Oxford*
Population: 162 100
Distance from Cape Town: 13 032km
Arrival date: 3 May 2023
Today’s temperature: 15 Deg Celsius
I thought I wouldn’t be able to escape coronation whoopdidoo, so I decided to spend my first Saturday in Oxford holed up and working. I was woken early by voices in the quiet street, but then it all fell silent. Later when I opened the blinds, I saw that bunting had been spun across the little street.
My current job requires me to log into a closed system and there was a problem doing that. I’d had no intention of watching the coronation, but while I waited for IT on the other side of the world to rise to my verification problem, I clicked into the royal action in time to see the white horses with their blue hair-dos pulling up at the abbey, and the Cinderella coach bounce-bouncing backwards into place after overshooting the mark a little.
The horses looked like they could be unicorns, which reminded me of a language mistake I made in Germany.
I was explaining the problem of rhino hunting in the Kruger National Park, which is in South Africa but is bordered by Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and how difficult this border problem makes it for rangers to catch the killers if they escape east or north.
I kept calling rhinos ‘Einhorn’ (unicorn) instead of ‘Nashorn’ (rhino). Halfway through my story, I realised my mistake. At the time, I was walking through a forest beside a lake with my cousin. He hadn’t corrected me. He said he’d been enjoying the image of unicorns prancing through the Kruger National Park.
Germans are very polite about language mistakes.
But back to the whacky ceremony, about which I really have nothing to say except: did you see the king’s shoes?! They looked like somebody had designed them based on a children’s story book about a king.
King shoes are a thing.
I couldn’t stop looking at them. They were probably the least conspicuous part of the extravaganza, just a step down from what someone called ‘the royal oven glove’ the man had to don at one point. I dwelled on the shoes instead of the more obvious derangements of the day.
I also dwelled on how much of one’s early literary experience has to do with royal imperturbability, royal problems, royal riches and royal vanity. I am still, a day later, trying to find the border between fantasy and reality in what occurred yesterday when, as Private Eye magazine had it, ‘Man In Hat Sits On Chair’.
Did the fairytales derive from the pomp or the pomp from fairytales?
Of course the children’s story books imitated life, but that imperial life is so ludicrous it really does seem the other way around.
I’ve been in Oxford for four days, but I only really arrived this morning when I did my first big walk, getting ‘lost’ (it’s a relative term) and accidentally covering more ground than I meant to. I thought I was walking all the way around a meadow. I walked all around something, through a forested area, but it wasn’t the meadow I’d intended.
I saw only two people in my muddled two-hour loop. The birds were going ballistic. At some point, a copper dog galloped up behind me and acknowledged me only by stopping briefly, then lolloping ahead. He came to me three times. I never saw his owner. He had a plastic collar that looked like it had batteries in it. I suspect he gets tracked. He doesn’t look easy to contain.
I suddenly found myself back where I’d left the conservation area. The same man was still standing with his photographic rig trying to get shots of the water birds. Heavy dog-and-duck drama was going down. The water is shallow and a dog was churning through it this way and that, chasing ducks. The water is also wide and this dog – not the copper dog from the trail – was without end. Across and back and across again, while its owner chased around the edges, calling to it.
That poor woman is going to sleep through the rest of this sunny Oxford day, dreaming of leashes and carabiners and dog murder.
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It’s weird because I didn’t watch the ceremony for various reasons but when I caught a clip on Twitter I burst out gasping giggling at his shoes! Absolutely absurd and my thoughts were that they definitely belong in a children’s illustrated book. I’m now wondering where they will end up now that’s all I’m over?!