… this time for real

I’m writing this from Edinburgh.  It’s not the first time I’ve been in Edinburgh since I started this blog: once I was here and chose not to write about it for several reasons which I’ll explain in a footnote,¹ and once I was here but the blog was on hiatus.  But this time is different, because now I live here—meaning that, once and for all, I’ve escaped Oxford.

Moving house during a pandemic is a strange experience, and perhaps not to be recommended.  The need to socially distance from those helping us to pack and unpack makes an already stressful process a whole lot harder.  What would have been a pleasant half-hour stop at Tebay services on the drive up² became a quick scurry in and out of a roadside Costa at Todhills rest area, chosen specifically because we thought it would be quiet.³  (It was.)  And that’s without mentioning the risk of being told to self-isolate in the fortnight before moving and having to try and delay the move, a circumstance which almost came to pass.

And, having moved, I’d love to spend time sampling the delights of a city I fell in love with when I came for a course here three years ago.  But we can’t: just as we’ve been avoiding Oxford city centre, we’re now avoiding Edinburgh’s as being far too busy for comfort.  A lot of the attractions are indoors anyway, and perhaps not even open.  Similarly, while I’d love to meet up with all my Edinburgh friends, I’m relatively uncomfortable with that, particularly against the current background of rising cases, and rumours that Nicola Sturgeon will be announcing a Scotland-wide semi-lockdown within the next few days.

But I don’t want to make it sound too negative, because it’s not.  The house we’re in is lovely, the people we’ve spoken to briefly-and-from-afar are friendly, and the temperature is much more my style.  Plus the water is soft, so it actually tastes nice, and there’s no more filtering it to avoid limescale in the kettle and bits in your tea.  Hopefully, too, we’ll be able to explore some of the surrounding beautiful countryside, which I’ve rarely been to before (having normally visited the city by train)—though obviously there may be periods when we can’t, if restrictions are re-imposed.

So what of this blog?  For a start, I still have more to write on here that serves the blog’s original purpose, of noting places to visit near Oxford.  In particular, I have two more write-ups to do of coronavisits in and around the city itself, which I’d recommend as places to go for a walk if travel is again restricted, and one more of a nearby village which you won’t visit but that I can squeeze a post out of.  There’s also the long-promised post listing all the places nearby that I didn’t write about, so that the gazetteer is as complete as it can be.

Apart from that, I remain a student at the University of Oxford,⁴ so there is a very real (if also symbolic) sense in which I have not escaped Oxford just yet.  Indeed, it will always hold a special place in my heart, as the city I spent eight years in, and as the first place I lived away from home.  So perhaps I will never truly escape, and this blog can go on forever.

But also, for now, I still enjoy writing it—after all, I restarted it as a distraction from the first wave of coronavirus, so there seems no sense stopping as we enter the second.  So you can expect more of the “new normal” mix of stuff on here, for at least the next few months.  And, who knows, maybe eventually I’ll change the name to “Escaping Edinburgh”.  But hopefully not for a while yet.

¹ Partly, I figured Edinburgh was too far to go for a day trip from Oxford, though later, through necessity, I have written about several such places.  But mostly it was that my trip was centred around a visit to the European Championships diving competition, with the rest of the time spent at Fringe shows.  I am not an entertainment critic, mainly because I’m easily satisfied with a show, so most of my reviews would have been “Yeah, I enjoyed it”.  Also they were almost all small shows put on by student groups or up-and-coming comedians, and so I’d have felt mean giving negative reviews even if they’d been warranted.

² Tebay, in Cumbria, is run by an independent concern, and is therefore one of the few motorway service areas not to be operated by Moto, RoadChef or Welcome Break.  It’s all the better for it, having a farm shop, a café with freshly-baked produce and hearty meals in the restaurant, even if it is still more expensive than your average high street outlet.  Outside a pandemic, highly recommended.

³ Todhills, just on the English side of the border, is not a full service station, and is very close to two others; it exists because, when they upgraded the relevant stretch of road to motorway status, it wouldn’t have been sensible to close the roadside facilities that already existed.  You almost certainly don’t care about this.

⁴ I’m complying fully with residence restrictions on students, because I’ve already kept the six necessary terms to graduate with a DPhil.  I checked the flowchart they sent out and everything.  Oxford is weird.