beautiful location, and the visitor's center is excellent. There are exhibits outlining the history of American involvement in the war, the impact on the locals of the large numbers of military and support who were suddenly occupying a relatively small island, and individual stories of some of those buried in the cemetery.

I was glad that we had gone there on the way to Cambridge, rather than afterwards as originally planned, because it made the visit to the Eagle more poignant.

Not my Aunt Maureen's bangers and mash

 

I seldom take pictures of my food, but I made an exception for a couple of reasons. First, the other students were so envious when they heard we were having lunch at the Eagle on our field trip—not because of the historic connections, but because we were going to skip the execrable bag lunches they give us on field trip days.

And second, because this was not what I was expecting when I pre-ordered the bangers and mash. Grilled sausages in a Merlot reduction with chive mashed potatoes? My aunt Maureen, who was an excellent plain English cook, would definitely have been rolling over in her grave.

And it was delicious, though I had to leave half of it in order to have room for the blackberry tart with clotted cream ice cream. I do have my priorities.

The Eagle

We had lunch at this pub, a short walk from the Cavendish. It's been around since the 17th century, but one of the things it's famous for is being the place where Watson and Crick announced the discovery of DNA. Which does seem like the most English thing ever (and yes, I know that Watson was American.) You make one of the biggest scientific discoveries of all time, and your first reaction is to stroll over to the local pub to tell your colleagues about it.

It was impossible to get a good photo of the plaque, but this is what it says:

On this spot, on February 28, 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson made the first public announcement of the discovery of DNA with the words “We have discovered the secret of life”.

Throughout their early partnership Watson & Crick dined in this room on six days every week.

The Old Cavendish

This was much more exciting than the colleges. The lab building was unfortunately closed for repairs, so we weren't able to go inside. But we lingered in the street outside and took pictures, awestruck and giddy at the same time, like pilgrims at a holy site. Or teenage girls outside a hotel where the Beatles were staying.

We'd been talking about James Clerk Maxwell and Ernest Rutherford in our class, and this was their lab! This is where J.J. Thomson discovered the electron! This is where Crick and Watson (and Franklin) discovered the double helix! I felt smarter just being in the same neighborhood.

St John's College

This is certainly different. Most of the older buildings in the Oxford colleges are constructed in the same yellowish Cotswold stone, which gives a kind of architectural unity to the city center. There are many brick buildings in Oxford of course, but I've never seen one quite like this. I think of brick as being a newer material, but the Tudor-style brick and stone of the main gate on the left dates from the very early 16th century, around the time of the college's founding in 1511.

The building on the right, on the other hand, is the Old Divinity School at St John's, and that dates from the late nineteenth century, exactly as you would expect.

Trinity College

Trinity was founded in 1546 by Henry VIII, whose statue adorns the Great Gate in the picture on the right. (One thing that did strike me about what little I saw of the Cambridge colleges was how many statues they had adorning their facades, which you don't see much of in Oxford.)

The Great Court, on the left, is described as the largest enclosed courtyard in Europe. It's famous for the Great Court Run, the attempt to run all the way (339 metres, 371 yards) around the court before the clock can finish striking twelve. (This was depicted in Chariots of Fire, although Harold Abrahams never actually made the run.)

The fact that it's called the Great Court, rather than the Great Quad, is one of the little language differences between the two universities, like calling the person who cleans your room a scout (Oxford) or a bedder (Cambridge), and your classes tutorials (Oxford) or supervisions (Cambridge). What you are most likely to notice in this picture is how brown it is. I think it only rained once the entire month I was in England, and not for very long, and though Yorkshire was still fairly green, even there we skipped a planned visit to a waterfall on the excursion to the Dales because there wasn't any actual water in the falls.

King's College

If you don't know a lot about the Gothic and neo-Gothic architectural details (and I really don't) this college which dominates the center of Cambridge looks very similar to Magdalen College in Oxford, which was founded around the same time.

That's the famous chapel on the right.

These streets, for example

One obvious difference between the two locations is size: Oxford is much larger and more urban. The city center with most of the college buildings is surrounded by miles of ordinary English neighborhoods with homes and businesses on every side. (I've heard people say that Cambridge is a university first and a town second, and Oxford is the other way around.)

But in the city centers, they are a lot alike. These two Cambridge streets—Free School Lane, by the old Cavendish Laboratory, and Trinity Street, home to the college—could easily be plopped down in the middle of Oxford.

Cambridge

Punts on a river. It's the Cam, not the Cherwell, and that's the original Mathematical Bridge rather than the replica at the Iffley Lock in Oxford, so this must be Cambridge.

I only spent an afternoon there, so have no real standing to list the similarities and differences between the two college towns (not that that has ever stopped me.)

I had a couple of dreams this week when a bad cough was disrupting my sleep where I was wandering through the streets of Oxford, completely lost, and finally realized I didn't know where I was because I was actually in Cambridge, not Oxford. But honestly unless I was standing in front of one of the colleges or the Corpus Clock or this bridge, I probably wouldn't know the difference.

The Cherry Orchard

I've just noticed for the first time that I never downloaded any of the pictures I took on our second weekend excursion, to Stratford-upon-Avon, so all I have from that day are phone pictures of the RSC theatre before the performance of The Cherry Orchard.

I don't think this is any great loss; the world does not need another picture of Shakespeare's Birthplace, and it saves me from any obligation to sort through them and see if any are worth sharing.

The pictures are gone because my camera was stolen, along with everything else in my purse, from a Starbucks in London. Obviously I managed to get myself back to New York despite having no credit cards, no cash, no phone, and no house keys, thanks to a lovely friend who swooped in and gave me a shoulder to cry on plus a much-needed loan, but it was not an experience I ever want to repeat.

As for The Cherry Orchard, I enjoyed the performance though I did think it emphasized the comedy at the expense of the underlying sadness. And the seats in the galleries at the RSC theatre are wickedly uncomfortable, with so little legroom even a 16th century audience would have felt cramped. My 20th century knees were outraged, but even those of my classmates with healthy joints were complaining.

I am home

And I am recovering from a nasty cold, so I absolutely do not have the energy or inclination to go into my misadventures and misfortunes in London.

I will start posting pictures from the field trip to Cambridge at some point, maybe today, maybe not. But since I definitely feel like the back end of something, these fuzzy sheep butts in Avebury seem appropriate.

Anti-vaxxers in World War I

The museum also had some very interesting exhibits on the fight against typhoid, and vaccination efforts during World War I. These flyers are all too familiar.

[W]e poison our men (against their will) with the most horrible contamination human folly ever devised...Our brave troops have to fight GERMANS IN FRANCE and GERM THEORISTS AT HOME...A Crime Against Personal Liberty—Individual Safety—Common Sense.

Also at the History of Science museum

This beautiful astrolabe belonged to Elizabeth I, a gift from her childhood friend Sir Robert Dudley.

Einstein's blackboard

For our final field trip, we stayed in Oxford and visited the History of Science museum. This is their prize exhibit--a blackboard used by Einstein for a lecture in Oxford in 1931. (In case you can't make it out, he was talking about general relativity and the size of the universe.)

Some of the Oxford dons who had attended his first lecture decided to preserve the blackboards from the second lecture; there were originally two, but one was accidentally erased. Einstein was not pleased. He wrote in his diary: The lecture was indeed well-attended and nice. [But] the blackboards were picked up. (Personality cult, with adverse effect on others. One could easily see the jealousy of distinguished English scholars. So I protested; but this was perceived as false modesty.) On arrival [back in Christ Church] I felt shattered. Not even a cart-horse could endure so much!

A different view from the observatory

That's London in the distance.

The Canary Wharf neighborhood, which I remember as being nothing much, is now a new finance center. I would never have recognized this as being part of London if I didn't already know it was. Forty years ago, none of those buildings were there.

The building in the foreground, with the long rows of columns on either side, is a former royal residence called the Queen's House, which is now an art museum.

Greenwich Royal Observatory

We've had two field trips so far for my class: the trip to Cambridge on Thursday, and a visit to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich the week before. The observatory was very interesting--I got to stand straddling the Prime Meridian--but old telescopes aren't very photogenic. So, unlike the visit to Cambridge, there are a manageable number of photos to share.

This is one of the mural quadrants installed during Edmund Halley's time as Royal Astronomer. This is a kind of telescope mounted on a quarter circle frame on a wall aligned north-south. This allowed the astronomer to measure the angular height of the star being observed.

Saturday reflections

The Corpus Clock in Cambridge.

It's situated outside the Taylor library at Corpus Christi college, and you can see a little of the towers of King's College across the street in the reflections.

It was conceived and funded by John Taylor, an alumnus of Corpus Christi, and is as much an art installation as it is a clock. It does have the basic machinery of a clock, but turned inside out. There are no numbers or hands, and the time is indicated by slits emitting blue LED light. But it's only accurate once in every five minutes, symbolizing the irregularity of life.

The clock was first displayed to the public in 2008, unveiled by Stephen Hawking.

The Breakfast Room, exterior

The Breakfast Room seen from the Fellows Quad. (It's the windows on the second floor, to the right.)

The Queen's Room is over the archway.

The Breakfast Room

This is actually something new at Merton: the room where I'm having my class this year. In previous years, I've been in perfectly ordinary classrooms that might be found in any college setting anywhere in the world, but for some reason this year I'm in this beautiful sixteenth century room. (Since we're studying cosmology, maybe the scheduling office had a sense of humor and liked the contrast of viewing Powerpoint slides about black holes and quantum mechanics on a screen with drapes hanging on either side and a marble pedestal on top.)

The room next to this, where the group sitting at high table on formal nights assembles for drinks before dinner, is called the Queen's Room. Henrietta Marie, wife of Charles I, lived in these rooms for several months during the English civil wars in the 1640's.

St Michael graveyard

I always love old churchyards.

For your safety and comfort

I loved these upholstered cushions for kneeling in the church. So much more comfortable than the barely cushioned wooden kneelers I spent many uncomfortable hours of my childhood on.

Two windows at St Michael

St Michael and All Angels

Back to the Yorkshire Dales.

This 12th century church in the charmingly-named Hubberholme has an All Creatures Great and Small connection—the interior scenes for the wedding of the James Herriott character were filmed here—but it's a beautiful little church well worth a visit even if they'd never managed to squeeze a TV production crew inside it.

The author J.B. Priestley loved Hubberholme, and his ashes are buried in the churchyard.

I am actually back at Merton

The second week of the program started today, but this is the only picture I've taken at the college—the gates to the Fellows Garden on a perfect summer afternoon yesterday.

I have enough pictures from Yorkshire and more recent excursions to go through, and I think I've already photographed every square inch of Merton by now.

Sunday bird blogging

A rook perched on one of the sarsen stones at Stonehenge yesterday.

It's not a great picture, but at least I had a longer lens this year, so it's better than the tiny starlings I photographed there last year. At the time, I wrote, “I don't imagine I will ever get to post a picture of birds at Stonehenge again,” but I'll gladly make it a habit if I can.

Saturday reflections

It's surprising to me that it's only been two weeks since I took this picture—it feels like forever ago.

This is from the hot Sunday when I got lost in Oxford and at one point found myself in a tunnel underneath the Rewley swing bridge. It was kind of creepy actually, but the reflections were nice.