About 9 PM Friday, 1st of July I'm starting this while bouncing along on the X90 bus from London's Marble Arch to Oxford. I'm chagrined that I'm later than usual both starting the re-bloggification getting into my digs for the next month: I was too casual about my Eurostar booking in Brussels that I--gasp--missed my train and had to take the next one, almost three hours later. No harm no foul, though: I made decent use of the time by going ahead and sweating out the line to get the end-of-July tickets for Am & Alex going to Paris, as well as started yet another list of topics for my upcoming course.
The time in Belgium this year was less exotic (no biking in the Ardennes, because the weather was not nearly as good as it was last June), but still very enjoyable: we seized the good weather windows and did a perfectly mixed urban-and-rural 40 miles that had me wondering just where else in the world you could blast along on a road bike for several miles through a forested park, make a couple of deft chicanes through ring-road traffic into a suburb, pass a chateau and its grounds, and very quickly end up in utterly bucolic scenes with happy cows, country churches, and of course rural-cryptic signage. We were off the detailed city map and onto a 1:200,000 Michelin sheet, which of course meant lots of guesswork, with some truly improbable moves that panned out, and a minimum of back-tracking.
It's a testimony to how vacation-like it felt that I didn't have my game face on nearly as much while I was there, to the point where halfway to the Gare du Midi I had a panicky moment of "did I bring my passport case?" which prompted a quick stop and check of the backpack in the trunk (I had brought it). It is so strange to be contemplating another month of herding ducklings, although this year will not be quite the same as the past two: staying in one place and doing day trips should not be as stressful as shepherding the little ones through Eurostar and metro and gares and buses and night trains. That's not to say I haven't had my share of sit-up-bolt-upright moments in the months since I got the news I would be filling in on this Oxford course.
Revisiting Oxford brings a flood of emotions, some good some bad: it's a town and state-of-mind where I spent two and a half years of my life, perhaps some of the most intense intellectual and emotional work I have ever done. I was right at the beginning of my adult life then, girding myself for a long-distance relationship that I knew would be tumultuous, knowing that I was academically arrogant in some ways and painfully naïve at the same time. I think back on that time and I laugh at academics who embody the Aging Masters' Athlete Syndrome of "The older we get, the better we used to be": at 22 I was so clueless about soooo many things! I had this idealistic notion of what studying at Oxford would be like, thinking it would be a crucible unlike any other.
I really hadn't done much research on the place before I went in 1978 as a participant in Pomona's semester-at-Oxford program, and I had only a vague idea of what the place would be like. I'd spent two months InterRailing around Europe, half with what was increasingly obviously my ex-girlfriend, and half on my own; in the middle there was a wonderful interlude in Florence with my mom and dad who were visiting relatives, and also a few days in the South of France with my brother, who was just beginning his expatriate life as a cellist based in Brussels but doing these ridiculously all-consuming festivals / music camps that I would later spend four different summers helping out with.
It was a very different Europe then: I had no Visa card, I had travelers' cheques, and each country visited meant another round of currency conversions. Sure the cost of travel was a lot lower then, but I was ridiculously underfunded: I schlepped around a tent and stove and sleeping bag, and stayed at campings or slept on the train--or in dark corners of city parks a few times, getting up at 5 AM to avoid being rousted, and considering any prepared food as an unjustifiable extravagance. When we didn't camp it was youth hostel time, or the cheapest bed and breakfast, and I think I saw two Shakespeare plays on a trip to Stratford, both standing room for 80 pence.
Now I am teaching a class where the students are paying an unthinkable amount of money for a single month, and it's all I can do to keep from making the calculation, how many months would I have spent living (comparatively) large with that kind of dough? My per diem isn't quite what would have sustained me for a week, but it's not far off--and my trip is not just paid for, I get a salary on top of it. I'll have a bed to stay in every night (assuming I can negotiate the contradictory directions to get to the flat and retrieve the key from the box according to the instructions I got)(this is all more opportunity for self-castigation about missing the earlier train, as I sure as heck hope I don't have to call the landlady's cell phone at 11 PM!), and I'll have 29 students depending on me to make this a memorable intellectual and personal experience.
As I've remarked to some people this spring, the teaching part is not as much of a stressor for me, but the tour-guide / camp counselor / beat cop aspects are what keep me awake at night. I'll be a father figure of sorts, and for the second fortnight I will actually be a multitasking father, as A & A join me, a potential pressure cooker that I hope I can survive better than I did in '09 (when I got hideously exhausted and sick for about 36 hours). Just as I had little idea of what I was going to be filling my days with back on my first visit, there's some of that same wide-open potentiality ahead of me now--but I'll be nailing activities down and creating the illusion of a plan even as I improvise and cover my tracks. Not knowing the capabilities of my students makes this all the more of an adventure, as does the realization that it's been six years since I last taught a literature class. I will be fighting down that impostor syndrome, knowing deep down that I have to trust myself and my teacherly Right Stuff, trusting also the magic of this place--I got off the track a bit, I know.
I did not revisit my journals from '78, though I did find one the other day from 1980 I think it was. Some of the places will have bizarre and inexplicable charges of memory for me, and I mustn't let those sentimental waves become too much of an alienating force for the students. Nonetheless, I plan to honor some of those feelings and explore their resonances in this blog, hoping to use the framework of regular writing here to produce some reflection as well as narration, in hopes of better understanding myself at what may be a late point in my career, as I revisit an important wellspring at the other end.
So I will trundle my baggage along dark streets, listen to the babble of summer-language-course students, and rejoin a set of ghosts that include my own youthful self…
OK then. Uneventfully got to this place after 11 PM, have mixed feelings, but will try to sleep now (the coffee I had with Julius at the Gare du Midi after negotiating the ticket-change must be keeping me awake, as I have unpacked and started configuring this sterile modern soulless apartment as a place I can work for a month).
This is the view out the window of the main room--yes, the sign says "Paradise Square," and the behemoth right behind it is the main car park for the Westgate Mall, Oxford's answer to DeMallition or Mallificence or perhaps Mallpractice. 
One gets a sinking feeling right after opening the door (picture me late last night, rolling my luggage along wondering what I was getting myself into). I'm not a huge devotee of feng shui, but you don't have to spend a lot of consultant bucks to know that this place is a stagnant eddy of chi, a place where chi goes to the Dark Lord for awhile: Makes ya wanna c'mon in and study fantasy literature, dunnit?
Here's the main room, minus a couple of chairs I already took out last night: Clearly whoever laid this place out should be taken out and shot. 
Now for some gourmet cooking, here's the kitchen nook--the trashcan is outside next to the dining table, which I am temporarily taking over for my desk, since the actual desk is on the other wall, is about 14" deep, and essentially unusable. Yes, those tiles are 10" squares, and yes, that is the washer-dryer next to the sink. And yeah, the hinges of the fridge are on the right, so if you're in the kitchen and want to open the door, you have to step into the main room. Convenient!
I think it's kind of funny that my predecessor who found this thing believed the advert that said it was 2-bedroom--her teenage son was going to be with her, along with her husband, but he'd have had a little trouble with this room. Cozy! Lucky for us A & A will be here for only about ten nights, if I calculate correctly, and if I can find some B & B in the Cotswolds to bail out to for a night, maybe I will do that to reduce the time here even further!
As you see, the master bedroom has a wee bit more floor space (two feet) but by the way, just beyond both of the bedroom windows is the main entrance to the block of eight flats: every time someone leaves in the morning, the wall shakes. Nice. So far, the weather has been cooperative (not so blazingly hot that one absolutely has to have the windows open (the ones that do open, open about 15 degrees of the 90, which is I suppose better than nothing, and at least some of them are up far enough off of street level that I don't feel insecure leaving them open). 