In the Cardinal College Cowfield (alliterative at Oxford, aren't we) someone has done some rather good sculpted figures sitting on one of the seats. A man sitting beside a glacial mermaid.
Thank Goodness, I thought, I hadn't got any grandchildren with me. Just think of those insistent, clamant little voices "Grandpapa, make us up a story about it".
Views across the Cowfield to an incredibly ugly modern building which the Eminent Founder would not have approved of, called, I am told, the "Meadow Building". It is in a sort of megabastard Venetian Gothic style. The only time I have ever seen it looking like anything other than an out-of-place eyesore was a couple of years ago when the floodwaters were very becomingly lapping against it. Interestingly, we do have an authentic gondola in Oxford; it lives beside Folly Bridge on the pontoon maintained by the rather good new Lebanese Restaurant there. Sorry. I ramble.
Not much evidence, in the subzero Globally Warmed temperatures, of undergraduates practising for Torpids: just a Women's Eight from Exeter College.
I wonder why women are always so much keener than men at rowing on freezing days. Perhaps it's their gorgeous subcutaneous fat. Sorry. I'm still rambling.
The eyes have it, Father.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how high on the river Cardinal Heard finished?
ReplyDelete"...their gorgeous subcutaneous fat."
ReplyDeleteAnd when Mrs. Hunwicke returns Father, she may want to 'have a word' with you on that score...!
Father, Mrs. Hunwicke clearly should still be putting bromide into your breakfast porridge.
ReplyDeleteBelieve me, in the present climate there's not much fat, subcutaneous or otherwise, on view in Oxford ... least of all, down on the river. The rowers permitted their gender to be inferred by the delightful shrillness of their voices. But perhaps they were really eunuchs. I must enquire whether Exeter Coll has a Eunuchs' Eight.
ReplyDeleteWell, things are certainly looking up in the University. The female oarsmen I remember from the seventies and eighties were anything but gorgeous
ReplyDelete