Notes from the English summer
Cool
With the onset of summer and the lengthening of the days, Oxford is bathed in gentle golden light, the sun’s rays gleaming through the slumbering spires of the University and inspiring journalists to indulge in long lyrical passages expounding the city’s beauty without letting commas or sentence structure restrict the natural eloquence of the moment.
Henry James believed “summer afternoon” to be “the two most beautiful words in the English language,” and while there is, of course, a great pleasure to be taken in the idea of hot lazy days filled with Pimms and punts, the dangers of living up to this ideal often seem to outweigh the satisfaction derived from it.
There is within the British psyche a failure of logic, resistant to the persistent warnings of stand-up comics, ensuring that if the sun is shining then there is no need to be concerned by the fact that it is cold and possibly raining (in England sun and rain are by no means mutually exclusive).
Couples can be seen huddled together as they scuttle around the sites of the city, squinting hopefully at the sky every time a hint of sunbeam peaks dolefully through the pallid clouds, while tourists huddle together over steaming mugs of coffee wondering if the locals’ actions amount to an act of pasty self-flagellation. Yet this period of mutability is not to be entirely derided.
With May comes the promise of real summer, and with the Noughties on track to establish its position as the hottest decade of all time, the creeping menace of global warming guarantees at least that Oxford will be getting hotter, at which point the residents will lock themselves indoors in a desperate attempt to save themselves from the cloying humidity. And with summer comes the real injection of tourism.
When T S Eliot proclaimed to see “crowds of people, awalking round in a ring,” his gaze is that of a man surveying Cornmarket Street on a Saturday afternoon in high summer. Here, on the street once voted second worst in Britain by listeners of the Today programme, so many walk that they seem to dwarf even the numbers that “death had undone,” each individual tread seemingly calculated to prevent anyone else from moving.
While the centre may seem to be choking itself to death, the inconvenience is probably worth it in the end. The money brought in by visitors is astronomical, the council as far back as 2001 proclaiming nearly half a billion pounds of revenue from tourism alone, the majority being generated in the summer months.
Besides, it is probably a bit unfair to keep all of what Oxford has to offer entirely to ourselves, even if it does mean that half your time at university is spent moving your belongings in and out of it. Logistics are, after all, a life skill. Beyond the threat of tourism there are those Grinches of academia attempting to impede on the enjoyment of nature’s most striking season.
For those with finals, the weather constitutes both a taunt and a temptation, the bright light’s alluring promise of pleasure luring unfortunate innocents to their academic downfall. Little victories, however, may still be won. Revision can be done on punts, notes taken in the open air, equations committed to memory in the cooling waters of Mercury Fountain.
Then there is, of course, the golden dawn of post-exams, where for a couple of short weeks the finished finalist has nothing to limit their ways and means of celebration beyond their own imagination, and all within the environs of academia’s various architectural wedding cakes. Unless you live in St Catz of course, academia’s architectural collapsed flan, but still in its own way a bastion of loveliness in an otherwise desolate world.
By the time you read this, May morning will have come and gone, Oxford’s own interpretation of an ageold ritual embodied by Champagne, choral singing from a great height, and aching heads in early Monday tutorials (since Oxford does not stop for bank holidays). Whether human endeavour can find a way to fling itself off a bridge in the face of the literal and legal barriers placed in front of it remains to be seen.
Yet unlike the mallard duck hunt at All Souls, May Day is not a ritual peculiar to Oxford. With its roots in the Pagan celebration of the springtime it is, unsurprisingly, a day that finds itself celebrated in various forms across most of the Northern Hemisphere �" and its unfortunate ex colonies �" often in ways more serious than Morris dancing.
The co-opting of the occasion as a workers’ festival and its subsequent endorsement by the Soviet Union have ensured that modern May days bring with themselves strong connotations and a forum for political expression. In 1955 the Catholic Church in the form of Pope Pius the XII declared 1 May to be St Joseph the Worker’s day, thus adding the mainstream religious to the stew of spiritual, natural and political associations linked with the day.
While it is certainly no evil to be reminded that the world does not stop moving when the sun starts shining, Oxford students need not feel too guilty if they wish to experience May Day on more aesthetic terms than those advocated by the various competing claimants on the beginning of a new season.
Trinity term is something that many students will only experience three or four times, so it is no bad thing then that summer in Oxford offers the opportunity to make the most of an aesthetic dreamland. Here finally is the opportunity to indulge yourself in fantasies of Oxford, and in doing so mould it at least temporarily into the experience you always wanted it to be. Walks should be taken, picnics should be had, and Champagne should be drunk.
Or if you would just prefer the sun and a book, then feel free to retreat to the parks and the meadows. Make sure that you experience summer in Oxford as you might wish; you have fewer opportunities than you might think. In the words then of one our finest modern bards, Sir Paul McCartney, “here comes the sun”. Enjoy it.
4th May 2006