So, with luck, this is going up immediately after Badger's chronicle of our adventures on Thursday. If not, technical difficulties have yet again won the day. This is the tale of our adventures in Oxford.
We were rather delayed Friday morning by our hostel complications (again), but like an old pro, Mouse managed to navigate the front desk to switch key cards etc. for the final room switch. (Well done, reservation company!) Shortly (?) thereafter, we had gotten on a train at Paddington Station, bound for Oxford.
Tigger approved of the lovely seats on the train, suitable for napping.
We were rather delayed Friday morning by our hostel complications (again), but like an old pro, Mouse managed to navigate the front desk to switch key cards etc. for the final room switch. (Well done, reservation company!) Shortly (?) thereafter, we had gotten on a train at Paddington Station, bound for Oxford.
Tigger approved of the lovely seats on the train, suitable for napping.
Shortly before noon, we pulled into Oxford and met up with an old friend of Mouse's. Let us call her Padmé; that's similar to the alias she used on the Star Wars message boards where she and Mouse met. (Yes, geeks. This general geekery proved advantageous. From a geeky point of view.)
Padmé is a graduate student at Merton College, the best college in the University of Oxford. We know because she told us so. Also because it was the college of Tolkien, widely acknowledged deity of twentieth-century literature and founder of the modern fantasy genre. And of T.S. Eliot, poet. And Padmé, who would never end up somewhere second-rate. And because Padmé is a student an tour guide at Merton, we were able to see places which that day ought to have been closed to the public.
Such as the table in the gardens where Tolkien spent much time with pen and paper. Tigger was inspired.
Padmé also showed us many other wonderful things in the library at Merton (Tigger was unimpressed at the no-photography rule and so missed out on medieval book chests and globes from the Age of Exploration.) We also saw the chapel, truncated by a corrupt Warden who sold land not his to sell, and we saw the courtyard where Merton students preserve the balance of the space-time continuum by walking round backwards from 2 AM till 2 AM the morning of the fall time change. There may also be drinking involved.
Tigger got ideas.
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