The City of Dreaming Spires

My sixth form chemistry teacher tried to persuade me to go to Oxford University. Actually, that’s a lie. He offered the entire class an option. Briefly it was this:

You can go to Oxford (or Cambridge) but if you want to you must excel at all of you’re a Level subjects and then exceed them. You must take S-level exams – and pass them – and then take an entrance exam. 

For the first time in my life I was forced to examine my own potential. I found all my A-Level courses challenging enough but then I had to do additional work to pass yet another set of exams to get to Oxford (or Cambridge).

I decided that A-Levels were enough for me and I would do my best to pass them and go to a university that I could achieve.

Why am I telling you this?

Because I finally made it to Oxford University after all these years.

I hasten to add – just as a visitor – not a student.

Mrs PM and I are on a quest to visit British cities with a heritage and history that we have ignored in our lives so far. I am ashamed when American tourists say to me:

“You live in England and you’ve never been to Oxford? I have and I live thousands of miles away. You should be ashamed.”

And the truth is I am ashamed – hence our quest.

This weekend it was the turn of Oxford to suffer a visit from the PMs. We found a bed and breakfast with a car park that was just ten minutes’ walk from the city centre. I must admit, I was excited. I had heard that Oxford was a beautiful little city full of history and tradition and I wanted to experience this first hand.

Compared to Manchester, Oxford is a very small city. The centre itself is easy to cover on foot. It didn’t take us too long to get our bearings. We arrived on Friday at around 2pm and, after a pub lunch near to Christ Church College, we mooched around the city for a couple of hours with no real plan of action.

Oxford has a few park and ride sites, which means that you can park your car away from the city centre and catch any one of a number of buses into Oxford itself and stroll around in a city that seems to be populated only by taxis, buses and bikes.

And that’s one of the first things I noticed – the sheer volume of bikes either riding around the streets or chained to railings and special bike areas dotted around the city centre.

Bike City

As we strolled around the city I spotted a little passageway with a sign pointing to “The Famous Turf Tavern”. I was intrigued and led Mrs PM down the passageway at the end of which we found the pub that the sign referred too. It was an opportunity to have a quick pint in a 13th Century alehouse that has featured in Inspector Morse and also gets a mention in the Thomas Hardy novel, Jude the Obscure.

The bar was wonderfully quaint with a low beamed ceiling that I very nearly smashed my head against.

“How many people bash their heads?” I quipped to the barmaid, who must have heard the question a thousand times.

“Lots,” she replied with a polite smile.

The pub itself was full of foreign visitors and Oxford students, a couple of whom appeared to be dressed up for a graduation ceremony.

After a further bit of mooching around the city, we returned to our hotel before strolling out again for an evening meal.

The next day, we had a planned walking itinerary to take in the sights, taking in Alice’s Shop as a starting point. Oxford is the birth place of Alice in Wonderland and Alice’s Shop is mentioned in the book. Today it sells lots of Alice in Wonderland gifts and mementos. Apparently Alice is based on a real girl called Alice Liddell. To be honest, I was intrigued and started looking for a white rabbit and a hole big enough to fall down.

Crossing over the road from Alice’s Shop, we explored Christ Church, including the Cathedral. Sadly, the Great Hall, the inspiration for Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies, was closed because our weekend coincided with the Oxford literary festival. It seems that Oxford has now, to a certain degree, claimed Harry Potter as one of its sons, as was evident from the shops selling Harry Potter memorabilia around the city.

The Great Hall in Hogwarts?

Sadly, not open to Plastic Mancunians today.

Our walk took us to most if not all of the other sights in Oxford including the Sheldonian Theatre, the Bodleian Library, the Carfax Tower and the Radcliffe Camara, via a museum or two. I even found a place to hide my fear of heights as we climbed up the relatively small Saxon Tower of St Michael, a tower that is almost a thousand years old. Although it wasn’t as tall as some of the structures I have been stupid enough to climb, I found my legs shaking slightly as I tried to take photographs of the city from this lofty position.

I was particularly fascinated with the Bodleian Library (known by the Oxford elite as “The Bod”), containing over 11 million items. I would have loved to have dived in and asked to wander around the old bookshelves full of dusty and ancient works, reading words from times gone by on all manner of fascinating subjects. Sadly, time and the Oxford literary festival put paid to that idea.

Our time in Oxford was completed on Saturday night with a Chinese meal and a final late evening stroll around the city before retiring back at the hotel for a good night’s sleep before the 160 mile journey back to Manchester.

Here are a few photos we took of the city.

A big bell in the Saxon Tower at St Michael's

Radcliffe Camara

Bodleian Library

Oxford riverside

One of the many churches

Hertford Bridge (aka The Bridge of Sighs)

Finally, here are a few fun facts about Oxford.

(1) Oxford was the capital of England during the English Civil war.

(2) Adolf Hitler had plans to invade England during the World War 2 and if he had succeeded he would have made Oxford his base. This was one of the reasons why he didn’t attempt to bomb the city.

(3) Christ Church Cathedral has a bell called Old Tom that strikes 101 times at exactly 9:05 pm. Traditionally this is a curfew signal for students who should immediately cease their late night shenanigans and return to the college.

(4) Oxford is home to the world’s first public museum, the Ashmolean Museum, opened in 1683.

(5) Twenty six British Prime Ministers were educated at Oxford including Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and the current incumbent, David Cameron.

If you ever get a chance to visit Oxford, I would recommend that you do. And let me know if you say a white rabbit running around – or Lord Voldermort.

Top Ten Movie Villains

A while ago, I wrote a post called Rooting For The Bad Guy where I admired the evil that appears in TV and movie fiction.

As a follow up to that post I would like to offer to you my top ten movie bad guys. As a rule, I love movie villains, possibly more than the heroes themselves and many have made me cheer out loud, there evil and nasty ways triumphantly upsetting the status quo and spitting in the face of lawful and decent behaviour.

Without further ado, here are my top ten movie villains:

10. Lord Voldemort

Before you start laughing, yes I did enjoy the Harry Potter novels and movies. I realise that J.K.Rowling wrote them for kids but I found myself drawn into them on a day when I was off work sick. Mrs PM had left Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone next to the bed and I had nothing to read – so I went for it. And I loved it. The books, and films, steadily became darker and darker as they progressed – and in my eyes better and better. 

Lord Voldemort is like a dark shadow luring throughout the story and as the tales progress becomes more sinister and more evil culminating in fantastic confrontation in the final book/film. He is evil personified and his appearance is quite disturbing given the nature of these so-called children’s films. 

9. Emperor Commodus
I loved the Roman epics of old, movies like The Robe, Demetrius and the Gladiators, Ben Hur etc. and when Gladiator appeared, I was delighted that this genre had been modernised. The film remains one of my favourites. I particularly like Emperor Commodus, a twisted power hungry individual who murdered the family of the hero Maximum Decimus Meridius, murdered his own father and became the most powerful man in the world – the Emperor of Rome.

8. Darth Vader
As a kid, Darth Vader was the ultimate villain to me. Every box was ticked in the villain checklist. He was a fabulously powerful villain, dressed entirely in black with a deep booming voice  and had the Dark Side of the Force at his fingertips. Had I had anything to do with the Star Wars franchise, I would have preserved his malevolence and not allowed him to succumb to the power of virtuosity as he did in Return of the Jedi. Darth Vader should have remained evil.

7. General Zod
Superman is the ultimate superhero and in order to conquer him, you need an equally powerful supervillain. Enter General Zod who appeared in Superman II and the new offering Man of Steel. General Zod is a power hungry psychopath whose only desire is to rule everything, a kind of superpowered dictator. The greatest thing about him is that he has all the powers that Superman possesses and can stand up against him on equal terms, unlike other more feeble nemeses such Lex Luthor.

6. The Terminator
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s original Terminator is a superb villain. Devoid of emotion, extremely resourceful and incredibly powerful he has one purpose and one purpose alone; to kill Sarah Connor. He feels no remorse and anybody or anything that stands in his way are crushed with maximum prejudice. I realise there have been a few other Terminators but the original one suited Arnie’s limited acting ability perfectly. Arnie at the time was built like a leviathan and his physique and general demeanour was perfect for the part of a relentless killing machine.

5. Hannibal Lecter
I read the book Red Dragon by Thomas Harris before The Silence of the Lambs hit the big screen and I regarded Hannibal Lecter as more of a monster than Francis Dolarhyde, the central villain in that book. Hannibal Lecter came into his own in the two sequels, The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal and Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of the psychopathic killer in the movie adaptations is phenomenal. What I particularly like about Hannibal Lecter is the fact that he is a brilliant psychiatrist as well as a psychotic murdering cannibal, and this gives him the edge and the ability to get into the minds of people. The way in which he kills Inspector Pazzi in the film Hannibal is extremely disturbing and is a truly magnificent piece of cinema.

4. Colonel Hans Landa
Inglourious Basterds is one of my all-time favourite films and the star of it for me is the multilingual, intelligent and extremely brutal Jew Hunter himself Colonel Hans Landa, played so brilliantly by Christoph Waltz. Landa is a ruthless Nazi whose job is to hunt Jews, a job he loves and does extremely well. The character is wonderful because as well as being completely detestable, there is a charm about him and a undercurrent of malevolent humour. While watching the film I always think “I should despise this guy – but actually I love him.” That’s what makes him so brilliant.

3. The Joker
When I refer to the Joker, I mean the character played by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. In the old batman series, the Joker was one of Batman’s most famous nemeses and in the first Batman movie, he was also played wonderfully by Jack Nicholson. Up to that point he was more of a humourous comedy character but in The Dark Knight, all of the humour was stripped away and the Joker became a totally evil, psychotic and very disturbing terrorist who was deviously clever and almost certainly totally deranged. The Dark Knight deserves all the plaudits it gets but without Heath Ledger’s Joker it wouldn’t have been such a great film.

2. Agent Smith
The star of the Matrix trilogy, for me at least, is Agent Smith, a computer generated artificial intelligence who detests humanity, referring to them as a plague for which he is the cure. By the end of the trilogy he has become as powerful as the hero, Neo and the movie’s finale is the ultimate confrontation between the two. Agent Smith is played by Hugo Weaving, who delivers the dialogue in the way you would imagine a predator speaking to its prey just before devouring it.

1. Khan Noonian Singh
Khan is not only the greatest Star Trek villain; he is my favourite movie villain. He first appeared in an episode of the original series of Star Trek and then resurfaced in my favourite Start Trek movie, The Wrath of Khan. Khan is a genetically engineered superhuman who blames Kirk for marooning him on a planet that becomes a wasteland after a planetary explosion, leaving Khan and his followers to survive on their own in an extremely hostile environment. He plans revenge with dire consequences for Kirk and his crew.

“I’ve done far worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you – and I wish to go on hurting you!”

And finally...

Over to you, dear reader. 

Who are your favourite movie villains? 

Do you agree with any of mine?