Hostility born out of a lack of holisticity.

 The 3rd destination on our summer road trip saw my best mate and I venture down south to the city of Oxford. After the successful experience of both Sheffield and Nottingham, we arrived skeptical, owing to Oxford’s pompous reputation in comparison. However, we do our best to be openminded…, Oh what fools we were. 

Oxford is a city sheltered by its own tariffed colleges and turned up noses. We step off the bus from ‘Summertown’ where we’re staying, and are immediately presented with leisurely cyclists and slow moving families, both lacking in any sort of spacial awareness. Needless to say by this point I was feeling distinctly un-summery. It had taken only a short amble down the highstreet on the afternoon that we’d arrived, to expose the crowds of yummy mummies popping into M&S before clambering back into their oversized 7 seaters. In Oxford city itself, large ornate buildings surround us, and they in turn are surrounded by hordes of guided tourists. As we slip past a group outside the Blenheim library (we being the ones to step off the pavement into the road, of course) we dawdle to try and catch a nugget of historical explanation. Instead, I catch the murmurings of a Harry Potter factoid and immediately decide I’m not interested enough to actually pay for one of these overpriced walks around the city. 

Suckers. 

However, very quickly I realise that maybe we’re the idiots, as it turns out that if you’re unwilling to pay to sit on a patch of grass enclosed by 9th century buildings every five minutes (which, I have no shame at all in admitting), there is very little else to do in Oxford. The roads are awash with students burning rubber in their thousands to try and avoid burning through cash quicker than you can say ‘cycling capital of the UK’. It is a city rich with history and architecture, but painfully absent of any holisticity and class consciousness. 

Perhaps from a Northern perspective, or perhaps just from a decent human being’s perspective, it’s even worse than London. At least there, the rushing is understandable; the capitalist cronies hustling through Canary Wharf or down doughty street obviously have somewhere to be that’s more important than stopping to thank someone for holding a door open. But here, in Oxford, people’s entitlement seems to compromise their eyesight, and any sort of consideration for other people around them seems impossible. 

We are reduced to playing a game of ‘Only In Oxford’ in order to articulate our disbelief to one another about the sheer rudeness of the city’s inhabitants. Only in Oxford is nothing open on a Monday, and if it is, it closes at 4. Oh but it won’t say that online, so that you find yourself faced with disappointment as you peer through the shop window of a dark, lifeless vintage store at 4:15 in the afternoon. Or, only in Oxford can you stand for 5 minutes  in a charity shop waiting to pay for a book while the till clerk scans through no less than 20 odd books and completely ignores your existence. Even oxford’s Oxfams offered no consolation to the misplaced righteousness of the city. 

Amidst the 9th century edifices, I felt catapulted into the past, unable to escape from within the gated college walls poised menacingly at every turn. Much unlike Newcastle’s Grey Street, apparently the most beautiful curved street in the UK, Oxford’s streets were some of the straightest roads, both sexually and architecturally that we’d ever trudged down. Even the ‘Bridge of Sighs’ seemed to obnoxiously cast into shadow our own forlorn sighs at the city’s disheartening and exclusivist pretence. 

It was not until we were walking back from the pub on our final night here (thank god) that it dawned on us, the only people who’d been nice to us had been ones we’d given money to. This rather embittered the slightly faith-restoring conversation we’d had with the bartender whilst paying our bill. Still, we may be the wrong class, but that won’t stop us draining a few glasses and making the best of it. Notts Oxford is not, but I’m sure we’ll have a whale of a time in Wales, our next stop.