Well that was really fun

Both of you who read this blog, you know the haps in broad outline. The last two weeks of the course were a true challenge on a whole lot of levels. I'm typing this in the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras, waiting here instead of having taken a later bus from Oxford becaus, well, you don't want to leave a damned thing to chance or traffic or any of the nine million minor f-ups that could occur and will occur if you count on people to do the right thing. Alex is temporarily engrossed in his iPod, and I should be marking papes, but I wanted to at least get a placeholder up before embarking for the European finish of this tour.

All the halflings checked out of college, and there were only a few little curveballs in the process. Nothing like the stuff that started two weeks ago as I started hearing about mutinous rumblings and then had a horrendous encounter with modern-era Mean Boy Syndrome, lots of wishing I could go back in time and clarify my expectations and accommodate he un-satisfiable, all in all a strange and sad revisitation of high school or middle school, tapping into all that old geeky stuff as you realize people are smiling to your face and stabbing you behind your back.

I am pretty confident I made a good save of the last week of the course, with a hastily but competently written explanation / exhortation of my methods and my concerns. No one really fessed up to being part of the Complaining Group (according to a mole there was a petition being readied about my running of the academic side of the course (discussion / papers at end rather than lecture-and-quiz) and the lack of organized activities (expecting them to take charge of sightseeing and college visits according to their own interests rather than follow-the-umbrella tours). The fact that the previous syllabus (such as it was) was still posted made it clear that my rendition fo the course would be different, but it provided a template for complaints. One student went to me--and to this day I do not know confidently whether she overdramatized the unrest, or whether she was the true mole who rescued the program by her courageous ratting out of her fellows. In the event: had three or four sleepless nights and complete bunker mentality before I could put this horrific episode behind me. I will try to put this into words another time.

Meanwhile, we're off to Paris, Alex and I are, to join up and send a couple of nights there before heading to see the bro and family.... More soon, as you-know-who is pissing and moaning about how much he has to wait....

London, and Family

Bit of break from the Peregrination Channel, but will try to post a few pics and paragraphs to get caught up before it gets too late. Thursday we did the London extravaganza, a little differently from the way the GT went at things--I did schedule a boat ride because that was so successful in Paris, there were some rumblings about the trip because so much time was spent in transit and going down to Greenwich. I have to say it's always a trade-off: do I give people lots of time off to manage on their own, or do I schedule events and group outings for the people who can't or won't schedule them themselves. In the end I ended up doing a weird hybrid thing where I took several events in the original inherited schedule that might have been lock-step group things, and made them into schedule-it-yourself parts of the London trip: a fixed amount to cover their own transport down, the boat pass, and a Harry Potter VII ticket. If some of them figured out cheaper ways to do various items, then more power to them.

We did luck out with the weather, and I actually had a decent time with the kids--and only a pair of them made it late-ish to the 11 AM rendezvous at Westminster Pier for the boat. I should point out that this student is one of the smartest in the class, and I totally forgive her for checking on her iPad in front of the Houses of Parliament.


The family time began with a certain amount of drama, as I discovered when I called the hotel that they had overbooked for the first night, and overflowed us into what on paper was an upgrade a few blocks away but was in fact a ghastly Ibis across the street from the Earls Court Exhibit Hall, sort of London's answer to the Moscone Center. Yikes. But with no way to warn Amelie, who was going to the original hotel after Tube-ing in from Heathrow after a layover night in New York. This meant schleppage for them and a frisson of frustration for me, compounded when we found that the breakfast that had been included in the original hotel was an extra £9.50 in the new, but we were welcome to walk back over between 7:30 and 9 and get our oh so delicious not quite British second B of the B & B. Rather than create a big stink we went with it OK, and it all turned out satisfactorily. By the time I arrived Alex was zonko and Ams was off foraging for cell phone SIM cards. Ams got to visit her old haunts in Holland Park, we had a nice but expensive dinner for which we were woefully underdressed, and got a decent night's sleep.

Next day after transferring to the other older hotel (typical warren--and the bathroom has the most spectacular plaster stalactite ceiling, with drips adorning the soap dispenser) and dumping bags we did our own Greenwich excursion, this time with more museum-ing along with an hour in a cafe by me marking blue books, and then it was back up the river to the London Eye.

London was absolutely jammed, as we were joining what seemed like hundreds of thousands of tourists who also thought the Elgin Marbles and other attractions were a good idea (it was compounded by the rain on our British Museum day--felt like the Vatican, but the guards were less pushy). In previous visits I had not bothered to drop £18 and wait in line, but the Eye was kind of cool, I have to say. Maybe not £18 cool, but I wasn't that disappointed in the end. In amongst spending money on touristic stuff we had some jet lag or blood sugar or teen angst, but overall no major meltdowns. I am vaguely concerned about how obsessive I have to be on these gigs, and worry about whether I am neglecting my family, but so far we are managing all right. I'm sure in two weeks when it is all over it will seem worth it.

Now I just have to survive tomorrow--the bus trip to Bath and Salisbury and Stonehenge, sure to provoke vomit noises from the cognoscenti. I have a set of papers to mark, and have to compose an e-mail firming up the schedule of due dates; this week we have been bumped from the classroom we had the first two weeks, and I ended up in a side-by-side seminar room with 20 chairs and 30 people, plus A & A arriving late. But we squished and things worked out. A lot of this is about Keeping A Positive Attitude so the kids thmeselves don't get psyched or skittish...

Peregrinator Slept Here

Haven't felt compulsive enough about blogging, especially because the Obsessometer was in the red zone from my sprint through the first batch of papers to mark. This group is amazing in that more than half of them have read ten times more of this literature than I have, yet they ALL have much to learn about analysis, coherence, writing style, etc. Absolutely bizarre to be so ill-read compared to my students. Food for another blog post, yes indeed.

Sunday as a break from marking I did a nostalgic loop walk past every place I'd lived while at Ox, starting from the University College Annexe at 25 Staverton Road in North Oxford, where the Pomona program spent its September before the Oxford students returned. That was an odd little scene, as the 1 of us got to know each other and met our tutors, and cooked in super-cramped quarters but enjoyed unseasonably warm fall weather.

Then it was off to 21 Leckford Road a few blocks away, where I was placed with a ghastly Danish-English couple who rented rooms and browbeat their kids--the other participant and I protested their portions and attitude so much we got out of eating with the family in the basement (I'm not kidding), and cooked on our own in the tiny dingy galley kitchen upstairs. These people definitely were hateful and mean-minded. Old codger named Yorick lived upstairs, along with a young Nigerian student who every weekend would be spirited off to London to sing in clubs--her name was Falushade but eventually her nom de stage was shortened to the last two syllables...

Then it was up to Bardwell Road, out of chronological order, where Bob J and I spent our second year after Oriel made its graduate students leave the nest. We'd met the eccentric landlady through a couple of girls from Pomona, and convinced her that we could successfully rehabilitate her garret in return for a slight reduction in rent. Must to her disbelief, my housepainting skills proved more than equal to the task (and far better than guys she had hired in other parts of the house, and my window at the top left of the house still appears lived in.

Then it was back into town and a couple of streets from the Oriel main entrance, where the college had a graduate housing annex in 4 Alfred Street. My room was on the ground floor, a few doors from The Bear pub, a few beer glasses from which launched through that window--how fitting to have the garbage bag garnish in this picture. We ate most of our meals in hall, but there was a (dark) kitchen where I taught Bob how to make bread and pancakes, and during the reading-intensive vacation we spent there, it became something of a social center for a couple of other graduate students who were similarly under the gun

That just about covers the places I actually lived. I probably spent a few nights in other places (a couple of B & B's and couple of sleepovers, heh-heh) but this was pretty much it. Odd to feel the ghosts coming back from 30-33 years back, forcing me to reflect on how different a person I was then, but in some ways how much that period shaped the rest of my life to come.

Here's a plaque almost covered in leaves in Park Town, the back of which was part of our lovely view from the Road garret-kitchen.


And now, to bed. Tomorrow's discussion is on Harry Potter, and then on Thursday we head to London for a boat ride to Greenwich, some sightseeing, and for some, a midnight showing of the last of the HP movies. For me though it will be a much awaited reunion with wife and son! And I won't even have papers to mark.