{A trip to Oxford}[16th November 1969]

[Redbook1:96-97][19691116:1645]{A trip to Oxford}[16th November 1969]

Sunday 16th November, 4.45pm

            For once I feel like writing in diary form, because an actual event has happened which, though seemingly boring, holds interest for me at least.

            I went to Oxford yesterday.  It was to have been a trip to see “Twelfth Night” by a dozen or so members of the Literary and Arts Society, but both transport and tickets fell through, so [...]V, the society's president, took three of us in his car: the two secretaries, F.S. and B.R, and myself.

            Seen objectively, we had what could have been a very boring time.  It was (continuously) cold and (intermittently) wet.  We went to the Ashmolean, had tea in a hot restaurant, visited Blackwell's, had a look at several of the colleges, including Christchurch, had supper at the Turf, saw two films at the Scala cinema, and came home.

            I feel changed by it, somehow.  It has lifted me out of a short term rut of hopelessness -- as I intended -- but for some reason I find myself now in a longer-run sense of complete pointlessness -- which is very different.  In the former I have an aim which I fear I shall never attain; in the latter, the aims themselves begin to seem worthless.

            Partly because of the cold, partly because of the unusual situation, I feel myself now to have seen things then with slightly different eyes -- both people and environment.  Oxford is a very peculiar place.*

*(I’m a showman at heart).

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