Tag: oxford

Categories
appearances writers

Heinstein and Friends

Oxford-based radio presenter Bill Heine has his first book out – ‘Heinstein of the Airwaves’. It’s a set of recollections of his years working for BBC Radio Oxford during which he came to see a very different side to Oxford.

Not the Oxford of ‘dreaming spires’ and Inspector Morse and scientific endeavour, but the Oxford of ordinary people and troubled estates and corrupt publishers (Robert Maxwell)…the real Oxford.

I love this book and read most of it in one sitting soon after buying it at the wonderful launch party in the Ashmolean Museum. Of course I turned straight to the one story in which I had participated – the story of how Bill Heine and author Brian Aldiss incurred the wrath of Stanley Kubrick when they tried to show the then-banned film ‘A Clockwork Orange’ at Bill’s movie house, The Penultimate Picture Palace.

That night, I was in the audience, having queued for ages for the free showing of this notorious film. I’d read the novel by Anthony Burgess and was keen to see it on screen. When Brian Aldiss came forward and explained to the gathered audience that Kubrick had sent ‘people’ and an injunction to stop the show, I got up to leave. I’d queued for ages next to and was now sitting beside a quietly spoken young guy who’d told me that he’d watched the film 57 times. He loved Alex, he told me with tears in his eyes. “I feel so sorry for him when he’s being tortured…”

If you know the story of Clockwork Orange, you might understand why this kinda worried me. So, I declined Bill Heine’s offer to the audience that they could stay and watch ‘Doctor Strangelove’.

Bill Heine invited me to co-host his radio show the week that ‘Invisible City’ was launched. Here’s a 3-minute excerpt of the show.

There was a second event to launch ‘Heinstein of the Airwaves’ last week, at Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. Bill invited four authors to talk about their books, updating him or retelling stories that he’d coaxed out of them on his radio show. So I shared a platform with adult authors for the first time; Brian Aldiss, Moazzam Beg and Mark Lynas. They told their stories before me; seriously dramatic stuff about dealing with Stanley Kubrick, being unjustly arrested and imprisoned for years in Guantanamo Bay, and almost dying of altitude sickness on a melting glacier (respectively!).

I wasn’t sure how I was going to come across after all that. But light relief and a sneak peek at the beginning of Josh’s journey actually went down very well! And what with Christmas coming up and granddaughters and godchildren and nieces and nephews to consider…we sold lots of copies of ‘Invisible City’!

It made a change for me to be signing copies for adults! Children don’t usually stay to chat…I guess they are shy? But that night at Blackwell’s I was kept very busy and met many interesting new people, including children’s authors and the organisers of Oxford’s new Jazz Festival…who invited me to their launch party! (click on the link to see photos.)

Categories
nostalgia

My one and only Boris Johnson story

boris-oxford.JPG
Boris as I remember him at Oxford. A million pounds says he doesn’t remember me.

So Boris is finally Mayor of London, eh? Surely a preface to David Cameron taking over as Prime Minister in the next couple of years. Which means that finally, my contemporaries at Oxford will have taken over the country.

I worry about this slightly because I am pretty sure I wouldn’t be much good at running the country; not nearly old enough or wise enough and I know that I’m probably as smart as some of those guys, although possibly not Boris, who really is very clever indeed.

So this is the time to tell my one and only Boris Johnson story. It isn’t very good, I’m warning you. But it’s the only one I’ve got.

Boris was in the year above me at Oxford. Our paths didn’t cross because he was in the Rich Beautiful Ambitious Talented People Who Went To The Right Schools And Will One Day Run The Country set and I was in the Bright Grammar School Kids Who Will End Up Running Universities And Businesses set.

Anyway. My then-boyfriend-now-husband was another grammar school oik like me, and a chemistry student to boot. (The only way to be lower in the social ranking at Oxford would have been to have to study hard to get by, since apparently effortless academic excellence is the only way to distinguish the kind of kids who get top grades at A level anyway.) Boyfriend was a member of the Oxford Union, not a students union but the famous debating society that was the University training ground of many of Britain’s top politicians.

Boyfriend and I very, very occasionally played chess together in the bar at the Union. Once we were playing after a debate. Boris, then the Secretary of the Union – this was the year before he became President of the Oxford Union, and another Union officer came into the bar from the debating room, still resplendent in white tie. They took their drinks and proceeded to watch Boyfriend and I play chess.

Now at this point you need to realise that neither of us can actually play chess. I mean we obviously know the mechanics of the moves, but that’s it. So we are playing. Boris and his prematurely aged fellow Union officer (who was about 22 but seemed around 32) watch with growing interest, starting to comment quietly to each other about our tactics.

We grow tense, aware of their scrutiny. Their interest grows all the more. We study the board furiously. I’m vaguely aware that you have to try to plan some moves ahead. I start to think one or two moves ahead, then three, then four, and my head hurts. Boyfriend keeps his cool a bit longer than me. I crack under the pressure and make a move, any move. Boyfriend does the same. Boris and pal seem surprised, then disappointed. Boris wanders off. Boris’s aged young friend comes over to us and comments that the game had looked extremely exciting, we were both in such very strong positions, we looked like two very strong players…and his voice tails off. We smile enigmatically, saying nothing. What remains politely unsaid is the final part of Young Fogey’s assessment…”but actually you’re both a bit rubbish, aren’t you?”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not cross about this and never was. On the contrary, I was proud to have impressed the already-famous-in-Oxford Boris Johnson even for a few minutes. Even if he was disillusioned. I actually felt sorry to let him down. He had already provided me with hours of entertainment with his amazing oratory and humour at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union. I didn’t always agree with him or even understand what he was saying, being a Scientist Of Very Narrow Focus.

But it was always clear to me that he was brilliant; possibly the most brilliant student I ever came across at Oxford.

Which is saying something because Oxford prides itself on having some smart cookies. Even so the supersmart and brilliant ones stood out a mile.

But can they actually run a country? I guess we’re going to find out…

Categories
mexico

With the Bohemians – A huevo!


Alonso, Mario, Hector and Pablo of the OU Mexican Society

After Mass last week I overheard two people talking in the shop near church. Their accents gave them away as Mexicans, so I introduced myself as a fellow Mexican. Oxford has a few Mexican graduate students nowadays and over the years I’ve got to know a few of them, which has been a wonderful way to meet Mexican people who are a) much younger than me and b) not related to me!

Pablo invited me to listen to him and some friends playing ‘trova’ at a ‘Bohemian Night’ at Exeter College MCR. ‘Trova’ are soft, latin-american modern folk songs, often with political sentiments. So I sneaked out of the house last Saturday and joined the Young People in the MCR.

Listening to them play, I was transported back to my childhood when my  uncle Jose Luis (‘Pepe’) and some student mates (my mother called them ‘the boys’) of his came to Europe travelling, back in the 1970s. Like Pablo and his pals, they also brought guitars and songs from old Mexico. I was a very impressionable young girl at that time and decided that an intrinsic part of being attractive as a latino male was undoubtedly the ability to sing and play guitar.

I was glad to see that these guys lived up to that stereotype. Like Pepe and ‘the boys’ back in the day, these guys had an impressive command of old Mexican songs by Agustin Lara and Jose Alfredo Jimenez, rancheras, trova songs, ballads…and that was before they began riffing with the audience in English, covering the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, The Eagles,  Don Mclean and Radiohead.

(A highlight was when they played “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles and then without changing the guitar riffs at all – because it’s exactly the same tune – went straight into the older Mexican jarocho song ‘La Bamba’.)

Very bohemian! And quite satisfyingly Mexican, too. Viva Mexico!

I might be going to talk to the Oxford University Mexican Society about ‘The Joshua Files’. Yes, I did tell them, many times, that it’s a children’s book…

 (NB ‘a huevo’ is Mexican slang for saying ‘too right’. And like most Mexican slang, it is probably rather crude…)

Categories
raves

The Oxford Stargate

I asked my husband David to swing by Cowley and take a photo of a monument that we call the ‘Oxford Stargate’ on his BlackBerry.

But lookie what he made me instead!!!

Is that not awesooooome? Ooh, I want to go to M35-117…

Also my Brazilian visa arrived today. It is a proper full-page visa valid for 5 years. Yay!

Categories
raves

Half-term=museum visit

It was that or a 45 min drive to the cutesy Cotswold town of Bourton-On-The-Water to sample the delights of the perfumery, the bottled sweet shop and the rock shop where our little daughter loves to fill a bag of polished stones from the ‘scratch tub’. But the weather! So we stayed in Oxford.

Any excuse to mosey around in the National History Museum of Oxford – full to bursting with children aged 3-8 making dinosaur things under the T-Rex skeleton, hand puppets in the adjacent Pitt Rivers Museum and slightly older kids gazing with wonder at armour and weapons such as Robin’s bow from the TV show and Captain Sparrow’s sword from Pirates of the Caribbean (pictured above).

The National History Museum consists mainly of one large gallery with everything pretty much chucked in together – geology to your right(ish), dinosaurs all over the place, mammals to the left, other creatures wherever they can squeeze in. The Pitt Rivers Museum of Ethnography, behind the Nat History, is a deliciously pokey collection of artefacts and weird stuff from all over the world, collected according to type of object, with the original hand-written labels from yeh-ears ago.

I took the photos above with my BlackBerry. Clockwise from the right: main gallery of the National History Museum; a chuck of iron pyrite; the T-Rex skeleton; spooky figures from the ‘Anthropologists’ Collector Fund’ in the Pitt Rivers; a rotating 3D model of DNA; Jack Sparrow’s sword.


My personal favourites from the top gallery of the Pitt Rivers are the suits of armour made from fish scales, buffalo horn and coconut fibre, a helmet made from a big, spiky shell, and the Japanese Noh Theatre masks.