Oxford

 

 

I lived in Oxford for about 7 years while working for Castrol International Technology Centre at Pangbourne nr. Reading. It wasn’t an easy decision as not long before taking up the position with Castrol we had moved the family home from Wilmslow in Cheshire to near Tamworth in Staffordshire. After this move Annette, after some supply teaching took a permanent teaching job while the children were established on local schools. Pangbourne was too far to commute so we decided that I would establish a second home with Frances our youngest daughter. We would meet at weekends at one the two homes.

As Martin and then Alison left home to go to university Annette took in the French teaching assistants as lodgers and company. These were young ladies part way through their English degree looking to improve their language.

I chose Oxford because it was more readily accessible from the Midlands. When the M40 opened it was about an hour and a half’s journey.

Although Oxford isn’t very large it has facilities of a place much larger by virtue of the large student population. Thus at least 3 commercial theatres were supported along with a number of alternative venues used for concerts, recitals and other theatrical productions. The Sheldonian Theatre is actually a University building and used for University ceremonies but also for various artistic events.

As it happened my time in Oxford overlapped with Alison as a student first as an undergraduate at University College and then post graduate at St Cross College. Frances was at school near the centre and next door to the second University at Oxford, Brookes. This turned out to be very convenient after I was stricken by a stroke  when Frances spent a lot of time living unofficially with her sister in her rooms at University College.

I chose my house at Sandford because it provided an easy exit from the city on the road to Pangbourne. The cut through avoided use of the ring road which was busy at times. Although about 20 miles to Castrol it was a very easy, quiet drive with no traffic lights There was also an easy drive to the Castrol HQ at Swindon.. A further advantage was it was situated a few minutes back streets walk from Sainsbury’s supermarket.

Our family routine was daily phone calls and weekends split about 3:1 between Tamworth and Oxford. When in Oxford we were able to take full advantage of both city shopping and the variety of restaurants, cafes and entertainment venues. Generally our choice of restaurants and cafes was rather conservative. While the variety was very large we tended towards the more “middle of the road”.

One enormous advantage of Oxfords prominence was that it provided an excellent base for entertaining visitors from overseas. The Castrol centre while close to Pangbourne offered only one hotel and a rather pretentious one at that. Surrounding villages offered a choice of pubs and restaurants which were admirable for lunch but Oxford for visitors offered a great many options. Initially I tended to use the most well known central Oxford hotel, the Randolph, alongside the Pangbourne option. Later I found a very nice hotel towards the outskirts. This was convenient for me as I was providing transport to the Technology centre, gave easy access to Oxford city facilities and also boasted a very nice restaurant.

I need to explain that as a worldwide company the Technology centre had many visitors from the overseas branches. The Castrol working language was English and the visitors were all English speaking to at least some degree. I was often impressed and rather shamed by the fluency of our visitors although it made my life very easy. Part of my group was responsible for our overseas contacts for our product areas. This meant I rarely travelled but rather the appropriate specialists came to us. Most usually these were marketing types but in the case of the larger branches there were technical people. These were used to the Castrol lubricants and metal working business but less so in my area of Surface Treatment. Surface Treatment was Castrol speak for production cleaning and temporary corrosion protection.

The large range of entertainment meant that it was often .possible to choose something which I judged particularly suitable. Thus a lady from the US was taken to the touring English ballet. The most memorable theatre visit was with Frances to see “Canterbury Tales “. Perhaps rather foolishly we were on the front row for a theatre group looking for audience involvement. Fortunately nothing more was required of me than to throw something back on stage. A lady who I knew slightly in the audience later remarked I was rather brave in my choice of seat location.

As might be expected Oxford has an excellent choice of bookshops. The doyen of these is Blackwells. Although dispersed to several locations the main bookshop is truly bizarre. The frontage is small and rather unprepossessing  but the interior is vast. The crowning feature is a large underground area built under the quadrangle of the neighbouring college. One of my minor regrets is that I never saw the vast underground storage area of the Bodlian library, one of the UK’s libraries of record. With over 12 million volumes it is the second largest in the UK.

Oxford is well stocked with museums. The Ashmolean is by far the most famous with some unique items including of English history. There is a MOMA although I see it is now described as the Oxford Museum  of Modern Art. It is quite small and totally different to its famous New York cousin. Easily the quirkiest museum is the Pitt- Rivers. Now officially the museum of art and archaeology the strange nature starts on the grass in front. There cast in concrete are dinosaur footprints. The displays are something of a miscellany. There is a large section of dinosaur skeletons plus a wide variety of scientific, ethnographic and archaeological exhibits.. Among the sometimes macabre exhibits is a stretched out human skin with bullet hole where the unfortunate victim was shot. The museum is partly kept under deliberately dim lighting which makes for an odd effect.