Oxford Open Doors

 It's a long ride from Swindon but it's free with the senior bus pass. There were places it might be worth looking inside. I was in good form and had finished the Times crossword just beyond Faringdon, taking care to only fill it in when one wasn't being thrown about by the prolifically pot-holed roads.

Neither of the student guides I asked in St. John's College had the faintest idea where Larkin's rooms might have been and some of the more recent architecture was a bit like that at Lancaster, so not uplifting. I've been in a couple of unprepossessing Oxford colleges before and was hoping for more.

Magdalen is surely that but I might have been expecting too much. The nameplate at the bottom of a staircase presumably indicated the accommodation of a professor that lived there and it brought to mind the dessicated-looking elderly dons who came in to sit at top table for dinner in halls at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1979, taking half an hour from their Herodotus for some bleak sustenance. It was so-so.

The main object of interest was the Painted Room in Cornmarket Street where Shakespeare may or may not have stayed with the Davenants on his journeys between London and Stratford. Not in that room, the guides didn't think, because they thought the Davenants served wine and might not have taken paying guests but William probably stayed at an inn nearby. I decided against enquiring what they thought about the prospects of him having fathered William Davenant while he was passing through. But one wants to see these places when the rare opportunity presents itself. It may not help much but there's a vague sense of feeling slightly more a part of it by having been. For example, I hadn't realized that the Davenant's premises included a branch of BetFred. Had Shakespeare been in Oxford on St. Leger day, he might have had his couple of ducats each way on the 11/1 winner.

But the main action of Oxford Open Doors for me was extra curricular. It was necessary to queue to see the Painted Room, only 15 being allowed in at a time. Time was on my side so I did, disappointed to be 16th in line for the next intake but at least glad to have a bit of wall to lean on to read the Times Saturday Review while I waited.

There appeared, in a blaze of entitlement and extreme self-confidence, a lurid caricature of Bullingdon Club and Brideshead Oxford who, to be fair to him, might not have noticed the 45 minute queue but took alarmingly quick exception to being informed of the procedure by the lady in charge of crowd control, not that such a role ought to be too demanding at such an esoteric attraction.

He immediately asked for the lady's name and she offered a variation of the Sicilian Defence by asking for his. He said that he didn't like her manner.

At that point I looked up from my reading matter and said that she had been perfectly civil to him and it was him that was being rude.

Excuse me, he said, are you reading your newspaper or listening to our conversation?

I said I'd been pretending to read the paper but had in fact been listening to him being rude. His reaction was to push his hand into my face thus causing my hat to fall from my head and onto the ground and then he exited stage left in some haste.

What a man. I'm not sure I've witnessed such outlandish gaucheness in the flesh before. Perhaps not even on telly in the blond Etonian, Bullingdonian, Oxfordian Prime Minister we had a few years ago whose behaviour was consistently boorish. 

I would be glad to renew our acquaintance and perhaps interview him but unless he finds this reference, recognizes himself and makes contact, it seems highly unlikely. I don't want to press charges for assault- that idea hadn't even crossed my mind until someone else suggested it. We had a lorra lorra fun there in the name of Englishness and our cultural heritage. I'd really like to find out more about him.