Once again I sit here gazing at the candle before me, and like Marcus, I reflect up on my life or one part of it: my youth.

I have spent the long weekend at my old Oxford college: Pembroke. I go there once a year to preach to students at Sunday Evensong and to catch up with friends, including the chaplain, Andrew Teale, who is a most kind host.

Inevitably memories flood in as I walk around the college where I studied English for three years. Pembroke is a small college: intimate and cosy, I would say, and I felt at home there most of the time and made good friends there, a few of whom are still part of my life now. One, my friend Peter, came to Evensong and stayed to dine in Hall. As we looked out over the sea of young faces in Hall, the inevitable line came to us both: ‘Were we ever that young?’

I like to stay in college in one of the guest rooms and one room in particular, which overlooks the Chapel Quad. I look out onto the small squat 17th Century chapel to the left and the Victorian dining Hall ahead with the lawn in the centre. This weekend students have been playing croquet on it. But it is the buildings to the right almost under the window which most attract my interest. At this time of year, with the window open, I can smell the lush wisteria that blooms around the entrance of the old senior common room and the roses around the arch to North Quad immediately under the window sill. The stillness is inviting in this heady fragrance.As the sky darkens, the old lamps in the walls of the buildings make their sandstone glisten. I sit watching the sky fade ineluctably into night and the glow of the lamps growing stronger, giving warmth to the gloom.

When I was an undergraduate in college, I noticed little of this, except the stillness and the freshness of the twilight sometimes. Summer term is something special in Oxford. My first summer term was like arriving at college for the first time all over again. The college looked so different in the summer, and the city too: the other college gardens and the parks and Christchurch Meadow by the river.  I was intense and in my own world in a way: self absorbed then recklessly convivial. Little has changed! I was young – and, dear me, the students do look so very young now to my older eyes. No: I am wrong. I do remember being caught up in the stillness of those summer evenings fading into night and the intoxicating perfume of the flowers.  

But I didn’t notice the lamps then: the indigo sky, yes, but not the lamps. Perhaps lamp-gazing in the twilight is for older people, when we are more mellow and content, when life is less intense, less raw, less filled with angst. Less vibrant? No: I am still capable of reverie: in that room overlooking Chapel Quad.  When I was an undergraduate it was that heavy floral perfume that sent me into a reverie, and the violet sky. Now it is the glow of the lamps. I am older now, so I am looking in a different direction, I suppose. The reverie is still real, still potent, but not as intense.

Earlier today I visited the Weston Library, which is the new building opposite the university’s main library: the Bodleian. The Bodleian Library is one of the largest libraries in the world and houses manuscripts and books ancient and new. It is the old medieval university library which was restored by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1598. The library has a right to a copy of any book that is printed and famous people have bequeathed their private papers to the library too and there are a multitude of volumes from all over the globe.

So the Weston library is a new overspill of the extensive stock for use by students and academics. I like to go in there because on the ground floor there are always some interesting exhibitions and there’s a gift shop and cafe.  

As I sat in the cafe in the entrance hall this morning, I noticed two strange customers seated a few tables away, opposite me. It was a man and woman dressed in identical long dark green gaberdine coats and identical woollen green and cream hats. It was cold for May today but they looked trussed up for winter and they both wore mittens. There were two large cups of coffee infront of them: they were sharing one and the other was being saved for later as the saucer was placed over the top of the cup to keep the contents warm.

It was difficult to work out their ages as their faces were lined and worn with care. They could have been late middle-age or a little younger. The man’s face and hands were dirty but the woman looked cleaner and their bags were on the floor beside them.

Oxford is famous for its eccentrics but I am not sure they were. I would call them ‘homeless’, but it seems too modern a word for the odd couple sipping coffee opposite me. If they were both male, I would use the old phrase ‘gentlemen of the road’ or ‘tramps’. They seemed to be vagrants. But their innate dignity makes me ashamed to use any of those phrases to describe them. They seemed more like late 19th or early 20th Century rural travellers, going from place to place looking for work. Yet they were happy and content and totally at home in the tall and spacious modern entrance hall, watching the world go by, looking rural and incongruous in this centre of academia: to be written about, rather than writing themselves. Or perhaps in their shabby bags, a masterpiece lay hidden. Or a thesis to shake the world.

The woman’s face was round and lined: an apt subject for Rembrandt to paint. The man had a red hatchet face and would have been more at home in an illustration in a Dickens’ novel. As they conversed their heads bobbed about in comical fashion.  There was something cosy about them, as if they were Hobbit residents of Tolkien’s Shire.

As I observed them, I tried to work out their relationship: fellow travellers perhaps? Or brother and sister? Husband and wife? Or lovers even. The man would look around now and then as if protecting the woman from a hostile world. They sat side by side and seemed close and intimate, sharing the cup of coffee lovingly.  Then the man looked around again and quickly kissed her on the cheek. Such a tender moment as if they were two secret lovers on the run.

I finished my coffee and wandered into the gift shop. Then I went into the exhibitions. I was meeting a friend for lunch and still had time to kill when I came out so I got myself another coffee.

There they still were, sipping coffee from their own loving cup, cocooned in their own company, comfortable and free. I envied them their intimacy – something I have never known.

Then I worked out where they were from. They would have been at home in a Thomas Hardy novel. They had brought Hardy’s Wessex into the Weston Library. His novels are on the shelves somewhere. I thought of students studying them and analysing them

somewhere in the library or sequestered in their rooms in colleges nearby.

Perhaps they would learn more from studying this deeply intimate and totally free couple and then their own intense student angst would drift away. I wish mine had.

Ave atque vale until the next blog.

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e mail.

And please do pass on the blog address to others who may be interested.

I would also value any feedback on nzolad53@gmail.com or my Facebook page or Twitter.

Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

​​