{fall tr avel is sue}


story by John Kelly photographs by


Christopher lane


previous pages’ photo Key on page 29


ab


I “


is their mania for, well, for everything. The English will collect, study and celebrate just about anything. Oxford seems to me the zenith of this tendency. For an Anglophile such as myself, being in Oxford is like wrapping a rubber tube around your arm, pulling it tight with your teeth, tapping your skin with a fin- ger to raise a vein, then mainlining pure Englishness. “Oxford has a reputation for being


charming, quaint and full of lovable ec- centrics,” one friend there told me. In other words, it’s the exact opposite of Washington. On the Thursday morning I arrived,


n the fall of 2007,


I moved my family (wife, teenage daugh- ters, dog) to Oxford, England, while I was on a journalism fellowship. I always felt like an impostor there, gnawed at by an inferiority that came from being a University of Maryland graduate study- ing at the University of Oxford, of being a deadline-driven hack at a place where a professor can spend years scrutinizing a single scrap of Ovid. But Oxford has a way of seeping into your skin, and it wasn’t long after I saw England getting smaller through the airliner’s window that I started contemplating my return. Last autumn, I was invited back to


present the fruits of my year of research. It was a slim paper I’d taken to calling “The Economic Influence of the Devel- opments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485,” after the stupendously mediocre journal article written by the hero of Kingsley Amis’s novel “Lucky Jim.” My paper was actually about … ah, who cares? I was back in Oxford! The English have a lot of national


characteristics — reserve, dry humor, self-deprecation — but what I like most


I went straight to the weekly mar- ket at Gloucester Green, a large, open and not particularly green space near where the intercity buses berth. Ta- bles bristled with treasures: Victorian postcards, ammonite fossils, lacquered boxes, prints torn from the pages of old books, stamp albums, military badges, lawn bowls, a ceramic Buddha, a rusty dagger. … This seemed to be the mer- cantile expression of the acquisitive impulses that created two famous local institutions: the Bodleian and the Ash- molean, the former one of the world’s oldest libraries, the latter one of the world’s oldest museums. “I like an Oxford crowd,” one vendor


told me as I held up to the sun a slide from a magic lantern, an old-fashioned slide projector. “They’re not stuck on decorative things. They like ephemera.” About half of the stalls at the market


sold food. There were establishments whose names sounded like the inven- tions of a comic novelist: Callow Farm, Sotwell Manor Fruit Farm, Little Wit- tenham Lamb. Not far from a stand called the Soupery was one called Wa- tercress Etc. I didn’t see much in the way of Etc., so I ordered a watercress scone to munch while I walked. (How did it taste? Watercressy.) The Oxford Covered Market is a few


blocks away. An 18th-century shopping mall in the center of town, it harbors, among its cafes, shoe stores, candy shops and fishmongers, a peculiar artifact that I’d passed many times when I lived in Ox- ford but had never scrutinized. M. Feller, Son & Daughter isn’t the


only butcher in the Covered Market. It isn’t even the only one surrounded by carcasses in the process of aging — deer, rabbits, pheasants and other animals whose bodies dangle from the rafters like furred or feathered Christmas dec- orations. But it’s the only butcher that displays in its window what appears to be the shriveled lung of a two-pack-a- day smoker. This … thing — black, scabrous,


about the size of a toddler’s forearm — is the Oldest Ham in the World. “This ancient ham,” read an explan- atory text, “came to England in 1892


My paper was about … ah, who cares? I was back in Oxford! 24 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | September 12, 2010


england


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