My travels will be completed on Saturday week. I’ll be back home in Athens with friends and home and in easier contact with my daughter. This has been a summer to remember. As I think about all my travels, I have to start with the last place: Oxford. I am impressed with how people ride bikes everywhere, walk to shop for anything, take a bag for purchases, are thrifty, swiftly, and wise. On the surface, that is; the back story is not as clean.
People walk everywhere or bike because owning a car is so expensive here. On top of the cost of the car, the petrol prices, the insurance, and paying to park EVERYWHERE. There are no free rides. So they ride bikes to work, to play, to school, to shop. Bike riding is obvious in the gym I joined. The stationary bikes are seldom in use. Rule No. One: Where there is a metal pole, there is a bike locked. A gate, a bike rack, a rod, bikes, bikes, bikes. There are pink bikes, double bikes, triple bikes, trikes for pedaling infants and toddlers, bikes that fold up into a circle to carry up stairs and into flats, bikes that have baskets up front, in the back, in both places, bikes with child seats. At crossings, the police put signs: Bicyclists must dismount to cross. Getting hit by a bike in Oxford is more likely than a car or even a bus. There are bike lanes on the sidewalk and lanes within the bus lanes for bikes.
Bags are part of your daily carry case. I have two. One is from the Strand Book Shop in New York and can carry books so it is the designated bring-the- wine home bag. The other one is a muslin 75pp bag I got in Ireland at the grocery store and has been used, washed, and folded into my purse so many times it is falling apart at the seams and must be abandoned when I leave here.
Now to the wise. The city is crawling with Ph.Ds and want-a-bees. The walking tour leader at the bookshop next to Trinity was a don in architecture, retired and now gives walking tours of the buildings. He knows his stuff. People in black gowns walking with other often older people, or riding bikes, or rummaging through the Oxfam shelves where retired profs leave their libraries and you can find that vintage book for a pound. Graduate students living in graduate student only colleges, reading for a year before they take their exams to see if they can even qualify for entering Oxford to get a doctorate. Then it is three more years of reading and reading and reading before things get through. Wise. Lots of really smart people all around.
So where is the disconnect? Money. An Oxford don can make around £50,000 a year. You do the math on that one. Add in astronomical rents and housing costs, prices of cars, private schools for the children, if there are children and what do you get? You have really bright people working for several colleges and teaching summer school programs to make ends meet. You have people editing on the side and working all hours with families living 3 hours via airplane away. You have graduate students living in graduate housing because often there are subsidies in the room and in meals. However, dining rooms at the colleges only serve breakfast and dinner at certain hours…you miss those hours, you miss food. Dinner is not served on Saturday and Sunday nights. You cannot imagine the amount of food a student can pile on one plate at breakfast. There are no kitchens or cooking apparatus in the student dorms. Ironing is only permitted in the student laundry facilities, a remote little building designed for clothes washing and drying. Fire is a big deal here and every, every, did I say every function begins with someone giving the rules, exits and expectations in case of fire. As big as Trinity College is there are only 2 benches allowed where people can smoke. One morning as I arrived at the college, the porter nearly cleared the fence, ran across the lawn (NO ONE WALKS ON THE FRONT LAWN EVER) because an employee notified him that three people were smoking outside staircase 5. I was asked to tell people at breakfast that there are only 2 smoking areas. Who wants to burn down a 400 year old college?
Summary. People in Oxford may truly be eco conscious; however, economics is a big picture of why people are doing what they are doing. I must say that I have not conducted a fully designed survey, nor have I put in any statistics, but people talk with me and all the people I have met on the bus, waiting for the bus, in a queue somewhere have complained about their knees from the walking on cement, the bike riding injuries (bruises, being squeezed off the road by a bus or a car, falls, constant rain causing colds, unsuitable clothing for work, finding a place to leave the bike, carrying bags down the walkway and up stairs, storing bags when working, etc., etc., etc.) and the fatigue of all the time it takes to do even small errands. ‘Nuf said.
Leara Rhodes 