Tag: Oxford

LEAVING SPIRES

by adamhalevi, posted in Adam and Dido, Adam Green, Dreaming Spires, Matthew Arnold, Oliver Cromwell, Oxford, South Park, Oxford

a farewell to oxford

Oxford has been our on and off home now for the past ten years, and as someone from a family with far more connections to “the other place”, it has taken me most of that decade to come to really like and appreciate the city.

Typically, as luck would have it, my liking of Oxford has more or less coincided with our leaving the city for pastures new.

And pastures don’t come much more picturesque, or quintessentially English than those of South Park on the eastern edge of the ancient town centre.

And as for those famous dreaming spires, there’s nowhere they look dreamier than from the steepling fields of South Park on a late summer’s evening.

This view of Oxford; largely unchanged since Matthew Arnold penned his famous verse; and not that different from when Oliver Cromwell’s besieging army was camped on this very spot; and when this great dead English oak was a foot-high sapling, has gradually ingrained itself into the core of my consciousness, and something I shall carry with me and treasure for the rest of my days.

DREAM-IN’SPIRE-ATION

by adamhalevi, posted in City Parks, Coronovirus / Covid-19, Cotswold Hills, Cotswold Stone, Daily Exercise, Dreaming Spires, Oxford, Oxford University, South Park, Oxford, Uncategorized

OXFORD VIEWED from my IPHONE

One of the silver linings to our current regime of semi-internment is our daily walk around our local park, and our subsequent reacquaintance with one of world’s genuinely iconic (a much overused and abused term) urban views. Fortunately for us, our local green space is South Park (no relation to its animated Colorado namesake) and the view it offers is over the venerable and elegant city of Oxford and its famous “dreaming spires”*.

*…And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening…
From the poem Thyrsis, by Mathew Arnold, 1865

From the highest point in the park, just before sunset; the steeply sloping greensward foreground, leading gently yet intently to the gleaming city and shimmering spires and towers of the middle-distance; with the hazy cobalt-tinted Cotswold hills rising in the west; the visual effect has a kind of confidant and – in these anxious times – reassuring drama about it.

It is almost as if, this most famous of university cities, with all its generations of accumulated human wisdom, represents a salutary counterpoint to the current narrative of our apparent ephemeral humanity.

Whether or not these rather flat iPhone generated images can give even the slightest impression of this heartening scene is another matter altogether, but I do hope so.