Don’t be a tosser!

Wednesday 31^st August; Oxford

The trouble with mooring in Jericho is its proximity to the main line.  Trains go straight through, but also slow down to stop at Oxford Station (screech, screech).  And they also pull away from the station, more and more frequently from about 5am!  They seem to have stopped the practice of diesel engines sitting noisily for long periods, thank goodness.  Towpath users are pretty quiet at that hour of the morning, though if it’s later in the day they are chatting to each other or on the phone.  I took Meg for a play on Port Meadow after breakfast.

Come on Mum!

We had hoped our daughter and her partner could join us at some point, but work commitments have made that impossible.  Instead we went to the University Natural History museum to see the dinosaurs.

T. rex

It's hard to photograph the bigger exhibits, because of the tracery of the ironwork that supports the glass in the roof.  That is worth a photographic study of its own, but not on this post.  We were there quite early, and as the morning wore on more and more small children arrived.  It was lovely to hear their excited cries and questions.

Iggy's hand

That’s not all there is of course.  We enjoy looking at the insect displays, which have lots of interesting facts to learn.  As we were looking at them (they are up in the gallery) a museum worker walked past with a couple of drawers of specimens, trailing the odour of moth balls behind him – we saw a small display about the damage live insects such as weevils can do to the pinned specimens, so precautions must be taken.  

We didn’t go into the Pitt Rivers museum, which is in the same building, as we have done a lot of walking in the last few days and we find the ‘museum shuffle’ takes it out of you.  On the way out we saw the immense skull of a humpback whale, nicely positioned in front of the arches of the exit.

We had to pop into Tesco on the way back to the boat, and then went to the Old Fire Station near the bottom of George Street for lunch.  Formerly known as the Crisis Café, it’s now called the Damascus RoseKitchen.  It is “an Oxford-based social enterprise serving traditional Middle Eastern dishes made with love by Arabic-speaking refugee women”.  The cooking is currently done by five Syrian refugee women, and profits still go to help the homeless.  And the food, which is mostly vegan, was excellent!  Dave had moussaka (not the Greek kind) and I had Mujadara, which is a mixture of lentils and bulgur wheat with gentle spicing and fried onion.  Yum.  And you can still get a proper cup of tea.

On the way back up the canal I snapped the stream which you’d probably run aground in if you passed the weir markers below Isis lock – but it's clearly good for canoe slalom.

We spent the afternoon by the river on Port Meadow with the dog and the paper.  There is almost no litter on the meadow – it’s far too large for a patrol to keep it clean, and maybe the wind blows it elsewhere, but it could have something to do with this poster.

Maybe CRT  should have something similar.  We had a quiet evening on board.  As dusk fell last night, some people arrived in the boat yard opposite with some equipment – they called across, in case we were concerned they were up to no good, that it was a night-vision camera and a bat-detector.  We haven’t seen bats here, but I do hope they detected some.  They quietly crept away some time last night and we didn’t hear a thing.

0 miles, 0 locks, but dinos, vegan deliciousness and walking.