Oxford 16/8/2010

Oxford is great! I love it. I have been threatening to come here for the past couple of years, ever since I got my DSLR. What I can’t come to terms with is the amount of bikes that look like they have been abandoned, and the amount of signs saying ‘No Bicycles’. I see lots of bikes with seriously bent wheels, rusty chains, and no seat. Are they abandoned – or have people just been very careless with their keys for their bike locks? Is there a phantom seat-nicker at large? Do students buy a bike (or find one?) when they start at Uni and chain it up somewhere when they leave 3 years later, rather than the hassle of trying to take it home or sell it? But then I think if I was going to abandon a bike I would at least release it into the wild and NOT chain it up. Anyway – there are thousands of the things, everywhere. Next time the trumpet blowing scrap iron blokes come round I might suggest they take a trip to Oxford – plenty of scrap iron for them, and I won’t have to listen to their tuneless trumpeting. There is nothing quite like the noise they make. How much better would it be if they actually learnt to play the instrument and produced something good as they drive round at half-nine on a Sunday morning? I’d probably still want to kill them for waking me up, but I wouldn’t be planning quite such a painful and violent death.