Very grateful to @bbctms for inviting me on, & giving me the chance to talk about Monday week’s elite #CricketWalk: raising money for the homeless in Britain & Yazidi refugees in Iraq
The village of Nuneham Courtney - which in 1425 was bought by Thomas Chaucer, son of the poet - was demolished in the 1760 by Lord Harcourt, who wanted to build himself a slap-up Palladian villa on the site. In WW2 it was requisitioned by the RAF; today it’s a Buddhist retreat.
The villagers were moved by Lord Harcourt into 2 rows of semi-detached cottages on either side of what today is the A4074.
The spectacle of an ancient village being cleared to make way for a rich man’s landscaped park provoked Oliver Goldsmith to write The Deserted Village.
“Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green:
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain…”
Hoving into view: the Joint European Torus (JET), where Europe’s top boffins are busy trying to solve the energy crisis by doing brilliant things with fusion.*
The plasmas in JET are apparently hotter than anything else in the Solar System.
*Though Brexit a spanner in the works
Enjoying the bucolic calm…
Cricket bat willows!
We cross the grounds of Radley College. They have a golf course.
And beagle kennels.
In the footsteps of Sir Arthur Evans and Matthew Arnold…
“And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty's heightening.”
Which is just as well, since our view of Oxford from Boar’s Hill is a rather gloomy, Augustan one…
Closing in on the end of our walk around Oxford…
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To @V_and_A, there to visit its show on Epic Iran with - who else? - @aa51_ansari
5,000 years old, & eerie as hell: the cap with ibex horns & the wings of the bird of prey draped over his shoulders hint at a being who is himself part animal & bird #EpicIran
Three absolute babes from mid-2nd century BC Susa #EpicIran
Thank you! After the demoralising match I had on Tuesday, this is the kind of reassurance that really gives me a filip, and makes me think that perhaps I shouldn't retire after all.
A lovely man stops me in the street, reminds me that @Hoggy602 was, after all, a Test bowler, & reassures me that I do look very good in whites.
Have now definitely decided not to retire.
It is absolutely true, and should the lovely man on the bicycle who stopped me outside the British Museum read this, I very much hope that he will confirm it.
“The dull, oxidised gray of slaughtered meat left out too long.”
Shalom Auslander’s description of the Hudson River in Mother For Dinner, his novel about the once proud & thriving ethnic group, Cannibal-Americans
“The Judaic concept of an Asshole God fit his generally negative view of the universe.” #MotherForDinner
I finish Mother For Dinner, definitely the best novel about a family of cannibals in Brooklyn I’ve ever read. In fact, I can best praise it as almost on a par with Hope, Auslander’s sensationally bad taste novel about a New Englander finding Anne Frank in his attic.