something about a wall

There’s frost on the window. Yesterday I went to a sweater shop in the covered market here in Oxford and asked the owner if locals find this windy weather cold. I’d been shivering all day but noticed plenty of people walking around without a coat—one student even wore shorts and flip flops. “It’s been unseasonably warm,” she told me and then added, “We’re bracing for the storm.” I turned on BBC News once I got back to my hotel and sure enough—“hurricane force winds and heavy rain” are predicted for later today. I bring bad weather with me wherever I go! Or hurricanes follow me: Ivan, Katrina, Sandy. Right now it’s sunny and there are blue skies overhead. I’ve been sleeping at odd hours—crashed yesterday after taking two two-hour walking tours to get acquainted with the city and its history. I don’t know what people do at night here in Oxford but there are some loud parties and/or pub crawls near my hotel that last until dawn. Hopefully the storm will keep things quiet tonight.

I had all kinds of ideas for a blog post yesterday but didn’t feel like writing when I got back to the hotel. Yesterday was my birthday and, as is my custom, I spent it on my own. I wasn’t alone necessarily but I was unknown and that’s the best part of travel: anonymity. There were plenty of other foreigners on the first tour; our guide had us share our country of origin and I was the only American in the group (I said I was from NYC to keep things simple). Others were from India, Pakistan, Colombia, Finland, and Australia. Every so often the guide would stop to tell us some interesting fact about Oxford’s 38 colleges, and she would look at me or the Indian tourists and say, “Well, in 1208 no one here even knew about America or India.” Which prompted me to start keeping a mental chronology. When did the English first travel to Africa? To Nevis? To Canada? What were “those assholes” doing in 1713? Because that’s how I divide the Brits in my mind. There are the lovely people living their quaint, lovely lives in England and then there are “those assholes” who bought and sold enslaved Africans and transported them to the Americas. I tend to think of my personal history starting at that point and it was something of a relief to come back to the hotel last night and watch an episode of Who Do You Think You Are featuring Hugh Quarshie, a Black British actor whose Dutch great-great-grandfather had married an African vendor (right) and left property to his mixed-race children. There are no simple divisions in reality—I do know that. But it’s not always easy to reconcile the warring impulses within. Being in England stirs an awkward blend of bliss and shame. I feel at ease because so much of the culture is familiar, yet I also feel enraged and excluded and invisible. As we walked around the city yesterday morning I kept feeling the urge to photograph the old medieval walls. There’s something about a wall that’s alluring even as—or perhaps because—it shuts me out. And that’s how exclusivity works, right? You have to believe that what lies on the other side of the wall is better than the space you currently occupy. And it’s that belief that drives you to search for an opening, a door in the wall. I’ve been a medieval geek for a long time. I think it started in the 5th grade when Mrs. Wistow introduced us to a novel about a boy living in a walled city as the plague swept across Europe. We also learned to sing “Scarborough Fair.” That year was pivotal for me—we also watched a BBC adaptation of E. Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet, which made a lasting impression on me. That was my first year at that school; my parents had divorced, we moved out of my spacious childhood home and into a townhouse in the adjacent city of Scarborough, and I entered a new school where I was not recognized as a gifted student. Maybe that was my first wall. I encountered other forms of racism at that school, so perhaps I tried that much harder to fit in. Or maybe I would have loved medieval history no matter what.

Time to venture out to forage for food. Will bundle up and face the cold sunshine…