17 October 2005
In love... with Oxford
I am in love with Oxford. What a lovely lovely city. I want to move in RIGHT NOW! I had the day off today, so the boy and I decided to do a day trip - we hopped on a train at Paddington and off we trundled.
It was a lovely day for it - started off grey, but then the sun came out and it was lovely and cool but sunny. We signed ourselves up for a walking tour at the Tourist Information Centre, which turned out to be a marvellous thing. Our guide took us into St John's College, on to Jesus College and then got us into Exeter College to see the William Morris/Edward Burne-Jones tapestry in the chapel.
After the tour, we had huge coffees (never seen a cup so big - and that was only the medium size!) in Waterstone's bookshop and wandered down past Christchurch to the Isis River. There was a path leading up the river bank, so we found our way onto it and went for a stroll among the geese, then across Christchurch Meadow - admiring the cows - to the college and back up to town.
They have a nice selection of shops around but my absolute absolute favourite - the one I would make a special trip for - is the Blackwell's music-specialist bookshops. CDs and music magazines (Gramophone, The Musical Times, etc. - quality stuff!) on the ground floor; books, scores, a marvellous assortment of manuscript paper, and musical gifty things (musical dominoes!) on the 1st floor, and then sheet music on the top floor. Bliss! I was really quite restrained - I'm proud of myself - because I only came away with a manuscript book (which has nice small staves which should suit my anorexic notation well) and a copy of The Musical Times which tempted me with articles on Shostakovich and dissidence; 'Stanford and the gods of modern music' and 'The challenges of plurality within contemporary composition'. But I could have spent a vast deal more money there... and no doubt will in the future. Hopefully these purchases are symbolic of a good start to getting back into composition. It would be foolish to waste the opportunities here - especially as I should now be eligible to submit scores for calls and competitions for UK residents...
Guess I'd better shut up now and go and do something useful!
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