More Spirit Than Animal

THE PRIZE

The journey from rapprochement to happily married couple was work in progress, doors once cautiously held ajar were now thresholds to be crossed. But all the time the silk thread kept us attached to her father, both trip wire and marital lifeline, the sun glinting off its slender promise, caught in my peripheral vision. I understood she was her Daddy's girl but I had my pride.

'Daddy said this was one of the things he likes about you,' she said without looking up.

I didn't grasp her point.

'Your pride...so unlike the usual young men he meets...too eager to book a seat on the gravy train...but you....he admitted he had misread you.'

The rhetoric flowed easy between suppressed half truths to undeclared disappointment. But half truths no less than whole truths carry little sway when truths compete. For truth to be epistemologically incontestable there must be an a priori foundation....snow is white....true...well only if snow really is white.

Thalia spoke of ambition and familial unity and I of the soul's salvation as if the two were mutually exclusive. It was becoming obvious that we were moving further apart the more we presented our positions. And yet there was harmony in the realisation, an acceptance of how things really were.

I knew that our happiness depended upon our ability to at least understand why we did what we did. But my shadow-self could feel a cold wind coming down from the highlands where too much lay beyond my control.

So first things first, establish the base line

As a legal graduate, Thalia was working for St Giles Legal, a law firm in the High and a cycle ride from our new home. I declared my ambition to paint alongside the new business but my heart could not shake a sense of her being some sort of prize. And Thalia, continued as if the unpleasantness had never happened. As if wounds were healed and the scars disappeared. She said I brooded which was true. She said I had not let go...also true. Melancholia, the shadow-self does not just take a vacation.

And Oxford is like no other city. There is a schizophrenic quality, as if the patient were not fully conversant with the real world. It does not have the self confident swagger of more muscular cities and it is slow on the uptake like a bright kid with dyslexia and maybe a touch autistic. A transient population plays a factor too in destabilising any sense of permanence. Students out, tourists in, so the annual cycle goes. Oxford exists in some Georgian time warp.

There is a claustrophobic quality to the restricted streets unable to widen as the traffic increases. The university buildings built around a thousand year old town grid crowd in and loom over the life blood pumping through the narrow alleyways. The effect is of an intense mind restricted by an inadequate body. Hawking was at Cambridge but Oxford could just as easily represent the soul of such a man.

Arterial roads breach the old city turnpikes and bring you face to face with industrial Oxford, the evil twin who will not leave. Here is the other Oxford with its own anti establishment culture of hard labour, immigrant workers and all the grubby trappings of the working man. The tension has been there between town and gown ever since the sun first set on the ancient burgh town walls.

The shadows of the city were our attendants, watchers, spies and whisperers. Standing on corners and hurrying through the alleyways disappearing the moment we turned. When they came into our townhouse we agreed it was time to step away, to pack up our things and fly away to the rarified air of the Catskills in New York State. Of course it was to a cabin owned by Daddy but no matter, that was something I was having to get used to. We would follow in the footsteps of Thomas Cole and his quest for the wilderness paradise of pre-imperial America. A few miles out of Newburgh with breathtaking views over the Hudson we would weather the uncertain climate within and without.