Five weeks since the last post, and term is over again - it's scary how fast these eight-week terms speed by. So much has happened since the last post, I'm going to write about it in two parts: The first will be on the second half of Michaelmas term and the second on the last week since term ended.
I was still sick with my cold and cough for much of 5th week, which wasn't a whole lot of fun. On the Monday night (not Tuesday as I said in my last post) was Guy Fawkes. I could hear fireworks all around but couldn't see any, even when I took a short walk in the freezing cold around the neighbourhood. I had, however, seen some out of my window on the Saturday, which was better than nothing. I might have mentioned last year that I'd forgotten how pretty fireworks can be since the ban in SA seems to have limited the amount and variation of fireworks that are available.
The highlight of that week was the Saturday evening when I went to the Kilns to watch a performance of An Evening with CS Lewis by David Payne. David Payne is a British Actor who started up this one-man-show after playing CS Lewis in a stage performance of Shadowlands, a dramatic biography of Lewis' life. People would come up to him and ask him questions about the life of Lewis which he couldn't answer, and he thought it would be interesting to research and come up with a performance in which he, pretending to be the man himself, could answer those questions. The show has been running for a number of years all over America and also in Canada and he has eventually decided to bring it to Britain. From 7 to 11 November, he performed it in the library at CS Lewis' old Oxford house, the Kilns. The show was free of charge and a collection was taken up to aid the running of the Kilns Centre. I had heard at least two members of TLC talking about having seen the show in America and Canada, so I was quite excited to be able to see it myself. It was also the first time I got to see the inside of the Kilns, having only seen it once from the outside when I first arrived in Oxford last year.
An Evening with CS Lewis is a one-man-show in which David Payne pretends to be CS Lewis talking to a group of American authors in the final years of his life. He sits in a chair drinking tea and tells them his life story. Usually he does the performance for large crowds in theatres and the like, but the library of the Kilns could only fit in 20 people at a time. The show was excellent, although you could tell that it was written with an American audience in mind (he made a joke about iced tea) and that he was less used to acting in such an intimate setting (sometimes he came across as a little too theatrical, which I could see as working fine on a stage, but this made it less convincing as he sat on that chair in the library not far in front of a small group). I tried to imagine that he really was Lewis and couldn't quite convince myself. I think he also missed a few opportunities to make use of the fact that he was really in Oxford, in Lewis' house. For example he would refer to Headington (the town/suburb of Oxford where the Kilns is) as "the village" rather than just "here", and when he referred to the first house Joy, who would later be his wife, lived in, he could have said "just down the road" and pointed in the appropriate direction. But in all, it was a great performance and a privilege to be there. I had the opportunity to greet and thank him after the show. I also met two old ladies who were attending the show, one of whom said she was at Oxford 60 years ago and used to attend some of Lewis' lectures. The second lady (who it turned out was a Classicist, and like me, prefers Greek over Latin) had been to some of his lectures in Cambridge when she was training to be a teacher there. Apparently earlier in the week, a man had come to a performance who was a childhood friend of Douglas Gresham (Lewis' stepson) and used to play in the woods by the Kilns with him.
The following weekend, my friend Emily's parents came to visit from America. Mary (my other friend who likes hedgehogs) and I got to meet them on Saturday evening when we went out for dinner at the Eagle and Child. I also got to see them again on Sunday evening at and after church and on Tuesday before the weekly CS Lewis Society meeting. They are a lovely couple and it was great to meet them. On Sunday evening, one of the guys from the Worcester CU, Rob, who became a Christian earlier this year, was baptised at St Aldate's Church. I went along with a number of others from Worcester. It was the first time I had been to a service at St Aldate's (the other large evangelical Anglican church in Oxford) and we were treated to testimonies from a number of people who were to be baptised. It was an amazing evening, hearing how God has worked in the lives of these various people and especially in our friend Rob's. After the service those of us from the CU went up to pray with Rob which was a really powerful experience.
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| St Giles Christmas fair |
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| Peter, Michael and Emily |
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| St Giles fair |
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| St Giles fair |
In case you are starting to think that I didn't do any work in the second half of term, I really did. I finished my essay on Greek verb stems (mentioned in the last post) which was the last of my History and Structure of Greek tutorials. Since then, I have had three tutorials for Historical Linguistics (one of the other options for which I will be writing an exam in June). I wrote three essays on grammaticalisation (the process in which words in a language lose their lexical/word-based meanings and become grammatical forms like prepositions or prefixes and suffixes), analogy (the process in which forms change in a language based on other related forms) and the comparative method (the method historical linguists use to reconstruct the ancestors of language families based on what we know about the descendant languages)*.
In addition to the essays and tutorials, I was forced to come face-to-face with my thesis topic as I had to give a presentation on it on 27 November. It meant sitting down and working out exactly what I'm trying to do in a way that I could explain it to my course-mates, which was a good exercise. For those interested, my thesis is looking at Hellenistic/Roman Period Greek word order as used by the 2nd century Greek novelist Achilles Tatius. Greek word order is really free and I am trying to find out if there are any patterns that could help us identify a "standard" word order and am using Chomsky's syntactic framework (the Minimalist Program) to see if I can explain why we get the variation we do. (I may at some point write up a clearer explanation - "My thesis for dummies" (?) - for those for whom that makes no sense. Those who do understand what I'm talking about, I can send you the handout from my presentation if you are interested, though I don't know how much sense it makes in isolation). I was extremely nervous for the presentation, but it went pretty well in the end (though I went a bit over time).
The evening after my presentation Emily and I were treated to something I've been looking forward to since Myriam told me about it last Christmas. Every year on the last Tuesday of term, the CS Lewis Society has a Christmas party at the Kilns. There was a lovely spread of Christmas and other snacks (mince pies, cakes, cookies, Turkish Delight ;-) ) and mulled wine. Mulled wine is a Christmas phenomenon that they have here in Britain that consists of spiced heated wine. I've never tried it as I don't drink alcohol, but at the party they had alcohol-free mulled wine so I could finally try some. It tasted kind of like warmed grape juice with All-Spice added (probably not as exciting as the real thing) but at least I could get an idea of what the fuss was about. Part of the tradition of the evening is a reading from a short piece written by CS Lewis called Xmas and Christmas: A lost chapter from Herodotus. It's a piece I have loved ever since I first read it and has become even more special since I became familiar with Herodotus' actual works (and Herodotus became my favourite Greek author) and could see just how Lewis was imitating him. It's a satirical piece about this strange tribe that lives in Niatirb (Britain in reverse) and practises this strange annual festival called Exmas, which involves the stressful activity of sending Exmas cards and Exmas gifts to friends and family (a terrible task as one has to guess which of one's friends will send cards and presents and what the value of each gift will be so one can send a present of equal value to the friend). It also involves over-eating and drinking and and wearing paper crowns is on the whole a very stressful and depressing time. He goes on to talk about another festival practised by a smaller number of Niatirbians called Crissmas which takes place at the same time. Some say the two festivals are related, but he doubts this as observers of Crissmas, "doing the opposite to the majority of the Niatirbians, rise early on that day with shining faces and go before sunrise to certain temples where they partake of a sacred feast. And in most of the temples they set out images of a fair woman with a new-born Child on her knees and certain animals and shepherds adoring the Child." The passage was read out to us by Richard, one of the older members of the Society with an amazing knowledge of all sorts of things. He was the one last year who told me, after a Tolkien-related talk at the society, about the time when, as a boy, he met Professor Tolkien.
The evening was to get even better. We had been told we would be given a tour of the Kilns. What I didn't know is that one of the tour guides would be Walter Hooper, the literary advisor of Lewis' estate, who has been responsible for publishing much of Lewis' work posthumously. Mr Hooper is often present at society meetings and I always feel slightly in awe of him since he actually knew Lewis during his lifetime. I didn't realise that the man had actually lived with Lewis and his family at the Kilns in the later years of Lewis' life. Lewis believed that once an author published a work he had written, it was his responsibility to answer every letter his readers sent him. Lewis' brother, Warnie used to help with the letters (as he could use a typewriter and Lewis could not), but Warnie suffered from alcoholism and would go off for long stretches at a time. As a result, Walter was asked by Lewis to help with the letters (making him I guess a kind of secretary). More than a tour of the house, we got a first-hand tour of Walter's memories of Lewis. We would go into one of the rooms and Walter, being old, sat on a comfy chair while we stood around (or sat on the carpet like little children) listening to the stories.
Photos of the outside of the Kilns from my trip last year - I didn't get any from my visits this time around:
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| Grace and I at the Kilns |
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| The Kilns door |
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| The Kilns |
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| Outbuilding near the Kilns |
He told us about the first time he came to visit Lewis in his house. After a few of cups of tea, he (being an American man) asked Lewis if he could use the "bathroom". Lewis proceeded to take him to the room where the bath is (the toilet being in a separate room) and gave him soap and a towel and left him there. Eventually he plucked up the courage to tell him what he had really meant and Lewis laughed saying that that would teach him to stop using American euphemisms. He also told us about the time (not long after that first meeting) when he was invited to a gathering of The Inklings at the Lamb and Flag. One of my favourite stories was about how Lewis gave away all his earnings from the initial publication of The Screwtape Letters and the radio broadcasts that would become Mere Christianity to orphans and widows in need. He then got into trouble because he was supposed to have paid tax on those earnings and didn't have the money any more. He managed to work something out with the lawyers and after that set up a charity fund where he would give (I think it was a third) of his earnings so he could still pay tax and look after himself and those he was responsible for. He also shared how Lewis lived a very simple life, despite being an Oxford fellow and successful author. Apparently years after the end of Word War II, the Kilns still had black-out curtains because Lewis couldn't be bothered spending money on having them replaced. Eventually they had to be replaced after a lady insisted they be washed and they disintegrated. Walter said they could have lived a much more comfortable life, but Lewis was happy as he was and settled for "digestives and beer" over more luxurious food and drink.
The most ironic story was from after Lewis' wife, Joy died. When people learned that he had lost his wife, they thought to encourage him by sending him copies of a recently published book on grief: A Grief Observed, by NW Clerk. The book was actually written by Lewis himself, but published under a pseudonym. To kept up the secret, he made Walter write thank you letters to those who had sent the book, the poor people oblivious that Lewis himself was the author. A fun fact we learnt from the "tour" was that Walter Hooper's cat is named "Blessed Lucy of Narnia". Apparently the Italian town of Narni, after which Lewis named Narnia (Narnia was the old Roman name for the town) really has a saint called Lucy - Blessed Lucy of Narni. I was quite excited when Mr Hooper referred to the Kiln's gardener, a man named Fred Paxford, who is said to have been the inspiration behind the beloved overly pessimistic character Puddleglum in The Silver Chair. When Lewis and Joy were about to leave for a long-planned trip to Greece, Paxford insisted that they really should not go as there had been a tragic plane crash in the last week and they were likely to die while flying over. I wish I'd been taking notes - there were so many more awesome stories. Emily and I were sitting with out mouths agape half of the time. While I really enjoyed David Payne's Evening with CS Lewis that I attended earlier in the term (listening to a man sitting in the Kiln's pretending to be Lewis tell us about Lewis' life) it paled in comparison after being in the Kilns while Walter Hooper as himself told us stories of his memories of CS Lewis. It was an evening I will not easily forget.
I spent the rest of the week, finishing off my essay on analogy. Although it was the last week of term, I had one more essay and tutorial last week, in "9th week", as I had missed a week earlier in term when I was unwell.
I'm going to end my account there for now. Last weekend (between the last two essays), Bethany (my friend from TLC whom I stayed with in Easter and who went to watch The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe stage show in London with me) came to visit. Emily and I also did some fun and touristy things around Oxford, but I'll keep those accounts (with pictures) for the next post.
Thanks again for reading my posts (apologies for the length of this one). I hope you enjoyed reading about some of the experiences from this term as much as I enjoyed experiencing them.
* These are gross simplifications of the topics. If you want to know more about them you're welcome to send me a message, email etc.
