The Most Gargoylish Friday Ever

In my manic final days in Oxford I raced around trying to do all the things I'd never found time for in the previous 10 months. I bought a pair of brown brogues at Ducker's on the Turl. I read a book in the Radcliffe Camera, the circular, light-filled reading room that is one of the Bodleian Library's signature elements. And I climbed to the top of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin. This is the church:



This is the steeple:


Open the doors and see all the...gargoyles:








Finally, here's my favorite shot:


I wonder: Does that pigeon dream of being a gargoyle? Or does that gargoyle dream of being a pigeon?

And Finally...
I'm slowly lowering my body into the sitz bath that is The Washington Post. Alice Reid, my colleague (and Oxford alum; who knew?), is ably handling this summer's Send a Kid to Camp campaign. That's The Post's annual fund drive for Camp Moss Hollow, a summer camp for underprivileged children. I hope you'll consider making a donation to this worthy cause.

And if you're in the D.C. area, help me out: My columns don't write themselves, you know, so if you have any ideas for when I start columnizing later this summer, drop me a line: kellyj[at]washpost.com. I'm especially interested in questions for Answer Man.

Thanks, and have a great weekend. I think I'll be mowing the lawn again.

Signs o' the Times

Clearing out some of my iPhoto catalogue I came across a few typically English shots. This sign was tacked to a door at Green College:



There are two things going on here. The first is the expression "on the latch," a veddy British expression which means to leave a door so it doesn't lock. I don't think we have that phrase in the U.S. The great U.K. pop band Squeeze includes the line in its song "If I Didn't Love You":
Taking a bite on a biscuit
The record jumps on a scratch
Tonight it's love by the fire
The door of your love's on the latch

Then there's the sign's final authoritarian note: "It is in your interest." I love that.

And I loved this sign at a butcher's in Oxford's Covered Market:


"Hand raised" pork pies. I can just see the little baby pork pies, no bigger then a biscuit, being hand-fed from a bottle of warm gravy. If only they were free-range, hand-raised pork pies, gamboling about the kitchen.

Amber (Well, Greenish) Waves of Grain

In the end, it was the most painfree trip we'd taken during our year abroad. No Heathrow Terminal 5 luggage roulette, like with Rome. No cattle-call RyanAir boarding hell, like with Dublin. No last-minute snag with the dog's crate, like when we'd moved to England in the first place. To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing became Oxford like our leaving of it.

We'd been fretting over our luggage--two checked cases each, stuffed to bursting, weighed with a borrowed scale--but each was under the limit. If you were standing near the British Air baggage check-in yesterday morning and saw a family of four high-fiving each other after each suit case was hefted onto the scale, that was us. The flight was a bit bumpy but BA provides a nice U.S. re-entry service: just watch "Semi-Pro" and "The Simpsons" on the little video screen and you're re-acclimated to the States.

Our driver was waiting for us at Dulles. I don't think I'll ever get over the thrill of seeing my name in Magic-Marker on a clipboard. "Why yes, I'm John Kelly." Then to BA cargo where, after 14 hours in his crate, Charlie the dog was set free, no worse for wear. He seemed to take special pleasure in that first long pee on American soil.

We climbed back into the van and proceeded to...wait in a traffic jam. That's when I truly knew we were back in Washington, a place where any trip can take anywhere from 20 minutes to four hours. But I wasn't in any hurry. It was costing me the same no matter how long the ride. And I felt no sympathy for the driver, who said he had to pick up another customer in Gaithersburg at 4 p.m. Let's see, our plane was scheduled to land at 1:30, we had to clear Customs and pick up a dog, then drive around the Beltway to Silver Spring? And he thought he could get to Gaithersburg by 4? The fool!

In the end, we arrived home at 3:59 and I wished the driver luck with his ion propulsion-drive system.

After 10 months on Osberton Road our Amurican house seemed huge. Huge but welcoming. Our tenants, Gordon and Leslie, had left it in just as good shape as we'd left our Oxford house. The only glitch was that the lawn service we'd contacted hadn't mowed since Gordon and Leslie moved out a month ago. The front yard was a wonderful ocean of grass, like something from the prairie.


I don't even know where to start with cutting it. I think I may need a scythe. Or some sheep.

The Sun Shines on Oxford

Charlie's walk, the final ritual that I've done every morning for the last 10 months. The streets are bit different at 4 a.m. A man I recognize as a homeless Big Issue seller from St. Giles bicycles past on the Woodstock Road, followed 20 yards behind by his dog, trotting to keep up. Perhaps they do this every morning.

Charlie and I walk around the basketball courts near the radio station, go past the playground then turn at the grass tennis courts to make our daily loop. A top window is open in the old folks' home, as it always is. I've heard that the lady inside throws meat to the foxes. I've never seen anyone at the window and I don't this morning.

Behind the tennis courts and behind the back gardens of Osberton Road. The bell in the chapel tower of St. Edwards School chimes 4:30. Charlie and I turn east through the tennis court parking lot. And there, over the chimney pots of North Oxford, is something I haven't seen in my 10 months here: a sunrise. Partly-cloudy ones are the best, the sun painting the grayish clouds in hues of bright pink and tangerine.

I've forgotten my camera this morning, so I can't take a picture. But you can't capture a sunrise in a photograph. You can't capture a city in a blog, either. Thanks for watching me try. The next sunrise I see will be in Washington. I promise to blog there, too, and I hope you'll join me.

Friday Grab Bag: Last Days of Saigon Edition

Ever tried to put 50 pounds of, um, anything in a 20-pound bag? Then you know exactly how our packing is going for our imminent return to the States. We brought too much with us when we came here 10 months ago. We bought a bunch of stuff while we were here. British Air reduced the weight of luggage passengers may bring. And now we're trying to pack.

We're in a triage situation. If it's an article of clothing that hasn't been worn in the last year why should we ship it back? In the giveaway pile it goes. Then there's the fashion eugenics: Tiny hole in a sock or a pair of underwear? Sorry. Your services are no longer needed. Such is the decision made between who will live and who will die.

We're resigned to mailing a few suitcases back but we're also calculating whether it would be cheaper to ship it or buy it new in the U.S. Oh, and we also have to clean the house for the final inspection.

So, grim, panicky hours around here. The Viet Cong are at the door. The chopper's on the roof. The clock is ticking....

BritNews RoundUp
Just some quickies (and, oddly, none from the Daily Mail): The Cerne Abbas Giant, an ancient monument carved in the chalk of a Dorset hill, is in danger of being obscured by vegetation. The problem: Not enough sheep are grazing away the weeds to reveal the white outline of the priapic fellow. Maybe they could get Viagra to sponsor a few sheep.

The BBC says it's not dumbing itself down, even though it bought the rights for a UK version of a popular Japanese game show that pits contestants against each other in madcap exploits. Writes the Telegraph: "BBC executives are said to have been particularly excited by a segment of the show known as 'human tetris.' A celebrity contestant is required to contort himself to fit through a shape cut out of a moving wall while dressed in a tight silver jumpsuit. If he fails to pass through it, he is knocked into a pool of water." (Check out the link with the Telegraph story. Looks like fun.)

A BBC spokeswoman said: "We are obliged to have something for everyone. Some people accuse us of being too highbrow."

Speaking of the BBC, a police helicopter in Cardiff gave chase to an unidentified flying object after nearly colliding with the UFO near a military base. "They are convinced it was a UFO," said a South Wales police spokesman. "It sounds far-fetched, but they know what they saw." What's this have to do with the BBC? Well Cardiff is where the sci-fi shows "Dr. Who" and "Torchwood" are filmed. Surely this can be incorporated into upcoming episodes.

Oh wait, we do have an entry from the Daily Mail: You can slice cheese with Keira Knightley's collarbones. And that's not good.

Gargoyle of the Week
St. Michael's Church in Ballinasloe, Ireland, is made of the gray limestone that runs through that part of Eire like the bones under Keira Knightley's skin:

The church features some particularly muscular gargoyles:


At least I'm not trying to pack a gargoyle, though it seems like we have to squeeze just about everything else into our suitcases. So, back to that. I'll try to pop in over the next few days, before we take a jumbo across the water, but if I can't, thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

Saying Goodbye

Woke early and tossed in bed. It's hard not to wake early these days, as the sun rises around 4:30 a.m. and doesn't wink out totally until going on 11. And it's hard not to toss in bed. My time in Oxford swirls around the drain and I have so many things to do before we leave: sell excess possessions (bicycles, printer, digital keyboard; make me an offer), arrange car rental, pack up, clean the house. Oh, and give my final presentation (today at noon at the Reuters Institute; feel free to come).

I used to think I was good at the mental part of moving, a legacy of moving every three years or so as a kid. And yet this upcoming move promises to be the most disjointing. As I get older I feel less in control of my thoughts, the first steps toward my eventual dementia, no doubt. And so about three weeks ago the visions of Washington started. Oddly, it was mostly images of commuting that crowded my brain: I-66 backed up near the Beltway, Georgia Avenue in the broiling sun, the great trade route of Rockville Pike, clogged arteries all around the city slipping unbidden into my consciousness. Perhaps my subconscious was preparing me for the change from carefree bicycle rider to embittered driver. Whatever it was, the message was clear: You're leaving.

Moving is a kind of death. As I walk (and bike) around Oxford these days I think, "This is the last time I'll see that pub/garden/building/person." They will vanish for me as surely as if someone had dropped an atom bomb on the Sheldonian. The fact that they'll still be here for others is scant comfort. Then there are the things I haven't seen and done. And isn't that why we despise death, because it fills us with regret at what we could have done but didn't?

I've a few more days, anyway. Blogging may be a little sporadic as I wrap myself in a chrysalis, preparing to re-emerge next week in the hot D.C. sunshine.

Fresh Eire


Quick impressions of Ireland: breathtaking around the edges, kinda boring in the middle. New houses everywhere. Not many Irish people there (at least in service jobs). That accent is a hoot. More expensive even than England, if such a thing is possible. Hurling may be the strangest sport ever played.

My "people" left there. I've no idea why or from where, but I can see that if your ambitions went beyond a tiny island you'd be curious about life over the horizon.

Beer, Glorious Beer: Touring Hook Norton

"Do not put your hands in any tubs of liquid," said Nick, our guide, as we entered the Hook Norton Brewery last week. Sensible advice anywhere, really. Putting your hands in strange tubs of liquid is a good way to lose your hand. It's also a way to get you kicked off a brewery tour. And since the whole point of a brewery tour is to get to the end of it so you can sample the beer you've just seen being made, that would be a Bad Thing.

My Lovely Wife and I toured the brewery the day after we toured the Mini factory. The effect was, quite literally, like going from the 21st century to the 19th century. If the Mini factory is all robots and laser beams, the Hook Norton Brewery is all bags of malt and tubs of liquid. Oh, there's also a steam engine: a 25-horsepower number believed to be the only one still in use for its original purpose, that original purpose being moving things--mainly water--around the brewery, since you don't really need a steam engine to make beer.



The steam engine has a seven-foot flywheel and its original 109-year-old drive belt. I don't know where you'd go if you needed a new belt. It would probably have to be custom woven from sheep intestines, kapok and gutta percha.

There were 11 of us on the tour and that was about twice as many as we actually saw working in the brewery. Occasionally as we climbed a narrow staircase or pitched up on a landing there'd be a casually-uniformed employee. A scientific-looking woman in a white lab coat was visible behind glass in one office, an array of test tubes in front of her. But otherwise, the place was almost deserted, imbued with the languid feeling you get after your third pint on a rainy day.

For a rainy day it was, absolutely pissing down. We'd taken two buses from Oxford, the first a double-decker to Chipping Norton, the second a tinier coach to Hook Norton that the driver piloted as if it were a Zodiac inflatable full of commandoes. He plowed through the narrow, twisting, flooded roads, pedal to the metal, spraying great rooster tales of foam behind us. By the time we alighted, trembling, in Hook Norton I needed a beer.

The brewery building itself looks Dickensian, and I suppose it is. They've been brewing beer in Hook Norton since 1849 and the Victorian tower brewery looked like a workhouse or asylum, steam curling up from various chimneys:
It reminded us of the building in the Japanese anime film "Spirited Away," a living, breathing thing. Inside was the best technology the Victorians had to offer: copper vats and toothed gears, sprockets and cogs and belts. It was like being inside a massive pocket watch.





Some of the cogs--as big around as dustbin lids--had wooden teeth. You never want metal against metal, Nick explained, since if the cogs seize up it's a horror to get them unstuck. If one cog has wooden teeth you can just knock them out with a hammer, pull the assembly apart and replace them. I don't know what this guy is doing, probably putting goose fat on the gudgeon ring or something:

I don't understand the chemistry of brewing beer. I have a better grasp on the consumer end of things. I believe the process involves water--called "brewer's liquor"--which at Hook Norton is pumped up from an underground well. Malt--which is roasted barley (who knew?)--is added. Hops do something important. Yeast helps things ferment. We couldn't go into the fermenting room--a stray bacterium can ruin the whole process, evidently--but Nick opened the door and swung it back and forth to waft the odors to us as we crowded outside.

"Oooh, that's lovely, that," said an older woman. "You're in the pub."

The process from start to finish at Hook Norton takes 11 days, or about as long as it takes to make 9,000 Minis.

Back in the little tasting room in the brewery's museum Nick pulled us half-pints of the various Hook Norton offerings: the malty Hooky Dark, the golden Hooky Bitter.... He opened a bottle of Cotswold Lion, a seasonal beer that tasted faintly of citrus. They were all very nice but I confess I'm partial to the beer I order whenever I'm down the pub: Old Hooky. "Beautifully balanced with a well-rounded body," is how it's described.

Like beer, like beer drinker, I say.


Can't make it to Hook Norton? Try a virtual tour instead.

Factory Fresh: Touring the Mini Plant

I suppose it makes sense that if people want to act like robots, robots might want to act like people. After all, robots are built by people, to do the things that people do, but to do them more precisely, uncomplainingly, and without ever tiring.

That's one of the conclusions I came to after touring the factory where they make the Mini. The human workforce is impressive, of course--some 4,700 "associates" work at the plant in Cowley, south Oxford--but it's the robots that prompt existential thoughts. They seem alive.

The original Mini was born in 1959 and it's been built in Cowley ever since. The iconic design--a low, wide stance that calls to mind a smiling, pop-eyed bulldog--made it the automotive symbol of Swinging '60s Britain, owned by celebrities and immortalized in such films as "The Italian Job." The Mini was never the success in the U.S. that it was in Britain, Americans seeming to prefer the similarly idiosyncratic VW Beetle. There are still plenty on the road here, though, and it's a shock to be reminded how small they are. The "new" Mini--itself a wisp compared to typical Detroit metal--dwarfs the old one.

We own a Mini and thus we had to visit the birthplace of all Minis--at least the ones made since BMW took over the factory in 2001. It's to the Germans that we owe the current Mini gestalt. Mini advertising, Mini showrooms, official Mini souvenirs--all of it is impeccably art directed, right down to the factory itself, the entrance to which features the reversed sans serif lettering of the print ads:

The production area covers 45 hectares, or about 110 acres. It sounds like a lot till you realize that's half as big as it was in the days the old Mini was built there. That's progress for you: the ability to do more with less. Advances in technology means bigger cars can be churned out in a smaller space. And for that we must thank the robots.

Body panels and sub-assemblies come from a plant in Swindon, about 30 miles away. The engines are made in Hams Hall, near Birmingham. It all comes together in Oxford, starting in the "body-in-white" building. When I was there, workers were moving around pallets of panels--"LH Sill Inner Assy," was stenciled on one. Others were feeding the panels to the robots, which would grab them as easily as you or I lift a cafeteria tray. The production line inched along, orange robot arms applying spot welds in a shower of sparks. The robots moved with purpose but also with a kind of grace, never deviating from their programmed path. Some robots did more than one thing: A massive arm would finish a weld then swing over to near where I was standing and dip its "hand" down into a trough, shrugging off whatever tool was at the end of its appendage. It would raise up a few feet then plunge into another trough, where, with the whir of an air ratchet, a different tool would be attached, RoboCop-like.


It wasn't all robots. They're not quite dexterous enough to put the doors on. Two men positioned them with the help of a jig while another welded the hinges on. And then the body rose up into the ceiling to continue its journey.

Odd little enclosed bridges connect the buildings at Cowley. Inside, the aborning Minis trundle along like so many ants. After the bodies have been assembled it's time for painting. As with the difference between a construction worker and a portrait artist, so as between a welding robot and a painting robot. The paintshop has the quiet antisepticism of an operating theater. No percussive thuds or spark eruptions here. Even the robots look more refined, their arms swathed in red fabric, as if Christo had paid a visit:


Each little platform that the cars moved on had a barcode indicating what color the Mini was to get. The robots--their white paintheads looking like cows' udders--would squirt into a chamber to clean themselves then rise, birdlike, and dance over the body. It was altogether less frenetic in the paintshop than the bodyshop. When the robots finished spraying a car they would pull back, appearing to rest as the next Mini moved along. The painted Minis themselves looked like an assortment of gumballs:



The last stop was the assembly building, where the shiny Minis were gripped in yellow metal slings that looked like huge calipers:


The windscreen, the dashboard, the seats, the trim, the electrics, the engine--it's all inserted here. After getting their own paint the doors are re-attached. There was even a point, walking along, when I got a whiff of something familiar and wondered if there was a cylinder marked "New Car Smell" squirting in that unmistakable odor.

This seemed the most human-centric part of the process, or at least human-friendly. (It's all Mini-centric.) Two humans eased in the cockpit, standing on a wooden floor that moved along with the car. Another popped in a headlight. A black ripstop nylon bag was plopped on the floor of each Mini. It looked liked another fashionable Mini accessory--a large cosmetics bag? weekend valise?--but it contained the car's entire wiring harness, soon to be snaked through the body.

The motor, transmission and front axle rolled as one along on a conveyor built and were lifted by two orange robot arms to the waiting body above:


Then, the mating. Two workers on a platform did something--to be honest, I couldn't see what, just heard that blaaat of ratchets--and, engine installed, the car floated to its next stop. Total time to install engine: 55 seconds. I thought of the 12 hours I once spent replacing the clutch on my MGB GT, a process that required removing the engine. When it was over I was as physically spent as it's possible to be.

Not so the robots. They never tired of lifting, welding or screwing, moving with an economy of motion that was simple but balletic. When--tires on, fluids filled, fuel squirted in--it was time to start the car for the first time and drive it away, a buzzer sounded and the line stopped. It was time for the humans to eat.

Morris Dancing
It takes about 24 hours to build a Mini. They can build up to 800 a day. Every modern Mini you've seen was built in Oxford, its riot of options--body color, roof color, rims and seats--coming together on the high-tech assembly line. It's the latest incarnation of an automotive tradition that dates back to 1913, when a bicycle racer named William Morris built his first car in Oxford. Morris went on to become Lord Nuffield, remembered in Oxford for the hospitals he funded and the college he endowed.

I find it endearing that cars are built in Oxford, this city of dreaming spires and gowned undergraduates. It's as if the Chevrolet assembly line was a stone's throw from Harvard Yard. The Mini plant is open for tours, though you must book well in advance. If you're interested send an e-mail to Oxford.Plant-Tours@mini.com. Or take a virtual tour. My thanks to BMW Group Plant Oxford's Rebecca Baxter for showing My Lovely Wife and me around the factory and for the photos of the assembly process.

He Shoots, He Scores: The Brave New Web

I am happy to report that after nine months at Oxford studying citizen journalism I have decided absolutely nothing.

No, that's not entirely true. I've learned a lot and arguably even formed a few opinions. (I sketched some of them out recently in a guest post at Kyle MacRae's Frontline Club blog.) But the main impression I have is of an industry--journalism--in a state of flux that is, depending on your particular outlook and constitution, either nauseating or exhilarating. Or a bit of both.

We're making the rules up as we go along. And how else would we do it? I'm reminded of James Naismith and the game he refined over years: basketball. Here's a great video re-creation of what that process may have been like. Naismith started out with peach baskets nailed to the wall rather than string nets around stiff metal hoops. The baskets still had the bottoms on them, until someone had the idea to cut them off. (Thus depriving some poor unskilled worker of a job: the ladder-climbing basketball basket-emptier.)

I know I'm stretching the analogy past the breaking point--traveling, you might say--but journalism today
probably hasn't cut the bottoms off its digital peach baskets. ("Digital Peach Basket": the new album by Moby.) That we're still finding our way is evident in two stories in today's Guardian. Reader' editor Siobhain Butterworth writes about altering, updating and correcting the paper's stories on the web. I don't completely understand the genesis of the column--something about a freelancer wanting to add material to an already-published piece--but I buy her central argument: You can't go around "invisibly" correcting/changing web stories, even if technology allows you to do just that.

Another issue is raised in a story about newspaper-sponsored blog sites. The Daily Telegraph allows anyone to start blogging under its umbrella (even me; I did it to test the process). Some 20,000 people have signed up and the Guardian points out that a few Telegraph readers have used the forum to promote the racist British National Party. What responsibility does the newspaper have? The Telegraph's Shane Richmond stirs up plenty of debate in his blog posting on that issue.

The irony is that the Guardian's Comment Is Free section is chockablock with vituperative backbiting of a most disagreeable nature. The Guardian points out that those sorts of comments are posted by readers in reaction to sanctioned bloggers and that the remarks are moderated (as are MyTelegraph's; and both sites allow readers to report posts they find beyond the pale). I suspect the Telegraph thinks this is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.

But, see, this is us experimenting to see what works. Years from now we may look back and think it was crazy to host reader blogs, or we may wonder what all the fuss was about.

Video Killed the Internet Star
I was curious what sort of video quality my Canon compact digital camera was capable of, so I shot a couple of events this weekend. And, being the compleat digital journalist, I stuck them on YouTube. Here's some of the Summertown Street Festival (the fast-mo, slow-mo is an "arty" effect I added in iMovie):



And here's a bit of the Oxford Town & Gown 10K:




While I wouldn't want to use the camera to shoot an Indiana Jones movie, the quality's not too bad. And note that as of 9:30 this morning about a dozen people had watched each. True, that's not very many, but it's amazing that anyone watched them at all, given that I just slipped them into the great vat of YouTube content. There's probably a Long Tail point to be made here.

Stop Your Sobbing
Don't forget: "Flat Earth News's" Nick Davies, speaking in Cambridge tonight. I'll be there too.

The Oxford Lecture: It's All Greek to Me

Oxford University has no classes. Note that I didn't say that Oxford has no class. It has class out the ying-yang. (Is it declasse to say "ying-yang"?) But for the most part students don't do as I did many years ago at the University of Maryland: Follow a set curriculum that forces their butts into desks at certain times on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Instead, Oxford undergrads have tutorials. Every week they're given a list of books to read and lectures they might want to attend. And every week they meet their tutor (solo, or with another student) to go over the paper they were required to write. The lecture, or seminar, is the lifeblood of Oxford and I've been to plenty over the last few months. What I find interesting is how confrontational they're supposed to be. Not confrontational in the sense of shouted threats, flying fists and the sweaty grapplings of post-doctoral fellows, but intellectually confrontational. Every lecture, it seems, is a thesis defense.

I went to one yesterday afternoon at the European Studies Center. The Reuters Institute's Antonis Ellinas (PhD from Princeton; Fulbright scholar; expert on European nationalist politics) was giving a lecture on Greek politics and the media, specifically on an emergent far right party there. I now know 3,000 percent more about Greek politics than I did before, including about the anti-semitic, anti-immigrant LAOS party. After Antonis delivered his 30-minute lecture--sketching the Greek political system, outlining the rise and fall of earlier nationalist groups, taking us through exit-polling data--it was time for questions.

It's traditional for the chair of the lecture--the person from the department who sort of commissioned it--to ask the first question, and that's what Othon Anastasakis did. He had four or five questions, in fact, but he saved the killer one for last: Given the strong conservative sentiment in Greece was it correct to characterize LAOS as a far-right party at all?

Anastasakis had basically just introduced the possibility that the central tenet of Antonis's argument--the very foundation upon which it stood--was flawed, was non-existent, in fact. I imagined what I would do if my life's work was questioned. I saw myself leaping from my chair, running into the street, flagging down a taxi, heading to Southampton and signing on as a crewman on a cargo ship.

Antonis acquitted himself just fine, and I'm not really interested in that question or that answer. What fascinated me was how mannered the debate that followed was. And how illuminating. At these Oxford seminars the lecturer delivers something that is picked at, pulled apart, poked and prodded. The idea isn't (usually) to score points or to refute. It's to explore. By communally navigating the distance between the lecture and the questions, the lecturer and the audience reveal hidden features of the landscape.

Party Hearty
I was also struck by how easy students of American political science have it. They only have to master the machinations of two major parties: Democratic and Republican. Antonis and others who study European politics have to keep tabs on dozens of political parties, groups that rise, prosper and die like so many mayflies. It's like following professional baseball, plus all the farm teams.

German Engineering

One of the benefits of travel is that it makes you appreciate the place you came from. But another byproduct of travel is that it makes you question the place you came from. While it may be true that there's no place like home, it's also true that home can sometimes use a little improvement.

That's what I decided after spending the weekend in Berlin. Clean, efficient, cosmopolitan--the antique intermixed with the modern. A subway, trams and bicycle lanes. I think Washington could benefit from a bit of Berlin style.

It probably helped that the weather was great. All of Europe seems to be gripped in the throes of beautiful climes. Parachute anywhere from London to Gdansk and you'll find blue skies and warm temperatures. But it was more than that. I find Berlin incredibly art-directed, with an attention to style that stretches from the way its people dress to the typefaces of its street signs and posters. I suppose it might grate after a while--perfection can extract a painful price--but thinking of the room Washington has for improvement, Berlin definitely had some appeal.

I compared the shopworn and crowded Smithsonian museums to the tidy German History Museum. It was wonderfully empty, leading me to wonder if that's because the Germans already know their history, don't want to know their history, or just would rather spend a gorgeous spring day outside rather than in.

It was probably the latter. That impulse is the same wherever you come from. And after we'd returned to England and were on the coach back to Oxford, I was reminded how achingly green and beautiful this country can be. The verdant landscape rolled by outside the window looking like a ripe fruit begging to be bitten. That's what nine months of rain does. What am I doing sitting here?

Mother of an Invention
In honor of Mother's Day, The Washington Post Magazine yesterday published my story about Daisy Breaux and W. Clark Noble, a pair of wacky characters from the 1920s who attempted to build a memorial to America's mothers. The final design looked like something from Batman's fevered imagination and the whole thing ended just the way we journalists like it: in recriminations and lawsuits. I'll be answering questions about the story online today at noon Washington time; that's 5 p.m. England time. Click here to join the conversation at washingtonpost.com.

Citizen Bane
Kyle MacRae founded Scoopt, the service that pioneered putting citizen photographers together with newspapers and magazines. Now he blogs about citizen journalism for the Frontline Club. I provided a guest post last week outlining some of my thoughts on the issue. Honestly, I'm beginning to think that the whole thing is becoming less consequential to the mainstream media, not because it isn't important but because so many things are battering newspapers, for example, that they barely have the time or energy to think about it.

May Day in Oxford: Beat It

Yesterday was the first of May in Oxford. It was probably the first of May where you live, too, unless you live in North Korea or Turkmenistan, where it's probably called something like Glorious Premiere Spring Dawning of Our Great Infallible Leader.

May Day starts here with pre-pubescent choristers singing from atop the Magdalen College tower. Most Oxford students have partied the previous night and the streets are full of plastered boys in tuxes and swerving barefoot girls in cocktail dresses. The Kelly family cycled to the city center at 6 a.m. to witness the festivities. Magdalen Bridge was closed to stop the morning's other tradition: jumping off it into the river below. In past years there have been icky, Joe Theismanesque injuries caused by the unholy intersection of drunk undergrads, pitiless gravity and shallow water. No one jumped while the bridge was closed and guarded, but soon after it opened and the crowds dispersed, we saw four guys go in. Here's one:


I know that merely by posting this I am encouraging unsafe behavior. But it did look like fun, and the first guy who jumped looked incredibly suave in his soaked dinner jacket:

But then again, anything looks better when done in a tuxedo, even bicycling down the street at 7 a.m. while drinking a pint of beer:



There are much better May Day photos at Sarah Laurence's Blog.

On the Street Where We Live

To understand the cartography of North Oxford it's helpful to imagine a tuning fork. St. Giles in the center of Oxford splits into Woodstock Road and the Banbury Road to the north. Our house is between the tines of Woodstock and Banbury, in a neighborhood called Summertown. We're fortunate, though, that our street doesn't link those two arteries, and, thus, we don't have too much traffic.

But we do have some and we are often entertained from the comfort of our lounge by watching trucks try to negotiate our tiny lane. We'll be seated at the dining room table or on the couch when suddenly the sky will darken and a lorry from Argos will ease slowly by. It reminds me of a ship passing through the Panama Canal. It's a tight squeeze. You can park on both sides of our street and the space that remains is about as wide as a double bed:


That white box truck has just navigated the road. They don't all make it. Europeans know that when they parallel park they should fold in their wing mirrors, but even that won't help if the lorry is just too big. Occasionally a massive truck will turn down our street, its driver desperate to leave the warren of lanes in this part of Summertown. Hoping to find the sweet release of the Woodstock Road, he instead discovers that he just won't fit. He throws it into reverse and searches for another way out.

When we arrived here last September it was in a rented VW Transporter. It was the biggest vehicle they had at the airport and the only thing that would accommodate our ragtag traveling circus (children, suitcases, dog, dog's wooden crate, family of Latvian aerialists). With my heart in my throat, and my own wing mirrors tucked in, I carefully threaded the needle, silently cursing Volkswagen for putting three coats of paint on the van instead of two. There's nothing like going 24 hours without sleep, flying across the ocean, going through passport control, retrieving your luggage, retrieving your dog from the quarantine facility, and then driving on the wrong side of the road in a vehicle that has the steering wheel on the wrong side of the dash.

I pride myself on my driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road skills. We hire a car every few months and I can go from motorway to hedgerow-sided lane with ease. The only thing I can't do is parallel park on our street. Doing it is like trying to do a Rubik's Cube while looking in the mirror with an eyepatch on.

14 Minutes Left
I'm supposed to be on Sky News tonight around 7:30, talking about things on the web. It means going all the way to London for about 3 minutes of air time. But who was it who said one should never turn down the opportunity to be on TV? Gore Vidal? Paris Hilton?

Oliver Loaf, Or: Please Sir I Want Some More

I confess I have a soft spot for Jamie Oliver, the chef so beloved by middle Britain. His livery lips, his unruly thatch of hair, his speech impediment--I could just eat him up. And soon, I will.

Oxford is all a-flutter over the impending arrival of a new restaurant conceived by Oliver. It will be known as Jamie's Italian. And what exactly will the cuisine be like? Well, I took this photo of the site, which is being renovated now:


A "twist of Jamie." It sounds cannibalistic. But it's the obvious next step in the deification of celebrity hash-slingers. First you could buy their cook books. Then you could buy their skillets. Then you could buy their ingredients. Now you can buy them, little bits of their bodies to sprinkle into your sauces and salad dressings, like a pinch of a saint's relic. A twist of Jamie. Some Oliver oil.

Or maybe I'm thinking this way because we saw the wonderfully odd French movie "Delicatessen" last night.

BritNews RoundUp
Did you see Emily Wax's delightful Washington Post story about the Redskins cheerleaders traveling to India to perform at cricket matches? Now comes the backlash. The Guardian reports that the pom-pom shakers have angered conservative politicians and drawn lewd comments from male oglers. "I think in the Indian context [cheerleaders] are seen as slightly sleazy which is not a reflection on the women but the perception [from Indian men]. So lewd comments, I am sorry to say, do not surprise me at all," Mukul Kesavan, a cricket writer, told the Guardian. Slightly sleazy? Cheerleaders? No.

Meet Britain's worst driver: Jamie Manderson has never had a driver's license and yet he notched his first driving offenses as a teenager, getting banned at age 15. This week he was jailed for eight months after earning his 51st driving-related conviction. Rob Ross, Manderson's lawyer, told the court: "He still has a problem with motor cars. He always will." In the past, Ross, who describes his client as a "likeable idiot", has said Manderson suffers from "a serious addiction to cars."

I haven't been able to find a decent video online (someone must have bought the rights to film it in 3-D Imax) but even the still photos are pretty amazing: More than 1,600 Belgian students dropped Mentos into Coke bottles yesterday, creating the world's largest eruption of sticky sweet geysers.

The same arguments over the HPV vaccine are being fought here as in the States. There's that puritanical tinge to it--the vaccination to shield girls from cervical cancer will just encourage them to have sex--but England being England, there's also an anti-science bent. This, after all, is the country that swooned over the MMR vaccine, when middle class mums with too much time on their hands started to believe a discredited researcher who said the jab caused autism. (It doesn't.) The Daily Mail helped fan those flames. Now the paper says one in three British girls offered the HPV vaccine in a trial have refused it. Or is it one in five, as the Guardian reports? Oh let's just average those and call it 25 percent.

The making of a new James Bond movie is greeted here with the same sort of excitement and glee as the news that a member of the royal family is pregnant. It's an excuse for Fleet Street to run all sorts of stories, starting with the annointing of the new Bond girls, roles that are roughly equivalent to those of the vestal virgins in ancient Rome. The latest movie, "Quantum of Solace," is providing lots of news, especially since they keep crashing those expensive cars. The third accident in five days has people talking of a "Bond curse." Maybe that's what you get when you give your female characters names like "Papilloma Jabb."

Finally, everybody hates J.K. Rowling. And when I say "everybody," I mean all the other authors at her publishing house, who feel the imprint pays far too much attention to that darned Harry Potter.

Gargoyle of the Week


This fellow peers down from a university building on the Banbury Road, the master of all he surveys.

I survey the weekend coming up. Have a good one and thanks for reading.

The Great Escape, Plus: Mind the Gap

Oxford is an ancient university and so certain workarounds are required to bring it into compliance with the 21st century. For example, in the good old days, if you were in the basement of a building and a fire broke out, you were content just to die of burns or smoke inhalation while silently chanting in Latin. Or, if you were lucky, you scrambled up a fire escape only to find your exit blocked by a chair against the door. Not any more. Now, courtesy of signs like that one above in Nuffield College, your escape route is clear: You simply climb to safety, emerging from the wainscoting like a rat.

I spent much of the lecture I attended in that room yesterday distractedly wondering if the panel would pop open and a ragtag line of dirty-faced survivors would crawl out. Finally, when I could take it no longer, I got up and moved a heavy table against the wall, ensuring that the proceedings wouldn't be interrupted. Now let me see, did I push the table away when the lecture was over?

Just kidding! Of course I didn't do that. I concentrated on the lecture, a talk by Paul Kellstedt, a political science professor from Texas A&M University, on sabbatical with his family here at Oxford. The lecture was entitled "The Macro Politics of a Gender Gap" and while much of it was lost on me (I start to sweat when I hear words like "variable" and "coefficient"), it was interesting.

Kelltstedt's central finding is that there is a gender gap between American men and women when it comes to political policy. Women are, on average, 2 to 5 points more "liberal" than men. What's interesting is that this relatively small number pales in comparison to other gender gaps: There are much bigger gender differences when it comes to party identification, political participation, presidential approval and presidential candidate selection. These gender gaps are growing while the macropolitical gender gap is staying the same. In other words, what you would expect to be the bedrock foundation for decisions about politics--a person's stance towards various policies (on the environment, welfare, etc.)--does not correlate directly to which candidates people support or how they vote.

I'm sure I'm mangling this completely.

Paul didn't mention it yesterday, but here's another bit of research that resulted in counterintuitive findings: The more you know about global warming, the less motivated you are to do something about it. Kellstedt and colleagues surveyed 1,093 American and asked them about global warming. "More informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming," they wrote in the journal Risk Analysis.

Said Kellstedt: "The findings that the more informed respondents were less concerned about global warming, and that they felt less personally responsible for it, did surprise us. We expected just the opposite."

Too bad there's no fire escape to help the planet escape from global warming.

Pullman, Transporter

And so last night to the Oxford Town Hall, where author and Oxonian Philip Pullman kicked off the Oxford Literary Festival with a reading from his new book, “Once Upon a Time in the North.” The slim novel is a “prequel” to Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy, a snappy little tale featuring a 24-year-old Lee Scoresby, the laconic Texas “aeronaut” who figures in the later books. (And is there a rule that “laconic” must be followed by “Texas”?)

Pullman said that one of his favorite parts of putting the book together was collecting the little bits that accompany it, picking out the dark blue cloth that it’s bound in (an homage to his university?). Oxford is full of Oxfam used book shops and he said the listings in an old Shipping World Yearbook from around 1910 were the inspiration for the ramshackle Arctic port where the action takes place.

The new book, he said, is a retelling of a classic Hollywood movie he saw as a boy: “The Magnificent Seven.” He said of his novel, “This is not a Western, it’s a Northern.” It’s set in a frontier land where courage is the chief virtue. “Courage could be said to be the most basic virtue there is,” Pullman said. “It allows you to exercise your other virtues.”

One of the things I like about Pullman is that he doesn’t have to compromise any more, not that he ever did. He managed to make a long, dense trilogy about the depradations of organized religion into a best-seller. And though his new book will no doubt appeal to Guardian-reading peaceniks, one of the first thing Lee Scoresby does is pull out his revolver—even if it is only to bash a balky valve on his balloon. Lee is even revealed as a bit of a playa.

It’s hard for a writer to see someone as successful as Pullman and not wonder, How does he do it? What’s his secret? Pullman was very open about how he works, but of course the answer to those questions is that he’s very smart and he works very hard. He knows his Milton and his Blake, his Genesis and his “Treasure Island.” He’s proof that the secret behind great writing is great reading. As for the writing, Pullmann does 1,000 words a day, in longhand, and even if the prose is flowing like water, he stops before getting much past 1,001. “If it’s going well that’s a good time to stop because it will be easy to start the next day.”

He doesn’t start a project with a theme in mind but builds it from the particulars of a scene: the smells, the sights, the sounds, the “minute particles” that bring a world to life. He lets the characters develop on their own, sometimes being surprised when they demand bigger roles than he intended for them. He isn’t afraid of the obvious, either.

Pullman answered questions from the sizeable audience that filled the Town Hall, saying that, yes, he has interesting dreams but he never includes them in his fiction. Your dreams, he said, are never interesting to other people. He said his daemon would be a raven. (His illustrator, John Lawrence, had already drawn it.) And he liked the look of last year’s “Golden Compass” movie, a comment that suggested there were things about it he didn’t like. But there are always compromises in film versions of books. A book, he said, is like a democracy, where author and reader each cooperate and play their parts, the writer providing the ingredients that the reader assembles in his head.

“Why did Lyra have to join the grown-up world?” asked one attendee. Pullman said that to have done otherwise, to leave her a child, would have made her a Peter Pan. “And Peter Pan is a ghastly book,” he said. The His Dark Materials trilogy is about the loss of innocence and how something that some might think is sad is actually to be celebrated, since it brings special compensations, such as wisdom.

“Innocence is not wise,” he said, “and wisdom can’t be innocent.”

Speaking of innocence, I love this photo of a little girl peering down from the balcony in the ornate Town Hall, a human face almost lost among the putti and the plaster.

The Digital Divide, or: If the Glove Fits...

Over the last few months I have been photographing lost gloves and mittens that I find in the street and on the sidewalks of Oxford. This is the sort of behavior that worries my family. It embarrasses them but it also frightens them, since it seems just one more stumble upon the slippery slope that ends with me not able to remember who's president or discern a wristwatch from a tea kettle.

But to those who would ask me "Why do you photograph lost gloves?" I can only give an answer that echoes that given by Mallory when he was asked why he wanted to climb Everest: "Because they're there."

Lost gloves are the inevitable byproduct of winter. This particular English winter, I'm told, has been mild. And yet it's affected me greatly. Frustratingly inconsistent, it's been blustery and biting one minute, sunny and pleasant the next. Just yesterday we had every form of microclimate it's possible to experience in one 12-hour period, including an uncharacteristically hard-driving rain, glorious sunshine that made me sweat, and hail. It's no wonder I feel slightly schizophrenic.

Of all our articles of clothing, we have the closest relationships with our gloves. They protect our hands, the structure of which separates us from our nearest mammal cousins. Every time we slip them on we recreate that most intimate of acts. Whether leather or fabric, expensive or cheap, gloves fit us like, well, like a glove. Gloves are metaphors for connection, a connection not just with their owner, but with another glove. Every glove is a twin, sharing the secret language that twins share.

And so every one of these errant accessories--soggy and forlorn on the pavement--has a story, a past: where they were bought, when they were worn, and culminating in that awful moment when all relationships were severed. Running for the bus, pulling out the change, answering the mobile. One minute you had two gloves and then you had one.

But you don't figure that out until later. "Where's my glove?" you wonder.

It's on the ground, looking like the victim in a crime-scene photograph. Or it's on a wall or fence, propped up by a passerby who thinks such a display will increase the chances of a reunion.

But it rarely does. Like a good friend snatched too soon that glove is gone. Oh well, you think, I can always buy a new pair. And besides, spring is on the way.

Here is my gallery of lost gloves:

Petard-Hoisting, Plus: 'Lark Rise--The Sequel'

The Bard of Avon's name has been spelled in numerous ways over the years and there was incredible variation even within his own lifetime. However, I'm pretty sure this was not among the versions:


The temporary yellow sign adorns a roadsign near the Cutteslowe Roundabout and advertises a "Shakespreae" production by the Creation Theatre Co. Thank goodness they're not doing "Omelet."

Lark Rise: What Happened Next?
This next item will make no sense to anyone who hasn't been watching "Lark Rise to Candleford," BBC One's treacly Sunday night costume-drama. Set in the late 19th century, the show revolves around the post-mistress of a small market town and the modest tensions between the town folk of Candleford and the rural inhabitants of Lark Rise. It's based on the memoirs of Flora Thompson, who grew up in Oxfordshire.

Last night was the final episode and while a few loose ends were tied up it wasn't the satisfying conclusion I had hoped for. In fact, there wasn't much character development over the course of the 10-part series: spinster postmistress Dorcas Lane stays unsatisfied in love, spunky teen postmistress-in-training Laura Timmins stays spunky, fecund welfare cheat Caroline Arless keeps being a pain in the ass. And yet we planted our butts in front of the TV every week.

In an effort to give a sense of closure, here's my guess as to what happened next:

Assistant gamekeeper Philip White catches Alf Arless poaching pheasant on Sir Timothy's land and kills him with a single blast of his shotgun. Philip hopes this will endear him to Laura Timmins, for whose affection he has competed with Alf. But Laura is horrified by his act. In a strange twist, Philip marries Alf's mom, the rotund Caroline, when it turns out she was never legally married to the seafaring husband she's spent the whole series waiting for.

Last seen moving to London, Sir Timothy Midwinter and Lady Adelaide return to Candleford to show off their baby. Or, rather, babies: She has given birth to conjoined twins and they have joined a traveling circus, entertaining itinerant laborers with an act called "The Royal We." The body of Zillah, Dorcas Lane's cantankerous cook who died at the end of episode 10, is sold to Sir Timothy to exhibit as part of the circus under the name "The 1,000-Year-Old Woman."

Despite numerous offers from willing suitors, Dorcas never marries. She sublimates her passion by wearing increasingly tighter and tighter corsets until one day she simply disappears. The busybody Pratt Sisters take over the Post Office. Their first act is to order that all correspondence be handed over in unsealed envelopes so that they may read them before delivery.

Laura's parents, Emma and Robert Timmins, are found dead in their Lark Rise cottage in what is apparently a murder-suicide. Authorities cannot determine who killed whom and finally decide it doesn't really matter.

Teetotaling head postman Thomas Brown moves with his new bride, Margaret the minister's daughter, to the Isle of Wight where he invents a non-alcoholic wine spritzer and starts a cult.

And what of Laura Timmins, the 16-year-old girl through whose eyes the story is told? She marries Twister the crazy old beekeeper after his wife, Queenie, dies from anaphylactic shock. Laura gives birth to six children in the five happy years that she and Twister have together.

Hey, I'd watch it!