Oxford is odd. Recently, someone decided it would be a good idea if they removed the surface of at least 3 main roads here, but I have seen no evidence whatsoever that they intend to put it back. This is especially annoying since it includes both main roads into the city that aren't liable to flooding.
There isn't, it seems, one single haberdashers in the whole of Oxford. There are, however, vast numbers of tourists. Tourists in Oxford confuse me. What are they looking at? The Ashmolean (outside of - the good bits of the inside are all closed for rebuilding), the Radcliffe Camera, the view from Carfax, Keble, the Martyrs' Memorial? That's about it, isn't it, and there's better examples of all of that in London or Cambridge? Oh, ok, not the RadCam or the Martyrs' Mem if they are interested in Anglican history, which I very much doubt. (Yes, some of the colleges are nice too, but they're closed to tourists.) Hordes of tourists punting down the Backs in Cambridge, I can understand. Or maybe they're all here for just one morning on their way from London to somewhere else. Stratford maybe.
9 comments:
Didn't someone once say that familiarity breeds contempt?
Ah, true, true. But I've spent twice as long in Cambridge as in Oxford, and I still think Cambridge is much better for tourists.
Except from the point of view of the resident, when it is significantly worse as the numbers are comparable and the infrastructure is worse.
But what there seems to be much more of in Oxford than Cambridge is coach parties.
At the moment*, the tourists are all standing on Folley Bridge and Botley Bridge, looking at the river.
* Strictly speaking, I mean during the day on Monday.
Is Botley bridge still accessible? I thought it was meant to be underwater. Or is that just the dip in the road just up from it?
So they've come to Oxford to see the floods...
Hmmm - I wonder how much money Tewkesbury could make that way.
I like Oxford.
Oh, the Botley Road itself didn't actually flood properly until today (Tuesday). They shut it on Sunday morning (when there was no extra water visible that I could see), and by Sunday afternoon some of the houses alongside the road and up sidestreets had flooded from round the back.
The road was passable without getting your wheels/feet wet until today; there had been puddles at the sides in places where water came up through drains or via the a couple of side roads. The water was going back down on Monday eve, before it went back up and then ended up higher than it had been by this afternoon.
The road itself is currently* flooded all the way across in four different places, and more houses and sidestreets were flooded today.
* - as of around 3:30pm on Tuesday, though the radio's said it's gone up a little since then.
It's worth adding that I do really like Oxford as a place to live. I just don't see that it's worth travelling 6000 miles to visit.
They're there for the Zodiac. Obviously.
Custard said: "I still think Cambridge is much better".
I couldn't agree more.
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