Last night, after staying abed much of the morning (as I have every day this week so far) and puttering around with a book in hand that I wanted to read but couldn’t bring myself to all afternoon, I finally made peace with letting go of a longstanding dream of mine. Then I hopped on Netflix and watched a terribly depressing movie set at Oxford and the first episode of Happy Valley, a procedural recommended by a sibling that opens with a Yorkshire Sergeant trying to talk a man down off of a playground set where he has doused himself in gasoline. He didn’t ultimately mean to set himself on fire, she tells someone later; he just didn’t think things through when he went to light a cigarette to calm down.
So. That grand tour I had planned? Not gonna happen in the midst of a global pandemic, it turns out. I had reconciled myself to a certain degree of inconvenience in pulling off the French portion of the trip, but things moved much more quickly than I could ever have guessed, and now I’m just trying to get home before more borders close against me.
First, the stop in Lille had to be canceled. Originally I had been set up to stay with the parents of a friend of mine who live in the area, but they are older and at least one of them would make a high-risk patient if exposed to COVID-19. That’s fine, I’ll just refund my Trainline ticket from Lille to Paris and extend my Eurostar ticket from London all the way to Paris.
Then France closed its borders to all non-EU and non-UK citizens. That includes me. So now I’m in a bit of a messy patch of time where I’m trying to rework my flight home from a different country than planned, and sacrificing a number of my prepaid expenses (hotel, Eurostar ticket, etc) on the altar of emergency governmental restrictions. As per usual, I stayed up to an ungodly hour trying to sort it all out in one day, only for my mother to remind me that sleep isn’t optional.
I’m growing very familiar with Delta’s hold music, as I’m sure a great many people are right now.
Truthfully, I will be glad to go home, now that I’ve given up on the dream. I wasn’t in a great frame of mind to celebrate art and architecture. I was and am in a great frame of mind to boop my kitty on the nose and endure self-quarantine in a town full of people who care about my health, mental and physical. Lizzy Bennett may have been all WHAT ARE MEN TO ROCKS AND MOUNTAINS (and then promptly marrying a man anyway, the sellout) but I’m all WHAT ARE ANCIENT BUILDINGS TO KITTY BOOPS. I don’t recall the Bennetts ever keeping a family cat, but I can’t imagine a big old country house full of five daughter’s leavings-around that wouldn’t have had a rodent problem in the days of English yore, and so I’m betting they had either a cat or the Black Death, and only one of those two things would explain why Mr. Bennett enjoyed chortling away so much while alone in his study with a bunch of books.
Just sayin’.
In Oxford, businesses are shuttering slowly, one at a time and always just when you planned to go. Today it was the restaurant where my hosts wanted to take me for a taste of all of the authentic French cuisine I’ll be missing out on due to … well, you know. (My crushed dream-pieces litter the floor, rustling in an errant breeze.) A number of the street vendors were still out and about dealing in fresh veggies and incredible varied cuisines, though, so I’m full of veggie dumplings and a sauce that I was promised was “real spicy” but which may indeed only have been “Montana spicy.” I love you, darling Montanans, but you’ve gotta learn not to go out for Thai and ask your table server for ZERO STARS OUT OF FOUR for spice. Honey, NO. That’s not sauce on your curry, it’s just lightly seasoned saliva.
As in many other parts of the world, Oxfordians have rapidly discovered the doldrums that go along with self-quarantine and are thronging the public walks along the canal path and by the river, at University Parks and Christchurch Meadows. I’m thinking about bringing along a used-up wrapping paper tube to thwack people with, since nobody here keeps a yardstick. I have to admit, the part of me that had to do the kneel-test for uniform skirt length checks in middle and high school wants desperately to go around measuring everyone’s distance with a serious stinkeye.
In all other ways that really matter (and apart from the absurdity of having separate hot-and-cold water faucets and calling all grain “corn”) Oxford feels like just another town in the American midwest, only with much more stubbornly stuck up students happy to detail the grand and lengthy Empirical/Colonial history which has led to both their buildings and their white privilege. Oof, I feel bitchy even to my own self in saying that. And the long-term residents of Oxford are quite nice, as it turns out, though I don’t know how they explain the vast stretches of huts and barely-together shacks alongside the train tracks leading into town from the west. I can’t unsee them, now. But as for helping out the leaden lump of an American trudging through their country, the locals have been kind, giving me smiles and extra time to fish out my ticket on the train and counting back change in the local currency very slowly so that I know what’s what.
I wish I’d been in a better place so that I could truly appreciate what this place has to offer. My friend who’s hosting me says she wouldn’t live anywhere else in the UK, which is a pretty strong statement really. I want to feel what she feels about this place. I’ve never not loved a place before in my entire life. The ancient, shuttered, and occasionally looted (did you hear about that art heist?) buildings just hold no magic for me.
I’m starting to fall asleep typing this entry, so it’s probably time to get up and get the blood moving. I have been on hold with Delta’s US customer service number the entire time it took me to (in a leisurely fashion, I might add) type this up. I might just have to call them back early in the European morning and hope that their UK contact number goes through next time. I guess it got so busy it actually melted?
My eyes have just about had enough of this staying open business. Time to log off.