Since my last posting we have been on our travels with trips to Oxford and to London. Our past few visits to Oxford have been during university vacations and we have been able to stay in one of the colleges. This isn’t necessarily a budget option but it does place you in the heart of the city and gives you an experience of what makes the place unique. It is great to have access to the ancient buildings, to look out onto a well trimmed quad (as in the photograph of Jesus College taken earlier this year) and to have breakfast in the grand surroundings of a college dining room. On this visit, however, we were obliged to stay in a fairly grotty Travelodge but we did get to experience the bustle of the city in term time.
On the trip to London we were carrying a large bass guitar for our son as well as our luggage so we decided to take taxi. However, our arrival coincided with a student demonstration against increased university fees. We didn’t actually see any demonstrators but our taxi kept coming up against road closures. The driver did his best to get us through and, with his crazy driving style, to impersonate scenes in The Italian Job. We ran up a bill of £30 only to end up one tube stop away from where we started. We ended up on the underground after all while the taxi driver made his way home to Essex.
Having met a cockney geezer taxi driver, the following day we had an encounter with some other interesting characters. A group of teenage girls boarded the bus we were traveling on towards Clapham and it became clear very quickly that they were on the way home from a shoplifting spree on the King’s Road in Chelsea. They didn’t care who overheard them as they discussed their techniques for distracting shop staff and negotiated the sale of their loot on mobile phones; the whole thing was both fascinating and appalling.
As a footnote, when they left the bus they were followed by a policeman.
No comments:
Post a Comment