Oxford

It’s my fourth time here, but the others were all day-trips. You can’t really savor the atmosphere of a place when you’ve never fallen asleep there deep in the night and then tasted the fresh morning air.

Actually, I’ll be spending five nights here.

On almost every trip to London I end up having multiple meetings at Paddington Station. That’s because I’m usually so busy in London that the only way I can possibly see someone is on way out to Heathrow before departing. Today, of course, it was a matter of waiting for the train to Oxford, but I had two great conversations out there.

The conversations are almost always launched at that Costa Coffee in there, for the purely accidental reason that it’s so easy to say “meet me at the Costa next to Track 1.” No one can possibly miss that place. As a result, that little non-descript chain coffee outlet is utterly saturated with memories for me from across the years.

Had a completely mediocre dinner here for an outrageous price. There must be good food in Oxford somewhere, right? I’ve never even stayed here as late as dinnertime on my past visits, so I really have no idea.

In fact, I’ve never seen Oxford in the dark at any time. Always sunny and mid-day when I’ve been here before.