I am stood in a queue in the Waterstones book shop on Broad Street. Before me lies an interminable wait – and all I want to do is read my new copy of The Story of Hong Gildong. I am sure that similar experiences will be familiar to many of the Cherwell’s readers. In a way, being stuck in an interminable queue is as quintessentially ‘Oxford’ as gowns, the Radcliffe Camera, or a late-night visit to Hasan’s. Typically, I have an episode of The Rest Is History or an audiobook with the reassuring tones of Stephen Fry to lessen the aggravation. Today, my earphones are discharged. The poet William Blake once wrote of the ability “to see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour”. Perhaps he would have been less enchanted with the ability to draw events out if he had been here with me. Two people in front of me chat inanely. I am reminded of Waiting for Godot. Still, as a PPEist, such potent boredom can and does eventually lead to only one thing: speculations about the likely consequences of my becoming omnipotent.
Leaving aside questions about the corrupting tendency of power, and the absolutely corrupting tendency of absolute power (would what I would change change if I were absolutely powerful?), here then are the three things I would change about Oxford if deified:
1. I am immediately struck that the first thing to go would be the weather. The famous opening of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities might have been written about the average Oxford day: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…” Just last week, I had left my accommodation in confident expectation of a ‘partly cloudy’ day, and was rudely confronted on my return journey with a downpour of truly diluvian proportions. Soaked and downtrodden, I made it back with a new sympathy for the Roman emperor Caligula, who reputedly declared war on the sea. Were I imbued with divine power, the atmosphere would shortly be abolished, or if this was not feasible for some reason, replaced with a more congenial state of affairs.
2. Second on the divine to-do list, a move towards faux-mediaeval and eccentric naming standards. If you are reading this in bafflement, simply imagine walking to lectures not in “Exam Schools”, but the “Doom Convocation”. Imagine attending a tutorial at the Saïd Business School under the “Magi of Marketing”. Imagine receiving on a marked essay not a “first” but “Boccræftig” (Bookcrafty). What a world that would be. Such a policy would markedly improve not only lecture turnout, but also student welfare.
3. Finally, the lack of canals throughout central Oxford is an oversight on the part of its planners which I would be quick to resolve. At present, punting is merely a fun pastime for the summer months – a curious historical hangover. Imagine, however, a Venice-style patchwork of waterways running through the centre of Oxford. We could punt from college to college, tutorial to tutorial, bookshop to bookshop. The manifold benefits of such a change are immediately apparent: such a transport mechanism would be environmentally friendly, biodiverse, and enormous fun, among other upsides. It would also prepare us for the possibility of a second Great Flood, which we oughtn’t to discount.
Plainly, reform would not stop here. I cannot imagine online college room-booking forms surviving long. I am, however, nearing the front of the queue. Further rumination will have to wait…
