Being on foot in Oxford was my first re-acquaintance with crowds since Brighton. Lots of tourists were in phone zombie mode, walking in a straight line staring at their devices until they collided with someone. That instinctive way opposing groups of walkers used to merge past each other wasn't happening any more. It was getting dangerous. It wouldn't be long before some politician suggests we can only walk around towns if we're insured to do so.
I ambled past Oriel College, part of Oxford University. I'd heard on the radio how a bunch of its students had wanted to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes that stands outside because of his policy of enforced racial segregation in South Africa. A student tour guide was making the case to a bunch of roadside tourists. This seemed a bit short-sighted. If we were going to remove the statue of every leader who ever misbehaved then we wouldn't have any statues left. My school was called Queen Elizabeth's. Should they rename it because her hobby was murdering Catholics?
Not far from the campsite I entered a pub called The White Horse to see Aunt Sally, a game local to this area. I'd seen a scoreboard for it out in the beer garden but no one was playing. It was only a quarter to five. Maybe it was an evening thing. To play, you throw sticks at a model of a woman's head. The pub smelled of farts and the Eastern European barmaid looked unhappy. Maybe she thought it was me who'd let one off. The odour was here before I was though. It was probably her. Or maybe she was just annoyed at newcomers not knowing the rules of the game and constantly pelting her face with sticks.
*
I woke up, made some coffee and had a couple of blueberry muffins for breakfast. I hadn't seen much of Oxford yesterday – the walk to the shark had taken longer than expected – and so I decided to stay on and have a museum day. Walking out of the site I noticed a sign on the door of the facilities.
“Please do not cycle around the toilet block.”
I wondered how many people had fallen off their bicycles and into the urinal before they'd felt a need to put that sign up.
I arrived at The Ashmolean. It bills itself as Britain's First Museum, which shouldn't be confused with Britain First's Museum, which is just a collection of rascist arseholes.
I sought out their locker room and suddenly remembered the Devon gnomes. I put my bag into locker number 38 and vowed to act upon their numeric meal recommendation as soon as I was out of here.
There was a ton of fascinating stuff in there, from every part of the world and every period of history. I doubt you could do it justice even if you had a week. There was an impressive collection of impressionist art, including Pissarro, Renoir, van Gogh, Manet and Monet. There was also an army of sculptures from Ancient Greece, much of which had been mishandled unless old Athens had a disturbing number of well buff amputees. And it was great to see so many Buddhas and to prove finally that the unfortunate period when The Enlightened One piled on all the weight must have been swift since it wasn't captured by anyone. He's either svelte or morbidly obese. It looks like the Nirvana he found was the Nestlé ice-cream variety.
It was lunch time. I nearly visited Thirsty Meeples, a café whose shtick is that, as well as your coffee and cake, you can choose from hundreds of board games. It's a great idea to trap people in your business for twelve weeks while they try to finish a single game of Monopoly. It seemed the sort of place to visit with friends at a later date rather than sitting there this lunchtime, expectantly flashing my eyes at strangers and then at my ready-to-go Hungry Hippos.
Instead I went to the Angrid Thai Canteen and chose what the gnomes had suggested. It turned out to be squid in three sauces with rice, a dish of delicious battered tentacles in a sweet chilli and ginger sauce with onions and peppers. I needed to keep up my strength. I still had more museums to see.
Next up was the Museum of the History of Science. It wasn't very big with just a couple of rooms open. A third room was closed “due to staff sickness”, which I hoped meant someone was off with the flu rather than some poor sod had spilled their sample of bubonic plague in there. There were lots of telescopes and microscopes and orreries, along with medical stuff like an eerie, pre-anaesthetic amputation set and a doctor's kit with two trepanning tools, an operation their patients needed like a hole in the head.
I walked back through town via Cornmarket Street. It was now crawling with people and political stands campaigning for Leave and Remain. Around the Remain desk there were more people than Kate Moss has had hot dinners (i.e., just one person) although Leave's was teeming. The polls had narrowed in the last few days. The murder of MP Jo Cox by a right-wing nutjob had shown the darker side of British nationalism and tipped a handful of people in the other direction. The mood was getting nasty.
Not everyone was interested in the EU debate. Some people stood around and watched a tight-rope-walking leprechaun singing Irish songs and playing a fiddle. Others were so self-obsessed they weren't watching anyone but themselves. An Indian fella videoed himself with a selfie stick as he examined shop windows. He wasn't videoing the items in the windows, just his reaction to them, which, for the most part, was po-faced glumness.
My third museum of the day was the Oxford Modern Art museum. There wasn't much inside, but the little they had was nicely mental, including a piece by Sol LeWitt, an artist so lazy he merely wrote the instructions on how to create his art and left the museum to carry them out in red and black crayon. Basically it was just a few wall-sized squares with an extra line in one or two of them. The caption told me that “despite seeming to allude to a particular geometric theory” it was in fact “a highly personal formulation unconnected with mathematical logic”. I love that these places take such pretension seriously. If you'd submitted that as part of your GCSE Art project you'd probably have been expelled.
There was another exhibit called Eye of Shark by Dorothy Cross. It was twelve rusty bathtubs and a shark's eye embedded in the gallery wall. She apparently “dissolves the hierarchy between living and inanimate matter to produce a sense of continuity between man and landscape”. Which is nice.
I'd done my culture for the day and so headed back to the campsite. Waiting for the zebra crossing's lights on the busy Abingdon Road, two English blokes in their forties spilled out of a house on the other side of the road. It started with raised voices and a bit of shoving and then a proper fight broke out. Oh yes, here it was, my street fight. My sticker book of British icons was complete! A woman stood in the doorway with a baby in her arms.
“Stop fightin', Kev!” she screamed.
Kev had his arms locked around the other fella's shoulders as they wrestled on the pavement.
“But he hit me first,” was Kev's mature reply.
They ended up rolling around on the tarmac, grunting wordlessly like pigs in labour, their arses hanging out of their tracksuit bottoms. Nobody was coming out of this looking good.
The lights changed and I crossed the road. Their tumbling carcasses were sort of blocking my way and so I stepped around them, pretending I hadn't noticed them. The guy pinned to the floor looked up at me. I gave him a half-smile and sort of raised my eyebrows in greeting. How very British. I stopped short of giving him a lusty “Good afternoon!” I walked back to my tent feeling a bit depressed by what I'd seen. No one was seriously hurt, but still.
*
Facebook told me that today, Monday the 20th of June, was the first day of summer as the rain hammered on the roof of my tent. I felt a bit like an old tyre, deflated, flat and I wasn't sure why.
I'd enjoyed my time in Oxford. I didn't really want to leave, especially in the rain. There were still things to see here. I knew that once I got rolling my mood would improve but the motivation to get moving wasn't there. I decided to stay in Oxford.
I went to the office to pay for another day, passing the shower block. A girl stood outside the gents' toilet door, looking at the chain partially across it. For some reason the vast majority of campsites clean their toilets between eleven and twelve in the morning, just when most people are leaving and proba
bly need to use the facilities.
“Is it open?” she asked, pointing at the door.
“I don't know,” I said. “But that's the gents anyway.”
She looked at me.
“I'm a boy,” he replied. “I've just got long hair.”
I didn't help matters by being surprised.
“You're a boy?” I said. “Really?”
I remember being mistaken for a girl about his age. I could have handled that better.
The last museum still to see, and one that had been closed the previous day, was the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments. It didn't open until two and so I went for a wander around Christ Church Meadow. Oxford has some lovely spaces. It would be amazing to study here, surrounded by the history and the beauty.
Great Tom, the loudest bell in Oxford, sits in Tom Tower that guards the entrance to Christ Church. Every night at five past nine it is rung 101 times, one bong for each of the original scholars of the place. It used to be the signal for the colleges to close their gates. If you had to be back home for nine each night, perhaps it wouldn't have been such a great place to learn.
I wandered aimlessly and ended up back in the centre of town. I got a newspaper and headed to St Aldate's Tavern, a dark, near-empty pub and ordered a Ginger IPA. The toilets were downstairs. The first door I came to was marked Narnia. I tried it but it was locked.
I passed the Aldate's police stattion, apparently where Inspector Endeavour Morse was based, and then arrived at the music museum. Unlike the grand entrances of Oxford's other museums, here you had to press a button to be let through a little door. It all felt a little bit James Bond.
There was only one other couple inside. The friendly guy in charge explained that I couldn't touch the main instruments but I could play with those on the table in front of his desk.
“And you can also play the theremin,” he said.
“Wow! A theremin!” I blurted out excitedly.
Despite a youth filled with synthesizers I'd never even seen a theremin before. It's an electronic gizmo with two antennae, one each to monitor the movement of your hands. Your right hand's side-to-side motion controls the pitch while moving your left hand up and down changes the volume. It makes an other-worldly sound and has been used extensively in science fiction movies, most notably Star Trek.
I switched it on, and its amp screamed with deafening feedback. The man on the desk jumped out of his seat.
“That'll be the kids playing with the settings,” he said.
He sorted out the amp and I stood for longer than I probably should, annoying him with my electro-whine while he tried to read.
An American family came in and talked to the curator. The daughter was just about to start studying music at one of the colleges here. She sat down at a harpsichord and played like Bach. I figured now would be a good time to stop dicking about on the theremin.
The museum has over two thousand instruments, mostly orchestral and some ancient pieces including a 'serpent', the black, twisty horn that was the forerunner of the sax. They even have a harpsichord they believe once belonged to Handel – he appeared with it in one of his portraits – and they're convinced enough to have insured it for a quarter of a million pounds. That said, Salvador Dalí once appeared in a self-portrait with a melted clock hanging off his 'tache.
In the evening I cooked up some food on my stove. A busy city campsite feels different to a quiet rural one. In the country, sitting in an almost empty field, I'm an intrepid explorer on the outskirts of civilisation. Here, cross-legged outside my tent, prodding the contents of my pan with a spoon, amidst the expensive caravans and camper vans, I'm a penniless cave troll. People smiled and then walked nervously by, probably scared I was going to eat their dog.
*
Cycling out of Oxford early the next morning in a cloud of fellow cyclists I was reminded of Copenhagen. According to Ed Miliband in 2009 the city was the green capital of Britain despite, only a few years earlier, said the Guardian, a day spent breathing the air of Oxford's city centre was equivalent to smoking sixty cigarettes. Even today it has five times the legal limit of pollution. Perhaps the profusion of bicycles just makes it seem clean.
I escaped town via Headington and threw myself into quiet lanes. The other roads eastwards out of Oxford had looked big and well-trafficked. My chosen route was mostly flat and beautifully peaceful. The quiet was interrupted crossing the noisy M40 and then peace descended once again, the only noise the tweeting of birds and the distant, lazy rumble of farm equipment. I'd stubbed out the supposed fag-packet air of Oxford and was now breathing in the fumes of crops gently toasting in the sun. A couple of days wandering city streets had been fun but I belonged in the countryside, like cow shit or myxomatosis.
At a junction I met another bloke on a bicycle going my way. He was off to a business meeting in the tiny village of Brill in next-door Buckinghamshire. Brill should form some sort of Positive Village alliance with Staffordshire's Flash and maybe invite Dorset's Plush along too. They could stand in direct opposition to the League of Misery, which would no doubt include the Perth and Kinross village of Dull and Hertfordshire's Nasty.
“It's more of a chat with my coach,” he said. He was the head of a software company, employing fifteen. “It aids with loneliness. And it's nice to be able to start a day like this for a change.”
We climbed the hill to the centre of the village and parted company. I went to see the windmill he'd recommended. It was built in 1685 and commanded great views of the surrounding flat countryside. If the city of Oxford wasn't as green as it should have been then this area certainly was. They recycled everything, including the names. Just south of here is a hamlet called Little London, while north is Muswell Hill.
Tolkien lived here in Brill for a while and used it as inspiration for the Middle Earth settlement of Bree. It felt like the sort of place you could imagine hobbits kicking around. And you'd have to go further than Oxford to find Mordor. That was apparently based on the blast furnaces and steelworks of the West Midlands.
The rurality continued. Beneath chestnut trees in the little village of Edgcott I passed the unlikely location of another prison, HMP Grendon. It is billed as a “therapeutic community prison”, which almost made me want to stop and spend some time there. No one else in Britain's countryside was getting much community.
Bletchley is a town famous for one thing and one thing only and so it was a little perplexing, when arriving from the south-east, to see no evidence that the world's greatest puzzle-smashing fortress was anywhere nearby. Sure, the welcome sign to the small town mentions “The Home of the Codebreakers” but after that you're on your own. It wasn't until I was right out the other side of town, after guessing at a number of roundabouts and a couple of junctions, that I eventually found what I was looking for. Maybe if you aren't up to fulfilling this relatively simple mission you don't deserve to see the place.
The story of Bletchley Park isn't as secret as it once was. When I was there the film The Imitation Game hadn't been out long. The movie almost gives the impression the code was cracked single-handed by Alan Turing when, although he played a pivotal role, it took a massive team. At its peak ten thousand people worked on this site. And what a pretty site it was, with great lawns and a lovely lake in the middle. A number of couples met and fell in love around this water, taking a break from decoding Nazi plans to fill the world with the type of blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans that Hitler wasn't.
Maybe if the entire project hadn't been so secret back in the day, the British government might have turned a blind eye to Turing's homosexuality, then illegal, rather than chemically castrating the poor sod. The museum steers clear of mentioning Turing's fate in too much detail and merely says he died of cyanide poisoning without telling you it was Turing himself who injected the lethal element into an apple and then took a bite, one explanation put forward for the reason Apple has the logo it does. In any case, it was no way to treat to man who'd helped to shorten the Seco
nd World War by an estimated two years, fooling Hitler's forces into thinking the Normandy landings were taking place farther up the coast at Pas de Calais.
The road south from Bletchley to my evening's camp took me through Stoke Hammond and once again I'd stumbled upon another Thankful Village. Given there are only 54 of them, this was a huge coincidence. Stoke Hammond is much bigger than Herodsfoot and so the chance of everyone returning home safely from the war was even more remote.
After requiring the help of nearly the entire village to find the campsite, hidden a mile out of town over one of those hump-back stone bridges that trolls live under, I set up my tent and settled down with the only newspaper that had been left in the newsagent's, a copy of The Times.
Brexit fever had infected the entire nation and The Times had broken down both camps into easy generalisations. The fact that UKIPpers and BNPeabrains were Leavers wasn't much of a shock, but Leave had a substantial lead amongst the over 60s, the working class and unemployed, and those in the Midlands, the north-west, Yorkshire, the south-west or, in other words, almost everyone in England outside the M25. The Remainers were painted as anyone who'd been to university, the middle and upper classes, and the young. If this was the case, then the future for Britain, regardless of who won, seemed bleak. The country couldn't have been more divided, and fights on social media were becoming more frequent. Sides had been taken and the newspapers in both camps had categorized everyone involved: the thick, lazy, racist idiots versus the stuck-up, out-of-touch, elitist bastards.
*
From inside my tent the outside conditions were peaceful. There was no wind or rain to disturb my breakfast blueberry muffin. It was a disappointment then to open the tent flap and find myself sitting inside a cloud, a drizzle so fine as to be inaudible. The tent was soaked and, with the sky a uniform pencil grey, no change was likely in the next few hours. There was little point in hanging around.
Route Britannia, the Journey South: A Spontaneous Bicycle Ride through Every County in Britain Page 24