The Other Place

If your allegiance is to Cambridge, then Oxford is The Other Place – and vice versa.

Oxford is strange. And its cathedral is unique. Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford – it’s never called Oxford Cathedral, and God forbid you should write Christchurch – is also a College chapel. The Head of the College is also, necessarily, the Dean of the Cathedral.

More Prime Ministers (and lots of other kinds of distinguished establishment figures) were educated at Christ Church College than anywhere else.

Christ Church even operates in its own time zone. It does not follow Greenwich Mean Time, or British Summer Time, but lags five minutes behind – for very good reason, that I can’t explain.

So I’m nervous of being here, and performing in the Cathedral’s Chapter House, after Evensong. It’s all a bit intimidating.

Those feelings are not dissipated on a long ride, in kind but not hot sunshine, along quiet roads where the heavy-headed grasses on either side bow and sway and nod nicely in the direction of travel.

Fossebridge has a discreet sign pointing towards a “Saxon church”, so a minor diversion is required. Not much of it is truly Saxon, of course, but it has a real feel of having been there almost forever.

Suddenly, after a few hours of quiet road, I’m in the traffic jams of Burford, where coach loads – literally – of tourists are taking in the sights. A big service has just concluded in the very grand church, and we’re allowed in to see many centuries of faith recently re-ordered to face North, and in the style of a conference centre.

But all this is just delaying my arrival in Oxford. And where else in England could your arrival coincide with a huge religious parade closing the main road past the cathedral you’re heading for?

I’ve been told my bike has to go in the bike store by the Porters’ Lodge. For security reasons – the College has yesterday had its triennial Ball, and lots of those distinguished alumni we met earlier will be here – the bike cannot go anywhere near the Chapter House.

But it won’t fit. Just take it into the Chapter House, if you like, the porters wave. Christopher, the American verger, gives me every kind of assistance, including a special “access all areas” green lanyard, to distinguish me from the tourists. I feel very important.

There’s time to look around the cathedral, and the college, to find a baked potato in a baking hot cafe across the road, and be back in time for Evensong.

I meet the Dean just before Evensong. She excuses her bleariness on the basis that she saw last night’s Ball through to the end – the College is also celebrating its 500th anniversary, so it was a special one. I’m not sure why they sat me where the preacher would normally sit, but it gives me a good view. The Frideswide Girls’ Choir sings angelically.

There’s hardly time to turn around, and certainly no time to practise, before the evening’s performance, which has to start five minutes late, of course. Christopher has to fetch a few extra chairs, and the audience is deeply attentive.

Afterwards we sit in the choir’s kitchen, eating their leftovers, and talking about his PhD, and his translation from Kansas to Oxford, before I pedal across town, to collapse with exhaustion. But I can’t sleep, even though it’s way past bed time. I’m thinking about how scared I was of coming here. Nowhere else have I been so welcomed. Nowhere else have I had such a lovely audience. Nowhere else has the administration and promotion been so fully behind the endeavour. The Other Place? I’ll never think of it like that again.