What is it about Oxford then?

View from Rose Lane rooms, Merton College, facing the Botanic Gardens and Magdalen College.

Thank you for subscribing and thank you for your patience! Clearly a very occasional substack this one and also one of changing topics and thoughts. Now, Oxford. Though I definitely can’t claim the University of Oxford as my own, neither an alumnus nor a member of Faculty, me. Not even a resident of Oxfordshire and I am not sure my pockets would quite be sufficiently deep to buy or rent anything particularly nice or desirable here. On the other hand, I once had a staff ID and I have been in and out of the place too often to have the detached view of the tourist.

Perhaps best to go back a few years, make it some 40 years, shall we? I hate when tech magazines give you the rundown on how awful technology was in the eighties, not least because I experienced it already at the time and actually didn’t think it very good even then. Okay, in 1983 I enrolled as a medical student at a redbrick (concrete and rusty iron as it were) university in Denmark that no longer exists under its own name after merging with a handful of polytechnics and other institutions of variable distinction. All well and good. After doing the first half of Medicine I was able to take out a year and go on the B.Sc.Hons course in Experimental Pathology at St. Andrews, now practically a Royal Institution and one that does very well indeed on the academic league table. That was my year of thesis writing, getting acquainted with lab work, the occasional high table dinner, academic gowns, bobs, the camera club and theatre. Also the oddity of halls of residence where someone would clean your room and cook your meals, amazingly time saving come to think of it. Being a student in Denmark was an altogether more adult and independent existence but also a lot less engaging and mind broadening. I returned to the concrete and rusty iron, finished my degree and worked as a junior doctor in various hospitals round the country, getting together my qualifications in the more haphazard way that was the order of the day in the early nineties.

I really don’t recall having visited Oxford on my holidays touring England but not sure why - definitely went to Cambridge and scowled at the daffodils and the closed doors to the colleges. Term time possibly. It is odd that I didn’t because I think Daniel Martin by John Fowles was one of those coming of age novels that made me want to go to university and that one is very much set in Oxford, complete with dead women in the reeds and extrovert blondes. I had definitely also read Jude the Obscure and I remembered all the Cambridge colleges shut to tourists even more so than they would be shut to a stonemason, who would at least be of some potential use. Now, I certainly visited Oxford on a whim some twenty years ago with my wife, train from Stratford (not the London one but the RSC one), saw posters for a Schubert’s Unfinished concert at Merton College that night and promptly went to get tickets. I did not know much about Merton College other than it being one of the oldest colleges in Oxford and nothing to do with Paul Merton.

Merton College, TS Elliot lecture theatre, March 2024

It was astonishing to be able to walk about the college in the intermission during the concert, checking out the lavatories etc and feeling temporarily admitted and accepted. Must have been the loos in Front Quad, I don’t remember exactly but likely near the Chapel.

For the past ten to fifteen years I have been on the faculty for a clinical course in Osteoporosis and Metabolic Bone Disease in Oxford, held in the term break around St Patricks Day and the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race, so you could do worse. The daffodils are generally out and so are the tourists. After years of rotating between colleges, usually St Catz (unpleasantly designed by a famous Danish architect) and St Anne’s, the course is now with the Bone Research Society and is always at Merton College. There is a good feeling of coming home, I don’t mind saying. Merton is a fine old college and the food is good. The rooms can be cold as can the showers but it all seems appropriate and oddly comforting because of it. I think I have stayed at maybe fifteen of the colleges on various trips, meetings and visits and Merton is certainly a good one.

So what is it about Oxford? I think Oxford has managed to retain a feeling of youth and curiosity which is probably the opposite of what one expects. Also, it does high table dinners very very well. The college system is alien to most universities, even within the UK - St Andrews which was funded in 1413, some 150 years after Merton college, only has the vestiges of a college structure - but it provides a fantastic opportunity to engage with experts in completely utterly unrelated other field and for new ideas to arise. Sure, you can easily ignore this and stay within your silo as you would do at other universities but at least the colleges give you a mini-university to relate to. I am unsure how we would do this at universities that follow the now conventional structure where things happen within your faculty but rare across faculties unless you take very active steps. Oxford is full of young people and it ought to make you feel really old. But it doesn’t. It makes you want to pick up your running shoes and your notebook and in my case your camera. Also, Oxford seems to think that you are obviously great at what you do since you are in Oxford whether temporarily or permanently so there is not any reason to show off. Anyway, there’s my hopelessly naive take on the Dreaming Spires but not, I think, entirely mistaken. Have I seen used pregnancy tests (negative) rolling about on the floor of buses heading into town from the JR Hospital (a couple of months sitting in as an Hon Consultant and then not visiting as a Visiting Professor due to some pandemic) or walked past the endless number of homeless people sleeping sheltered in front of offices and churches? Absolutely. Concerns about mental health and student wellbeing. Definitely. But is Oxford still curious and wondering what to do with you? No doubt about it.

Fill your boots. And no, Joanne Rowling (later JK) read French and Classics at University of Exeter.