In the Beginning

This story begins like many others before it with one restless student in the middle of a city of very non-restless people. After six weeks among the Tories and Tom Fooleries of London, she hoped on a bus and traveled to a mostly unknown town called Oxford.

Upon stepping off the bus, the young explorer realized that she was wholly unprepared for this wilder corner on England. The friend whom she was supposed to meet was nowhere to be found, and everyone around her stared, knowing that she did not belong among the ivory spirals and skyward towers of Middle Academia.

Help arrived in the form of a brief orientation of the land of Oxford and a map. Before long the explorer set out in the chilling day on a quest to discover the mysteries of the fabled city. Our formerly London sheltered student crossed the bridge, and just like stepping through a wardrobe, she found herself in a completely different environment filled with curious characters. Researchers and academics hovered over stacks of sources like dwarves over their treasure troves; tattered facility members mumbled odd formulas; and guards as thick as trolls patrolled the entrances to the different colleges.

As she stepped among the marbled scholarly sanctuaries, a harsh wind pulled at the ends of her coat. The weather had been cold in London but nothing like the frigid Oxford air. It made her wish that she grabbed one of her heavy Chinese coats before heading out the door. The Winter Queen maintained a strangling grip on the bustling village. She clung to the bell towers and pressed down on the cobbled streets and gothic buildings with a disheartening cold that stifled laugher at the very thought and hastened travelers to their destinations away from the cold.

The girl pressed onward on her little journey. Every turn unfettered a new amazement. The adventurer passed under covered bridges with stain glass windows sparking in the determined spurts of sunlight that cut through the clouds. She wandered though the endless courtyards within the library complex until she wrapped around a knoll-shaped library wing. The girl even watched in resigned jealousy as students filed into the courtyard of what she knew to be Hogwarts and wondered cynically if future witches and wizards knew a shortcut to completing her upcoming presentation.

As the sun set and a light rain began to fall, the girl scurried into a cozy pub thick with decades of memories of smoke and heated debates. The Owl and Child is known for once being the meeting place of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The two great authors would sit together and discuss the surreal fantasies of their literary worlds and are the inspiration for this post. Maybe visiting the pathways and pit stops once patronized by such imaginative masters will provide a little motivation to a certain London weary girl…