______________________________
I recognised it at once by its tower
______________________________
Have you visited St Michael at the North Gate in Oxford, Eanflaed? I recognised it at once by its tower as a young jobseeker thumbing my way round the south of England and sleeping under hedges ( for crying out loud) and I am embarrassed to confess that I hadn’t heard of it. Yet there it was, shoe-horned into Oxford's Cornmarket Street: boxy, long-and-short work, little round arches under podgy pilasters. Unmistakably Anglo-Saxon. I had no time to look inside as I was busy beating the mean streets of Oxford so as to make an exhibition of myself to virgin employers with my Direct Approach, all CV and portfolio like Dick Dauntless, and realising I wouldn’t half like living and working amongst Professor Tolkien’s old haunts, in “the city of dreaming spires”... Imagine my motivation and joy when I landed a job at a printer’s in Gillingham.
About fifteen years later, the only other time I’ve been to Oxford, I was on my way to meet up with some friends at the Rollright stones. So I found some time to soak up the ambience, case Merton College, nose into some cool bookshops ( gasp, Tolkien stuff!) and... overran by an hour and had to grab a taxi.
Obviously I’d be happier knowing that any third time really would be lucky, and I won’t be disappointed if ever I make it inside.
( By the way, have you heard the folk belief that nobody can count the Rollright stones? Well it’s true! Some stones are small and could have split away from a bigger neighbour, so no two people make the same decision as to which are the proper stones, and if they ask a third person to settle the disagreement, he or she proves to have come to yet another total, and so this world-historic issue never ends...)
