Oxford and the Cotswolds

In College
Here is a partial list of names: Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Charles Darwin, WH Auden, Charles Dodgson, JRR Tolkien, TS Eliot, Oscar Wilde, CS Lewis, William Golding. It is hard to go anywhere without tripping over these guys. They all came here and lolled about with the gargoyles, sundials, giant quads and the dining hall at Christ Church College that was used as the dining hall at Hogwarts in Harry Potter. Benny tells me that it is possible to walk from Oxford to Cambridge without ever leaving college grounds. There are over 30 colleges and less than 20,000 undergraduates. To look at the colleges you would estimate that they house tens of thousands instead of just hundreds. One college (All Souls) only admits 4 undergraduates per year and the entrance test is a quiz on table manners involving difficult questions about what to do with cherry pips, another college does not have any students at all.

Poaching
One of the colleges owns a herd of deer, but Benny and Sandy tell me that I am not allowed to go poaching. I really like Danny the Champion of the World have been given a talking to about my plans to reenact it. I am also not allowed to herd, claim or kill a swan because they belong to the queen, yes, every last swan in the UK. I don't know what she does with them, but every year she sends out an army of people to count them, so she will know if I have been messing around with them.

Rambling in the Cotswolds
On Boxing Day we drove off to the Cotswolds (a series of towns that looked at Oxford and decided to be ever cuter). Famous people live in these tiny towns, Kate Moss, Coldplay etc but we didn't see them. We did exert our rambler's rights over hill and dale. There is no such thing as bush walking, because there is no real bush, but it is the tradition to wander about along fence lines and rivers across the paddocks and fields of tweed wrapped farmers. One such farmer explained the details of how a hedgerow is made and the importance of instilling these traditional skills in the youth of today. Apparently hedgerow making will ward off the tendency of the English youth to join nasty gangs and commit unseemly crimes against the unsuspecting folk who live on council estates.

For rambling you need: boots, gaters, a scarf, a map, a hat and most of all a walking stick. People set out like they are going off into the wilderness and I refrained from telling them that they were never more than 5 miles from a pub. (We only had wellies and beenies, not real high tech spring loaded sticks, so did not get a proper welcome at the pub.)