CHAPTER 6: NORWICH, OXFORD & COVENTRY WHICH WERE JUST THE TICKET

Our next assignment was the cathedral in Oxford and, as we alighted from the Park and Ride onto the city's streets, my mind was taken back to a previous visit with my family when I'd have been about fourteen. Up until the time I moved to my secondary school, I had very little experience of public transport. Any journeys we made were by our family car so the prospect of catching two buses to get to school was rather exciting if a little nerve wracking to begin with. I was only one of two children from my village school going to the secondary school but the good news was that the other child was my best friend Ben. My mother took both of us on a trial run in the summer holidays so that we'd know what to do when the start of school arrived. When the big day arrived, it all went very smoothly and after a few weeks we were seasoned veterans. Although I had a bus pass, thus removing the need to buy bus tickets, I became fascinated with them because there were so many different companies operating in Nottingham and surrounding areas and so many types of tickets. There were rectangular card tickets that the conductor would punch holes in to indicate the fare paid, there were rolls of thin paper that spewed out of the conductor's machine as he or she manically rotated a handle, and there were little square ones in a range of colours that reflected the ticket price. I began collecting abandoned tickets, squeezing them into the back of my bus pass holder and then gluing them into a scrapbook once I got home. My collection began with tickets from the buses I travelled: passengers would discard them fairly quickly once they'd found a seat and so most were in fairly good condition. My first bus of the day was the 7:30 red double decker that came past my house. It belonged to the Trent Motor Traction Company and provided me with the first ticket of my collection. After a brief spell as part of the National Bus Company, it was denationalised and joined forces with another company, Barton Bus Transport. They ran coaches out to the west of the city so I would occasionally catch one if I was going to a friend's house in that part of the world. Their buses were also red with a logo showing Robin Hood holding a giant banner with the company name sprawled across it. My return journey from Nottingham was the same Trent service but at that time of day it was operated by Skills, a luxury coach company who specialised in coach tours and holidays. Then there were the green and white Gash buses that ran to Newark, dark blue South Notts buses that ran services to Loughborough, and West Bridgford buses in their brown livery that only served one of the city's suburbs.

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Other bus companies would stop at the city's Huntingdon Street bus station and I took to examining the contents of waste bins to try to locate any tickets I didn't have. Through this means I acquired my Midland Red ticket and one from a Lincolnshire bus company whose name escapes me. My favourite tickets were those of Nottingham City Transport. I caught two NCT buses each day and they were full of jettisoned tickets. Not only were they the little square ones in lots of different colours, on the back they carried advertising. This provided me with a branch to my collection as I sought to cover as many different adverts as possible. So complete was my love of buses that I devised various bus routes around my garden and those of my uncle and grandparents who lived in adjoining plots. I would then play at being a bus driver, steering my scooter along the garden paths, halting at request stops and spending a few minutes at the terminus before setting off on the return journey. I even started issuing my own tickets, complete with adverts on the back. The only ad I can recall is one for Dan's Hats. Family days out provided another opportunity to add to my collection and the likes of London Transport and Edinburgh tickets entered the scrapbook. My collection was still in its early stages when it came to an abrupt end. We were spending a family day out in Oxford. As we walked along one of the busy streets, I spotted a ticket in the gutter. I stepped out into the road to retrieve it. Whilst I was overjoyed to find an example of Oxford City Transport, my mother was less impressed. Not only was she concerned about my safety, she was horrified that I intended to keep the dirty rain sodden piece of rubbish I'd just picked up off the floor. I explained about my collection but to no avail. I was told to put it in a bin, which I reluctantly did. Suddenly, my whole collection felt worthless. What was the point of trying to collect things if your parents made you abandon one of your prize exhibits. From that day in, I collected bus tickets no more. I discovered the scrapbook in the loft a year or two ago when were clearing it out. It really was a scruffy affair, not helped by the way the sellotape I'd use to fix the tickets had turned from clear and sticky to brown and decidedly unsticky. 

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The streets of Oxford were particularly busy the day of our cathedral visit as it was one of those manic December Saturdays when everyone seems to go Christmas shopping. And, on the face of it, that was what we were there to do. A's original suggestion that he and I had a Christmas shopping day every year had less to do with the shopping and more to do with having a good day out; somewhere interesting where we could see the sights and call at a couple of pubs for something to eat and drink. These days out usually ended with me ready to head back home whilst he threw out suggestions about where we could go next. His entreaties such as, "Let's go to Weston-Super-Mare and stay over," were consistently met with a negative response from me and, in time, he began suggesting more and more outlandish things to do just to get the reaction. Even though I knew what he was doing, I bit every time. 

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The original Christmas shopping day had been just that. We travelled down the old Fosse Way on a magical winter's morning, the mist slowly rising over the landscape lit by the low morning sun. We chose Cheltenham as our first destination, or rather A chose Cheltenham because he spent his early 20s there, met H and had a ball with a new group of friends. Oh the memories he loved to share with me again and again and again. Oxford was our second shopping day and the first to tie in a cathedral. More of these Christmas shopping days will come later and, when we'd completed the cathedrals, we'd tie in a pier for a while before settling on a Leicester City away game as the focus of the visit. This being only our second excursion, we did actually do so Christmas shopping. I only had Sue to buy for but, as she had a birthday in January, I had a good few presents to buy. My reputation for thoughtful choices was not impressive. A first foray when I was in the sixth form found a number of girls expressing their surprise as they pulled off the wrapping to discover a very pretty box of paper tissues - my reasoning was that they looked impressive when wrapped up. Sue has never quite forgiven me for buying her a heated rear windscreen kit as her main present one Christmas - maybe not the glamorous present but you can't argue that it wasn't useful and I even offered to fit it for her. On future Christmas days out, I'd continued to purchase a range of items whilst A bought less and less. Eventually he changed his primary objective from buying to researching, this a couple of weeks before the big day, because all he really wanted to do was have a good day out, see the sights, have something to eat and drink and wind me up. Buying things got in the way of all that. 

I'm not sure how I developed a reputation for being a bit stingy with my money. I've always bought my round of drinks and shared the cost of meals out, but a reputation is what I had with A. As we trudged through the streets of Oxford, he espied a Lewis' department store and we decided to call there for a morning coffee. Wishing to dispel the image of me as a miser, I informed him that it would be my treat. Oh how excited he must have been. And then I discovered that they didn't take cards and I only had £1 cash. For A, this was gold, and the day Michael bought the coffees but had to borrow the money became part of his repertoire of tales. As did the Christmas shopping day in Ipswich a few years later when my first purchase was an ill-advised long-handled sweeping brush which I then had to carry around for the rest of the day, bashing other shoppers, getting it caught in doorways and dropping on fairly regular occasions.

After coffee,our plan was do some shopping, visit the cathedral and then head off off to Burford on the edge of the Cotswolds for lunch before spending the afternoon in, where else, Cheltenham. It was as well we did it that way round because when we arrived at the cathedral we found part of it had been cordoned off. A volunteer informed us that in the afternoon the BBC were going to be filming for a series they were making about church organs so the cathedral would soon be closing to the public. They were expecting the presenter, composer Howard Goodall, to arrive at any moment, although he still hadn't appeared by the time we finished looking around. He is one of my heroes, having written lots of serious music, much of it religious in nature, but whose is better known for penning the theme music to programmes such as Mr Bean, Blackadder and The Vicar of Dibley. 

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Having given us her little information bulletin about the filming, the volunteer then tracked us as we made our way around the cathedral which really didn't take that long. Unique amongst the cathedrals we were to visit, Christ Church is both a cathedral and a college chapel and quite petite. Oxford is the oldest university in the English-speaking world with teaching recorded here from around the time of the Norman conquest. It grew in size and stature over the next 150 years with the masters being recognised as a corporation or universitas in 1231. Deteriorating relations between the students and the townsfolk led to the creation of halls of residence around this time with three colleges, University, Balliol and Merton, being established between 1249 and 1264. Christ Church was originally the idea of Tudor statesman Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Wolsey had studied at Magdalene College whose building had been funded by the suppression of a number of monasteries in Hampshire. Seizing in this idea, when he became an influential figure in Henry VIII's circle and the pope's representative in England tasked with reforming monastic life, he closed 29 religious houses, the first being the priory of St Frideswide in Oxford. Having placed the nine canons living there in other monasteries, he used the site on the edge of Oxford to construct a new college to be called Cardinal College. Unfortunately for Wolsey, King Henry was relying on his influence with the pope to get his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled. When this didn't happen, Wolsey fell from grace and retreated to York where he was the somewhat absent archbishop. Eventually, like many who fell out with Henry, he was charged with treason and was on his way back to London to stand trial when he fell ill at Leicester Abbey and died there. Incidentally, when I was a child, I had a number of jumpers that my mother referred to as Wolseys. I only discovered later that Wolsey was the one of the first brand names ever, the garments being made by the Wolsey company, one of the oldest textile companies in the world, whose factory was next to the ruins of Leicester Abbey, the burial place of the cardinal. Henry VIII took over the Cardinals College project providing the college with a new name and a cathedral to go with it. 

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We'd come through the college grounds on the way to the cathedral, passing through Tom Quad, at one time the largest quadrangle in a city stacked with quadrangles, and past the great dining hall, a setting so magical that it inspired the makers of the Harry Potter films to recreate it in their London studios. Now we had almost completed our cathedral visit, pausing in the Latin Chapel to look at the stained glass window, and that's when the steward struck. She sensed our interest and launched into the story behind the stained glass which had been created by English cathedrals' favourite pre-Raphaelite, Edmund Burne-Jones. It told of St. Frideswide whose remains were interred here, causing her shrine to become a place of pilgrimage until the English Reformation of 1538 when it was inevitably destroyed. The piece of the shrine that survives is actually the stand on which her tomb would have stood. As a young nun and a princess, she was propositioned by King Algar of Leicester, the son of the infamous Lady Godiva. Wishing to preserve her chastity, St. Frideswide fled Oxford for the countryside. At one point, she escaped the king's clutches by climbing a tree and hiding there, but eventually, tired of being on the run, she prayed to God and King Algar was struck blind. The King then saw the error of his ways and begged for forgiveness and as a consequence, his sight was restored. In one unusual panel Burne-Jones had included a picture of a flushing toilet. Our guide told us that this was because they had just been invented. However, it seems that they had been around for quite a while but we're now being manufactured in much greater numbers and the inclusion in the window may have been a way of recognising a financial contribution to the window from one such manufacturer. Thanking her for her interesting and enthusiastic talk, we began to retreat but she collared us one final time to point us towards another Burne-Jones window in the Chapel of Remembrance illustrating the life of St Catherine. The artist modelled the Saint on the Dean's daughter Edith Liddell. Her sister, Alice, was also the source of inspiration to a Christ Church maths lecturer named Charles Dodgson who wrote about her using his pen name of Lewis Carroll in his novel Alice in Wonderland. 

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