Stealth Showering, Part 2!

The morning following my first stealth shower I arose eagerly and once again returned to the luggage room. There it was, still unlocked, still unguarded. I scampered in and repeated the previous morning’s shower ritual, this time without nearly having a heart attack every time I was forced to take my eyes off the bathroom door, which had yesterday caused me to picture it being knocked down by an enraged band of Oxford Shower Police. Feeling marginally more confident that my plumbing/hygiene difficulties had been resolved, I left the luggage room once more.

Needless to say, I was bursting with the joyful news of my stealth shower, and as so often happens when I find something terribly exciting, most of the people I told couldn’t quite see it. However, I did get one person to respond with something other than an ill-disguised nervous look and a quick escape into some other conversation—one of my fellow students disclosed the location of her stairwell’s bathroom, which she claimed was relatively acceptable, though I doubted that it was as acceptable as my stealth bathroom.

The following day I stealth-showered again, feeling even less nervous. Later that day, growing positively brassy, I decided I ought to put the bedroom attached to this plumbing marvel to use as well. It had a comfortable chair, and was quite cool, making it a much more pleasant place to study on a warm afternoon than my own third-story bedroom. So, I collected my notebook and Tolkien, and headed to the luggage room for a productive afternoon. Sadly, though I hadn’t come close to a coronary in the shower that morning, I was considerably jumpier at the thought of discovery that afternoon. I could hardly get through a paragraph without jumping up to pull the blind, check the door, or peer around the blind I’d just closed for the elusive Shower Police. One of these window checks led me to notice there were several workmen doing some sort of construction in the quad beyond (or possibly several undercover Oxford Shower Police, who could say). They kept making noises which startled me more than just being there already did. Then, on one of my investigatory abandonments of my studies, I happened to glance into my stealth bathroom. Yep, it was still there. Yep, the plumbing was still intact. Yep—but wait. The toilet seat was up. I most certainly hadn’t left it that way. It clicked that I was not the only one making use of this gem of a restroom. Probably the workmen in the adjacent quad found it fairly convenient as well (assuming they weren’t Shower Police).

That was too much for me. I gathered my things up and fairly bolted. Still, there was one more benefit to be harvested from the room. Set up as though it were waiting for a guest, it had a towel, bathmat, and soap packet neatly stacked on the bed. These were commodities to be little less highly valued than plumbing. Though I’d brought my own bath towel, I was having to rely on the good “scouts” (apparently they’re not maids) of Oriel College to supply bathmats. They gave out sturdy squares of paper for the purpose, which looked much more like the sort of thing mechanics put on the floor of your car to protect it from their grubby shoes while they perform maintenance, and the scouts were none too keen on replacing them regularly. So I nabbed the whole stack of linens (and paper) off the bed the next morning when I came in for my stealth shower.

Two more days were begun with refreshing stealth showers. Things had certainly improved from, say, the messy and largely unproductive attempt to wash my hair in my bedroom sink that had begun my trip. On the evening of that second day, as I headed down to the college computer lab (just follow the signs saying Nurse’s Office. A Britishism? A prank? I have no idea, but there you go), I noticed another open door. This one was a hallway even I, with my blissfully uninhibited attitude towards doors, had never attempted to investigate, as it had been described as a residence for important visitors (or so, at least, my memory of my heavily jet-lagged college tour told me), and had a very loud, echo-y sort of floor. Apparently these were extremely important visitors, because right there at the end of their hallway was a large rectangle of a bathroom ventilated by a stained glass window. I can’t quite imagine how the thought process for that went—yes, we’ll tuck bathrooms in this corner, this tunnel, and this closet, and, oh yes, let’s get some plumbing in the chapel while we’re at it—but there it was. Of course, I investigated. This bathroom had a slightly larger shower stall than my stealth shower, a rough sort of floor I would normally associate with swimming pool locker rooms, a very orange overhead light, and the stained glass window opened out onto a heavily-trafficked alley, but it seemed like a functional bathroom (relative to bathrooms other than my stealth shower, of course). I decided to keep it in mind, though I hoped I wouldn’t need to.

The next day, I headed off for my next stealth shower. I threw on my clothes from the day before, bundled clean ones in my towel, grabbed my various soaps and lotions and brushes, and trotted across the quads, enjoying the smell of summer in the early morning. As I entered the hall containing my stealth shower, I heard voices. Uncommon, as it was early, but not unheard of. But as I got closer, I knew they were coming from my stealth shower. My stealh shower and its adjacent bedroom were no longer a luggage room, but an occupied one. Trying to look as though it were quite normal to wander around in public at 7AM in rumpled clothes while carrying an armful of linens and toiletries, I walked past the door to my stealth shower, pointedly not aiming accusatory glances at the people standing in the doorway of its bedroom. This was probably just as well, as one of them was leaning rather proprietarily against the doorframe, wearing nothing but a towel, and the other, more conventionally clad, appeared to be seeing how her friend liked her accommodations.

I was forced to make use of my rather timely discovery from the night before, which was fortunately not being used by any important visitors (and had a lock on the door to keep the Shower Police at bay). It did work, but it was quite disconcerting to dry off and dress while listening to people chatting or shouting to one another in the alley just on the other side of the stained-glass window.

I checked my stealth shower several more times, but in vain. The door was now locked, or occasionally blocked by its new occupant. I was back to itinerant showering, though my options had increased. I had my chapel shower, and the shower my fellow student had told me about. That one was a little more interesting than I would have liked—I located it at the top of the main tower. To enter it, one had to duck under a huge old wooden beam, and the bathroom itself had two levels separated by a short staircase—the lower one for the sink and shower, and the upper for the toilet. The upper level had a perpetually open window which looked out on the college roof, and which didn’t seem quite pigeon-proof enough for my liking. Also, the shower drain functioned about as well as a plug, and the low lip on the shower stall meant one was constantly in danger of flooding the first level.

At least my new shower options no longer required me to disturb anyone early in the morning, but they were never quite equal to my stealth shower. Oh, well. It was good while it lasted.

Washington, D.C.!

When I begin packing for a trip, some primeval survival instinct takes over and I behave as though wherever I am going is likely to be about as foreign as another planet, and I need to take a fairly sizeable representative sample of everything I own to keep from dying of starvation and heat or cold and lack of proper hair care products. This turns me into a stressed-out basket case, and makes me hate packing.

For our trip to Washington, D.C., though, I found a perfect solution: wait to pack until it’s about forty minutes before departure time. I actually packed less than twice what I needed, and was still out the door on time without extra hours to worry about having forgotten something.

Which meant, of course, that I forgot something—sunglasses. This didn’t seem quite so vital in the gray rainy morning of the Midwest, but when I stepped outside onto the blinding pavement in Washington, D.C., it suddenly became vital. We redirected our tourist instinct from finding large pieces of history to photograph to finding a store that sold sunglasses.

Union Station was what we came up with, and a small drugstore near the entrance from the Metro had what I wanted. The first pair of clip-on sunglasses I picked up was expensive, and I was on the verge of returning them to the rack to look for something cheaper when my father stopped me.

“Are those flip-up sunglasses?” I examined them more closely, and discovered that they were indeed the kind that clipped to the nosepiece and had a hinge, allowing the dark lenses to be flipped up above the glasses or down over them as desired without the bother of detaching them from the glasses. My father had an overlarge pair clipped to his already fairly large glasses, now flipped up for convenient indoor seeing, making him look like Mickey Mouse with the dark semi-circular lenses perched above his eyes. “They’re so convenient!” he insisted. “And that pair is cheaper than mine was.”

I bought them, with some misgivings about how dorky I wanted to look, but found that he was right—they are convenient. When I walk outside, I flip them down with my fingertip. In the dark of the Metro or the shade of a building, I flip them up, going back and forth between the two without a thought. I figured they were dorky, and probably touristy as well, but not much worse than anything worn by all the other people visiting our nation’s capital.

Or so I thought until the Metro ride that night. My father and I sat side-by-side, lenses flipped up in the dark tunnel to turn us into Mickey and Minnie Mouse. A man several rows down, facing us, suddenly pointed in our direction, nudged his wife, and made an up-and-down gesture in front of his eyes with his first finger. She looked a bit tired and nodded, humoring him, but he was chuckling.

“They’re talking about us!” I exclaimed, poking my father.

“Oh, yes, they wish they were as cool as we are,” he agreed, nodding with practiced oblivion.

The next day, I stood with my father in the entryway of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, sunglasses once again flipped up, waiting for the security guards to be satisfied that my mother had nothing threatening concealed in her numerous bags. A small boy, six or so, darted through the knees of the crowd and pulled up abruptly in front of me. He stared upwards, brown eyes wide. I smiled encouragingly, assuming he’d misplaced his parents. But he grabbed the arm of some other small child, arm raised above his head to point first at my face, then at my father’s, gesturing above his own eyes. My encouraging smile vanished. We don’t just look dorky and touristy. Evidently, we have become a tourist attraction.

But hey. They’re so convenient!

Thank God for Vatican II

Since coming to Oxford, I’ve been attending weekly mass in Latin at a church called the Oratory, run by a religious order not common in the United States (the name escapes me; the professor with whom I’ve been going could tell you all about it). The church is large and elegant, adorned with rich paintings and ancient statues. The pews are plain wood, smoothed by thousands of worshippers. The ceiling arches high above the sanctuary until it comes to the altar, when it becomes a painted dome.
Mass begins with a small herd of priests and acolytes processing from the right side of altar to the end of the church, up the centre aisle, all the way back up to the altar. All the while, we sing a hymn in English, generally a plodding, tedious sort of thing, accompanied by an organ high at the back of the church.
The priest begins the service singing, a capella, in a lovely, rich voice, Latin words ringing out over the church. We, the congregation, answer, also singing, the Latin words from the small purple Order of the Mass booklet. I have not been attending the services long enough to predict which melody is to be used for each response—and haven’t the breath or the voice to sing well in any case—so I follow along more softly.
Through the service, I follow along in the purple booklet, learning each week how to better distinguish the individual Latin words, and to identify them with the printed text, which is sometimes confusing and requires quick darting from page to page at some parts of the service. There are very few parts of the mass where it matters, though—besides short responses, the congregation speaks only the Confiteor, and sings the Credo and the Pater Noster. The rest is left to the choir.
The choir, though, is magnificent. Voices—bass, baritone, tenor, alto, soprano, and all the ones in between that I don’t know names for mingle, separate, stand out alone, then come back together, sweet and magical and overpowering. The Gloria, the Agnus Dei, and the Sanctus are the only hymns to which the congregation has words, and the harmonies make it difficult to follow anyway. It is the music, and not the language within it, that has the effect. Listening to the priest speaking or singing alone in Latin has a similar effect. I know the English words, and can sometimes pick out cognates. The oddest part is the Litany of the Saints, each familiar name given a Latin twist—Felicitate for Felicity, Agnete for Agnes, Matthia for Matthew, Barnaba for Barnabas.
But at the same time, I feel separate from all the events, even with my little purple book. As beautiful as it all is, it feels as foreign as though I’d stumbled into a room full of people discussing nuclear physics.
Fortunately, the homily is done in English. Unfortunately, the Greek-speaking, disgustingly well-read, wittily erudite priest at my own lowly, American, English-speaking parish has rather spoiled me for other, less educated priests. I find the man standing in a real pulpit at the top of a spiral stair something of an anticlimax. Still, I’ve managed to glean some amusement—Sunday two weeks ago, I was told that, “God is like a parent who enjoys watching his children play outside, but knows they must come inside to have their tea.” I missed the spiritual significance of this (if ever it had any) in laughing at how utterly British that sentence was. I should like to see even God persuade American children drink tea.
Despite all the formality and the majesty of the service, I have never seen a more disorganized taking of communion. Instead of rising row by row and filing to the front of the church in neat lines, the entire congregation rises en masse and dives into the centre aisle as though it were a train about to leave. People must manoeuvre to get a spot in which to move forward to the communion rail, and really, it seems a bit of a miracle that anybody ever gets sorted out and back in their seats.
Mass is ended first with announcements—some of them invitations to the church’s parish centre for alcoholic beverages—then with a plodding, tedious hymn in English. As often happens with songs with words I can understand, they seem either to make little sense, or far too much, as in the hymn in which Jesus is a vampire: “Hail, Jesus, hail! Who for my sake / Sweet blood from Mary’s veins didst take.”
All in all, it is an enjoyable experience, but one I am glad will not be repeated every week—I can come back to English (and a little ancient Greek) and a priest with an IQ containing more digits than there are persons in the trinity.

Those That Study History Are Also Doomed to Repeat It

Since I have been in England, I have seen a total of four Shakespeare productions for my class. They were staged in various locations, using a variety of different settings and costumes. All were good, or at least, as good as could be expected given the source material in at least one case.
The first one I saw was Twelfth Night, staged in the garden at Wadham College. The text itself is a despicable piece of nonsense. The set-up is improbable, and never explained even by invented laws within his invented realm of Illyria. Characters change personalities to suit the situation, and frankly, the ending is only happy if one doesn’t examine it at all (though isn’t that always the way with fairy tales involving love). There are really no more than two or three amusing lines throughout the entire text, which leaves actors of today (and probably other times as well), required by tradition to vindicate Shakespeare as the God of Authors, in something of a predicament. This production handled it by using a modern beach setting, and using the contrast of their water toy props with the text itself, and by playing up the bawdiness well beyond the point that would have been permissible on an Elizabethan stage. Although the production was humorous, it was rather sad to watch excellent actors forced to try so hard.
The second production I saw was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I have already seen twice before in different theatres and at different times in the States. This production was at the Globe Theatre in London, the theatre built as a reproduction of the theatre in which Shakespeare’s plays were staged before it burned to the ground. When they rebuilt it, they kept many details the same, including the flammable thatched roof and the central area (the theatre is round) in which they force patrons to stand around the stage, through the entire production. Evidently, it was tradition that tickets were sold for a penny to “groundlings,” who could crowd on foot around the stage to watch. They have chosen to keep the part of the tradition in which they force innocent people to stand for three and a half hours, though they have seen fit to charge another £4.99 for the privilege. I assume they have also seen fit to install modern, and not Elizabethan, plumbing and heating and so forth, probably following modern fire codes, even in the thatch, despite that historical inaccuracy. But standing—no, no. They feel that is a significant part of any Shakespeare experience. And truly, it is an experience, craning over the heads of the entire western world, trying to see the stage, while one’s legs turn slowly to aching, painful lead. I saw the play mostly from the side, which meant I chiefly saw a large pillar, which is part of the support of the stage.
The production was good, however, with interesting music—sung by a contra tenor, and experience I’ll happily not repeat—and the actors were talented. However, both of the American productions I’d seen trumped them, and my favourite character, the Puck, Robin Goodfellow, was a sad disappointment. He was played by a middle-aged, plump man, who wheezed around the stage very comically, but not at all representing the “merry wanderer of the night,” or, as I prefer, Neil Gaiman’s “giggling-dangerous-totally-bloody-psychotic-menace-to-life-and-limb” wanderer of the night. Still, it couldn’t be called a bad production by any stretch of the imagination, but I was a little let down.
The third play I saw was The Merchant of Venice, at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace and hometown throughout parts of his life. The town is much given over to all things Shakespearean, from naming every business in town after him, his family members, of his characters, but the theatre we were in is not entirely devoted to Shakespeare’s plays. It is built with no attempt at resembling an older theatre, and had seats and galleries much like any normal theatre. However, once again, history wrapped its ugly fingers around someone’s brain. The last row in the ranks of seats at the highest gallery was not a row of seats, but an aisle in which people were assigned places to stand. The view was no better than from a seat. The historical accuracy was all but nonexistent—the “groundlings” here were nowhere near the stage, which is several floors below them. The standing area took up exactly the same amount of room as a row of seats would have—my trusty tape measure told me so, much to the bemusement of my fellow theatre-goers—but there it was. More money spent to stand, while my feet slowly squish themselves into fiercely aching pancakes, as I try to appreciate art.
But it was a magnificent production. The actors were wonderful, the austere set fit the play perfectly, and I could even bear standing at least long enough to see every bit of the trial scene, where Shylock shone. Unfortunately, said brilliance was all but unappreciated by my peers, who clearly don’t know a good thing when they see it.
The fourth play I saw was also A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This one was in Oxford, in Headington Hill Park, and was a “promenade” performance, which meant the audience followed the actors around to various sets throughout the performance. Having already seen this play three times, and having been very disappointed at the Globe, I was loath to see it a fourth time, but had a paper to write which would be difficult to do without seeing this other production. I had low expectations, especially when a friend told me that they had made a great many changes. However, I was not disappointed.
First of all, I had a seat. Somehow, this lowly, outdoor production had managed to come upon the startling revelation that people are much better able to enjoy themselves if they are not aching from the position in which their bodies are. They had arranged logs and tarps to create moderately tolerable—absolutely heavenly, compared to the Globe or the Courtyard—seating for every single solitary patron. Truly, a commendable success right there, regardless of the content of their production.
However, the production itself was excellent. They had few actors—Hyppolyta and Titania were played by the same actor (a man in drag; it was a rather interesting choice, but it worked); Theseus and Oberon were the same; Helena and Robin Starveling; Hermia and Snug the Joiner; Egeus and Nick Bottom; Lysander and Flute the Bellows-mender; Demetrius and Peter Quince. They made Peaseblossom, Mustardseed, and the other fairies nothing but little spots of light shown on actors’ fingertips. But their performance was magnificent. Running all over the park—at Puck’s beckoning—made the scenes with the lovers less repetitive and silly, and made it feel more realistic.
And Puck. I cannot praise Puck enough. Of all the Pucks I’ve seen, he was my favourite. The actor must have been exhausted by the end of the performance—he ran everywhere, performed acrobatics, lifted other actors off the ground, delivered his every line with giggling-dangerous-totally-bloody-psychotic-menace-to-life-and-limb verve. Truly, even if the rest of the actors had been terrible, Puck’s performance alone would have made their play able to put the Globe’s attempt to shame.
However, tomorrow I can look forward to another Globe production, another three and half hours standing in a crowd on a concrete floor, while watching King Lear. Then, come the following Monday, I’ll see Much Ado About Nothing, in Oxford, produced by the same company that did the second Midsummer. Although I hold out high hopes for the actors, I’ve been warned by Douglas Adams that, once again, Shakespeare’s text is something of a cruel imposition. But, we’ll see how it goes. Wish me luck.

The Cornmarket

On the way to a high Latin mass at The Oratory of Oxford, I saw a great deal more of the route than I did the previous week, when it was pouring down rain and the city was obscured by a combination of grey rain and people’s umbrellas. As we walked down Cornmarket Street, I saw a stand set up there, from which hung silk scarves, pashminas, and hair bands. The table portion of the stand held silver jewellery. I couldn’t see a price for the pashminas, but they were pretty, very colourful and delicate.
On the way back, I saw the stand again, and noted the price, which wasn’t terribly high. I was tempted to purchase one, but instead got lunch at a fast food sandwich place called Pret a Manger and returned to the college.
I did laundry that afternoon. While my clothes spun in the dryer, I wandered into the quad near the “laundrette,” where I found a bouquet of flowers in a garbage can. Fool that I am, I pawed through the bouquet for still-living flowers, but eventually had to admit that they really had all seen much better days. A short while later, I noticed yellow stains on the only clothes I’d saved out from my batches of wash, the ones I was wearing. I’d covered them in pollen. This meant that my only sweatshirt was dirty, and this left me with only one other option for a warm top, and it is not particularly warm. I decided I’d best find something else to keep me warm, and I thought Primark, a British equivalent of Wal-Mart, would be a good place to start.
On the way, I decided I’d check Cornmarket again for the pashminas. It was already five thirty in the afternoon, so I wasn’t certain that the stand would still be set up. It was, though, and I examined the row of pashminas, debating colours.
A little girl darted out from behind the booth, which was evidently run by her family. She had one of the hairbands, made of beads and silk, bound round her forehead, hanging in her eyes. “Is there anything you need help with?” she asked, her accent charmingly British and her voice light, merry, and friendly.
She made up my mind. “I think I’d like this one and this one,” I told her, touching a sky blue and a gold.
“Okay,” she said, her voice still full of childish exuberance. She dropped to her hands and knees and pried open a plastic box beneath the stand, through which she pawed vigorously. She bounced up with a blue square in a plastic pack, which she handed to me. She told me that the gold pashmina on display was the last one, and it could be taken down for me to buy. She sprang up on her tiptoes, reaching high above her head to undo said pashmina. I reached out to help her, but she insisted that she could do it herself, and she did.
I pulled my money from my wallet, and offered it to some of the adults behind the stand. One of them instructed the girl to get a bag for my gold pashmina. She darted beneath the stand again, searching through more boxes until she found a pashmina-appropriate bag. When she re-emerged, she had more hairbands tied around her arms and legs. “Very festive,” I told her. “Thank you,” she replied.
I left the stand very happy, both in the pashminas and the memory of the sprightly little girl-child. In the end, I turned the wrong way, and never made it to Primark, but I was utterly contented with my expedition (and did make it back to the college by dinner).

Stealth Showering!

In museums, and in public buildings, and all sorts of places, there are doors beyond which the lowly public is not permitted to pass. There are signs on them saying, “Private,” and “No Entry,” and “Staff Only,” and “Warning, Biohazard.” Oftentimes there are employees, or armed guards, to make sure the instructions or implications on these signs are followed. But then there are the places in which no one thinks anybody would try to get—buildings not specifically open to the public, but not locked or forbidden, either, containing rooms that no one thinks to guard because it’s not thought that unwelcome visitors would come that way. These rooms do not usually contain sensitive information, or anything private—no harm comes of looking around in them. I always enjoy looking in those rooms no one thinks to guard, stepping beyond shut but unlocked doors for a peep around. The Board of Trustees Room in the administration building of my university is one of my favourite haunts.
Here at the college in Oxford, there are also a great many doors, most of them locked but some of them not. I’ve poked around in some of them, looked at the furnishings or the twisting passageways, and left them as I found them.
I shall now digress to a seemingly unrelated subject.
The plumbing in a seven-hundred-year-old building is not exactly on par with American standards. And when a bathroom is shoved into a little left-over corner of a hallway, plumbing jammed in whatever space is available, with the appropriate fixtures sometimes shrunk to fit, standards of cleanliness are apparently also relaxed. The bathroom in my stairwell is a tiny shaft of a room, shivering cold even in summer, full of shampoo bottles left behind by past students, and has a couple pairs of shoes sitting in the entryway. It apparently is used by the rowing team during term. All this could be forgiven, however, if the shower were capable of producing hot water, which has always been, in my mind, one of the great benefits of plumbing. However, it cannot, so I do not use this bathroom. I attempted once to sponge bathe in the less primitive sink in my bedroom, but this was an unsuccessful, messy attempt.
The second shower I tried is in a private bathroom attached to my friend’s bedroom. For many mornings, I’ve gotten her out of bed around seven o’clock to let me into her room so I can invade her bathroom for a half an hour. And they haven’t even got the plumbing perfect in there, though it has achieved the all-important hot water. But the room is tiled, and the shower consists of a spigot stuck in the wall. Whenever one turns it on, the entire room is sprayed with liquid, leaving fine mists in some places, and puddles in others. The floor isn’t exactly angled towards the small drain installed in it.
I tried a third shower, in hopes of at least being able to spread out my invasive personal hygiene. The third shower was in the stairwell beside mine. It is reached by means of an oddly-angled passage, and is also a small, shaft-like, chilly room, this one short a sink. There was hot water, which covers a multitude of sins, such as the muddy prints on the floor of the shower. But it seems that one of the myriad construction projects required in a seven-hundred year old building for maintenance and modernization had been begun at one point in this bathroom, and then abandoned. Shards of plaster littered the floor, a strip of tiling along the threshold of the shower had been removed, revealing filthy, icy floor beneath, and a chunk of the wall lay there, revealing a deep, dark hole through which the outline of pipes and shadows of God knows what could be seen. I was not keen to return, so I fled back to the safety of my friend’s bathroom.
Then, quite by accident, I discovered a triumph of modern plumbing over ancient architecture.
While showing some fellow students one of the odd sights that’s to be seen all over the college—in this case a gold-painted toilet perched inexplicably at the top of a staircase—I passed a door which is normally closed, and which I have not tried to enter. Today, a sign was stuck to the door saying, “Luggage Room” (groups staying at the college periodically reserve ground-floor rooms for their members to store suitcases in, instead of forcing them to drag their heavy baggage up multiple flights of stairs) and it was standing open. I could see straight back to the entrance to a bathroom, so I poked my head in. The luggage room appeared to be a clean, nicely-furnished bedroom, laid out as if for a guest. The attached bathroom, much larger than any bathroom I’ve seen in the college thus far, was a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
It had a fully-tiled floor, a regular-sized sink, and a toilet painted a tasteful white. And it had a shower stall. Clean. Empty of shoes and shampoo bottles. Simply sitting there, waiting to be used.
The next day, in the early hours before breakfast, I packed up my shower supplies and walked briskly across the college. I worried that the door would be locked. That there would be people in the room. That staff members would be hovering threateningly around it. But none of this was the case. The door still stood open, the room beyond was still empty, tidy, and waiting. The bathroom was not a dream, but a joyful reality. I hurried inside and shut the bathroom door, slightly dismayed to discover it didn’t have a lock. Nevertheless, I resolutely carried out my showering ritual, keeping a nervous eye on the bathroom door through the glass panel of the shower stall. But I was victorious, and left the bathroom in the same state I had found it, except that I left the shower stall door open so that it could dry out.
I left feeling exhilarated. This was a step beyond simply looking around in a room nobody thought would interest passers-by. Still, I had done no harm—the bathroom was still clean, the room was still tidy. This was better than turning cartwheels in the Board of Trustees Room, or exploring a half-constructed, unguarded house. I’ve managed to combine a sense of daring and excitement with personal hygiene, though I really don’t think anyone particularly cares. Still, I enjoy it, and plan to continue to use the shower as long as the door remains unlocked.

London!

I took a day trip to London yesterday, to sightsee and to watch Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Globe Theatre. On my trip to London last year, though I saw a great many tourist sights, I still managed to miss some of the most major ones, and was glad for the opportunity to amend this error.
The first place visited was Buckingham Palace. The whole area—road, sidewalk, and driveways—around the palace (though outside the gates) is more given to pedestrians than motorists, as it is adjacent to the wide, green, tree-filled space of Hyde Park. Yet, crowded though this attraction was, it did not seem to be crowded mainly with tourists, or at least not the backpacked, camera-wielding tourists I am accustomed to seeing at other sights. Everywhere I looked people were dressed elegantly—besides the men and women I saw in their military dress, there were men in suits or some other form of dress clothes. Women wore dresses or skirts, and hats. Oh, the hats. I’d never seen such hats (at least, outside of books on the history of costume). They had broad or narrow brims, and were decorated with flowers or feathers or fruit or ribbons or all of the above. Every hat I saw looked light and shady and summery. I felt very dowdy in my jeans and sneakers, sunglasses perched atop my head, amongst all these gracefully elegant folk.
Another fashion I saw quite regularly was the scarf. Women and even some men wore light scarves about their necks, this piece of attire that I normally associate with winter somehow appearing airy and summery. They add elegance to any outfit, or so it seems over here. When I did see people wearing clothes more closely matched to mine, they wore scarves, and it brought them up to the level of the dress coats and fancy hats, leaving me down with the tourists and pigeons.
The palace itself, though huge and imposing inside its gold-painted (I hope it’s just paint) fence, was fairly boring. It seemed modern and square, for a palace, holding nothing in common with either the heavy stone strongholds of history or the light, sparkling fairy castles of fantasy. I took a few pictures and was ready to move on.
The fountain in front of the palace, a memorial to Queen Victoria, was different. Having no particular preconceived notions of how a fountain ought to be, I was able to like this one on its own merits. It was a monolith of white marble, fading and staining and rusting nearer the water level to a rainbow of colours. Statues of religious, political, and mythic figures surmounted every available surface. The water was clear and cool, and no one yelled at me for leaning over the lip to splash my hand in it. If it had been any smaller, all the carving and adornment would have made it gaudy, but as it was it could only be called impressive.
The next sight on the list was Westminster Abbey, an easy dart across odd traffic from the palace. Upon approaching, the lawn in front of the abbey appeared to be thronged with a city’s worth of people, creating the worry that the queue to get in the church would last as long as the airplane flight to its country. However, it came out that the lawn is just a popular place to mill, and the line really consisted only of one or two people purchasing tickets.
The building, more cemetery than church, is enormous. Tombs of the forgotten wealthy litter the floor—nearly every time smoothed paving stone held worn lettering to the effect that Here Lyeth Some Dead Person with Money or Status. More impressive people, of course, have sculptures and sepulchres, or even entire chapels, for their resting places. Especially important graves can be recognized by the high fence around them.
Surrounded by hundreds of tourists, I shuffled past Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I and Bloody Mary (who apparently share their tomb), Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Edward the Confessor was so important that his burial area cannot be entered by the public at present.
In the nave, I found Charles Darwin’s grave, his stone somehow having escaped being lettered extensively with Latin or poetry or proclamations of family lineage. It bore his name, and the years of his life, and was smooth all over. Not so Lyell’s, up and to the left of Darwin’s, which was cluttered with paragraphs in Latin.
The whole place was bewilderingly impressive, with artistic and architectural masterpieces, and skeletons of the important dead, every which way one looked. Hoards of tourists, absentmindedly listening to their audio tours and directing their gazes upwards to various points of interest, blundered into one another, adding to the ambience. Though it was beautiful, and contained much that at least ought o be sacred, I couldn’t work up much of a sense of awe. The simply-done (relatively speaking) University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, also containing Art, Architecture, and Wealthy Dead People, seems much holier. Perhaps I might feel differently about the Abbey if I went at a less busy time, but given the price of admission, I’m unlikely to find out one way or another any time soon.