Ode to Oxford

When they weigh my heart, they will find in it a spired city of books.

A friend once teased me that wherever I lived I thought it the best place in the world.

We worked together and I often banged on at him about the amazing places I had lived in London. Wapping, with its potted histories of pirates, riverside hangings and sunken jetties. Rotherhithe’s foreshore, peppered with ancient beads, coins and clay pipes. West Norwood too, where I wanted to know everything about the hidden River Effra, the old Great North Woods and the brooding cemetery on my doorstep.

Writers mythologise our internal narratives: that’s what we do. We mythologise wherever we happen to be and whomever we happen to be there with.

I know I’ve done this everywhere. I also know I was wrong about everywhere but Oxford.

Marvellous as all those places were, nowhere tops Oxford.

It’s a funny thing: there’s a long tradition of having to pretend to be bored and unimpressed with the majesty of Oxford when you’re a student. Being awestruck is for the tourists, not for those who hurry unseeing to the library. We must keep shtum, not talk about how amazing it is to eat at high table or how endless are the corridors of journals in the Bodleian. For heaven’s sake, be cool. Take it in your stride.

Well, I’m not cool and never have been. I think Oxford is magic and I’m happy to share it. We’re not in the Middle Ages; I’m not some elite monk trying to keep literacy all to myself.

To Oxford: the city of books.

Oxford’s books live mostly in its libraries—and Oxford’s libraries hold every book ever written. Obviously this needs to be hedged about with caveats: “published in the UK only” and “since the 1660s”.

But you get the idea.

All the books that have ever been: all the books of the dead.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in the libraries of Oxford this year. They come in all shapes and flavours: modern, ancient, light-filled; tomb-like, airy, dense. Social Sciences. History. Ornithology.

Law, where the marginalia are older than American democracy (and just as incomprehensible).