cocopunk

Then I went to Oxford. After hours of googling whether it was better to take the bus or the train, I found no discernable consensus and decided it was best to go to the train station and figure it out from there. (In college we were advised to take the bus from London, confusingly named the “Oxford Tube,” because it was cheap and stopped right in front of Stanford House, but that was twenty years ago.) The train was a good choice. It was a good train! Evidently the UK has proper fast trains topping out at 125mph and it took less than an hour. There was only one confounding aspect upon boarding: I tapped my phone on the entry gate to pay, the same way you board the tube or New York subway, same as in Tokyo, same as anywhere. In many places, London included, you also tap when you exit and are charged based on the distance you traveled.

But when I arrived at Oxford station you couldn’t tap to exit. After holding up the line while I tried to figure it out, a worker told me that they don’t have tap to pay. You need a ticket. Which means that you might board in one city without a paper ticket, as it is 2025, and then you can’t exit at your destination. You can tap in but not tap out. [George Costanza voice] I couldn’t tap out, Jerry! No tap out!

I was trapped in train station purgatory. (Not really. Another station agent let me out and told me to buy a new ticket at the window. He also handed me a little scrap of photocopied paper with instructions to call the rail service and explain what happened so that I wouldn’t be charged twice after buying another ticket. I never bothered to do that.) Which means this happens often enough that they print instructions to hand out. And yet.

Anyway, it was true that the train station was not in the city center but it was only a ten minute walk from where I wanted to be.

Finally I arrived on High Street, the historic city thoroughfare that left such an impression upon me as I stepped off the aforementioned bus twenty years ago. I pulled out my camera to take a picture of the golden afternoon light shining on the old and new architecture abutting one another with charming friction, and —MEMORY CARD CORRUPTED.

My camera would not take a picture. The memory card wasn’t working and it was the only card I had. The whole point of the trip for me—really the whole fucking point of the trip to the UK—was to take photos, particularly of Oxford, and my camera had died.

While thinking about what to do I wandered over to Christ Church meadow and fiddled with the camera settings a bit to see if I could manually reset it somehow, to no avail. I had my phone camera if nothing else, and resolved to just walking around with that. But as I moped along towards the river I had a startling realization: you can buy memory cards in stores. Cities have stores, and I was in a city. I wandered back to a shopping mall to look for electronics stores; aside from a couple of cell phone shops the only place that possibly had electronics was John Lewis, a department store sort of like Macy’s. Blessedly they did have an electronics section with a few SD cards.

An hour wasted but crisis averted, I immediately went back to the ducks. There was a coffee cart in front of Christ Church by the meadow and I made small talk with the barista after trying and failing for the third time to order a “black coffee.” So she made me a flat white and it was very good.

But the river, that is, the canal, the canal boats, the meadow, the cows in the distance and the low-hanging fog, the rowers practicing on the water with the ducks and geese squawking, mostly geese, was exactly as I left it. I walked along the water almost daily when I was a student because I was board and lonely with nothing to do besides my school work. Those memories are like grains of sand in an oyster that become something else after the passage of time. It doesn’t even matter if it was a “good” or happy experience in 2005; it’s something else now, gilded with time.

Oxford was still Oxford and I was glad to see they had kept the red door at Stanford House. The High Street Starbucks I photographed and recently painted was gone, now a local bank. Tourists were plentiful. I noticed and overheard more gray-haired nostalgia seekers than I had before, pointing at things they had known, perhaps because I was now one of them.

There were so many streets and alleyways that I wanted to revisit that it was impossible to see them all; I’d spent six months wandering those streets as a college student but I didn’t have that many miles in the tank nowadays. So I walked and walked and walked some more, taking photos all the while, until I was satisfied that I’d seen enough and was reassured that Oxford was still there, believe it or not, and you can go back anytime.

The return ticket I bought at the train station also didn’t work. I approached the same weary agent I had talked to when I arrived, and a little exasperated at recognizing my face, he buzzed me through.

In a final stroke of bad and good luck in quick succession, the long lens on my camera bumped into someone as I went through the gate and the lens cap went flying. I heard the distinct sound of plastic hitting the ground but I couldn’t find it anywhere, again blocking the line of people going through the gate while I scrambled around to find the lens cap. So I gave up, just a lost piece of plastic, could be worse.

But miracle of miracles, when I got to the train platform a middle-aged man tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, is this yours?” He handed me the lens cap. He said someone else picked it up and handed it to him for some reason and I guess he followed me. I was the only person on the platform with a giant camera after all. A small miracle of human community.

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When I got back to London I got a pint at the pub and sat outside on the sidewalk to write this journal and something odd and hilarious happened: a random passerby hit on me. Was I being cat-called? A passing woman on the sidewalk—about my age, olive skin, indiscernible accent—walked up to me and said “Excuse me. I like your style. Can I get your number?“

I nearly burst out laughing. Never in my life! It’s not like this was someone hanging out at the pub and socializing; she was literally just passing on the sidewalk. It didn’t pass the smell test to me—maybe I looked like I had money and could be taken advantage of? I don’t know. Maybe she just liked my style, which was pretty good.

It reminded me of a time in San Francisco when I was moping around between grad school classes and sitting in Union Square by myself and I made eye contact with a person who was passing by. She approached me and explained that she was a psychic and said she could help me somehow.

I said sorry, no, in both instances.

The next morning I revisted the British Musuem to commune with the pharaohs and Moai and then walked to Covent Garden to see if I could find something to eat, expecting it to be a sort of street fair like Borough Market. But it is not; it’s just a collection of shops and cafes that didn’t appeal to me. So I stopped at a Caffe Nero for a bite and coffee and to decide what to do next. Staring at the map I saw the natural history museum not too far away, which sounded like a good idea, so I went there and perused the bugs and bones. The highlight is the main hall, both the architecture itself and the blue whale skeleton suspended above the crowds.

Hyde Park was nearby so I went to see the Prince Albert memorial across from Prince Albert hall, and before heading home, I stopped for a pint one last time at a pub called Paxton’s Head.

For dinner that night I got fish and chips, takeaway, because I like to scurry away with my bounty like a scared animal, and was curious about the takeaway boxes I had seen online (sort of like oblong pizza boxes. I wanted to see the box!). I probably should have just stayed at the restaurant because, guess what, cooked fish has a strong smell and I did not want to stink up my hotel room, let alone the entire B&B where I was staying. It hadn’t occurred to me until I was walking home with my prized box, smelling of deep fried fish. It was too late at night to find a public park where I could sit and eat so I did what any reasonable and considerate person would do: I took my fish and chips into the hotel room bathroom and ate sitting on the toilet, lid closed. Everyone knows the bathroom contains odors, after all.

I think it worked. The bathroom smelled like a fish fry and the house cleaners might be confounded, but everywhere else was odor free.

I left the next day.

Addendum

The next morning before I left I inadvertently set the fire alarm off at 8:30am.

There was a sign in the bathroom that said, in bold lettering, to close the door when you showered because the steam could set off the fire alarm. That’s also how I knew it would seal off my fish dinner. I had no problem before, but the last morning, I took a shower, exited into the little bedroom apparently too quickly, and immediately heard the sound of an alarm.

First of all, why do British smoke detectors use technology from 1870 that can’t discern what actual smoke is? I guess it must be optical somehow and is set off by any sort of vapor. American smoke detectors have a tiny bit of radioactive material that allow them to detect smoke from a fire, which seems like a good tradeoff of safety.

Fairly confident that there was no fire I casually got dressed and went out front, as per the instructions written on the back of the door. A few other tenants were waiting and I didn’t mention what I thought had happened. After a few minutes the hotel staff were able to turn off the alarm and everyone went back inside the building, which did not smell of fish.

When I finally departed, the British rails were sterling and reliable and I got to the airport way ahead of schedule. But to board my flight, we had to take a bus on the tarmac and walk up a set of stairs like it was 1973. That ended up being good news: the airline couldn’t enforce the boarding order so I was one of the first on the plane. And it was only half booked anyway, allowing for the luxury of stretched legs, people lying across entire rows to take a nap, flight attendants asking every five minutes if we wanted a drink. I guess no one was too keen on going to America.