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A Love Letter To Old Stones
Why Oxford captured my heart and has held it ever since
I’ve been fortunate to have lived in many beautiful places around the world during the course of my life, and to have visited a great many more. Venezia approached via the Grand Canal is of course one of the most spectacular cities on Earth, not for size or gilded grandeur but rather for its astonishing juxtaposition of palazzi and water. Paris has its chic and its fin-de-siecle memories and of course Agra has the Taj Mahal. Cape Town, which was a run-down backwater when I knew it, is now a cosmopolitan city, albeit one with power cuts and a very unreliable water supply. San Francisco has moments of charm as does (somewhat surprisingly, perhaps) San Diego, and old Prague delights the eye almost everywhere you turn. Long ago I strolled along the canals of Sankt-Piterburg, uneasy in the knowledge that the Parisienne echoes were built on the bones of more than 300,000 serfs who were brutally worked to death so that the aristocracy could have somewhere pleasant to live. Sydney is a vibrant city and Perth, when I was there, was a pleasant but somewhat isolated city with perhaps the nicest climate in all of Australia. Adelaide was charming because, the center being confined on all sides by parks, one could walk across it in less than half an hour.
