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Obligatory Royal Wedding Blog

Posted in English Living with tags , , , on May 1, 2011 by cmerritt42

The crowd watches at Blenheim Palace

This was my first royal wedding experience in England, seeing that I have not, to my knowledge, been located in England for a royal wedding prior.

There were a couple I recall from my youth.  One, the most famous, happened when I was just starting to get mobile, a few others I remember from watching news clips.  All of them had the same thing – pretty dresses, carriages, men in uniform, horses (for the carriage and around the carriage), a bunch of needlessly tall fur hats, and one dignified English lady in a nice looking hat, most likely of a bright color.

Seeing that the whole world was looking upon England for this particular wedding of some minor, second-to-the-throne-guy named William, and some nobody, daughter-of-self-made-millionaires Catherine, England spent a grand majority of time pretending like it was no big deal.  Sure, you could walk the tourist shops and pound stores and find their faces all over every item known to man kind.  Sure, news agencies constantly and never-endingly reported on the most mundane scrap of knowledge about the planning. (Kate’s Mum & Sis go stand outside a random dress shop!  Are they possibly going to get a dress from the dress shop that may or may not have something to do with the wedding???  The world waits with bated breath…)

But, if you approached most people in my circle of British friends the reaction was…meh.

Two people getting hitched…meh.

William’s a nice kid but we don’t know him…meh.

So I secretly squirreled away my £2 Primark knock-off engagement ring.  Hid and pulled out for personal amusement the little flag and bag I got from my husband.  Painstakingly kept out, but did not call out to those who entered my home, the Cath Kidston “Will & Kate” mug in the center of my coffee table.

I had planned for a long day on the sofa with my special mug and a Will & Kate tin filled to the brim with coffee cake.  Everyone was meh, nobody wanted to make a fuss.  My excitement, I thought to myself, was mine own.  A product of not having pomp and circumstance in part of my life for 30+ years.

Then, two days before, all British party hell broke loose.

Meh was replaced by bunting.  Lots and lots and lots and lots of Union Jack bunting.  And picnic deals, and special Pimm’s and champagne and party popper’s.  The friends who were meh suddenly and without warning exploded with British pride.  We were to go out!  Celebrate in the streets!  And by God we would gather on lawns and down at the local palace and watch William and Catherine join in holy matrimony!

And with that the sofa was nixed for a sundress (layered with various other items) and a flowered pin for my hair I set off laden with goods for Blenheim, seat of the Duke of Marlborough.

Along with everyone else.

Really, half of Oxfordshire.

The Royal Wedding had been tacked on to a joust they decided to put up for the locals.  Usually during the nice Bank Holidays Blenheim hosts jousting, starring some wonderful stuntmen who really love their jobs.  Blenheim, like myself, had probably witnessed the meh, and so they decided to set up what would amount to a small movie screen under a tent.  It was located sort of off to the side of the joust, with a thought that perhaps since it was a morning wedding people would wander in but it wouldn’t get too crowded.

Boy, they were wrong.

We packed ourselves like sardines amongst the masses.  People had brought entire picnic pop-up tables and chairs which blocked the view.  Our friend surrounded us by bunting, and then got told off for blocking people 50 back because she was wearing pink (but not for the bunting).  To cap it all off the speakers were broken and so there was zero sound.  I would pop my head up every few minutes to see if I could catch a glimpse of arrivals.  Mercifully I had printed the entire wedding program and another friend brought her newspaper copy of hers.  We contemplated leaving… but that was un-British.  British people tough it out.  British people wave Union Jacks upon any sighting of a royal (really, I think they shoot out of jackets and pop out of couch arms when a royal appears).  British people, who don’t ever want to admit it, love themselves a big royal do.

And so, when out stepped Catherine in her pretty wedding dress we all ooo’d and ahh’d.  The service was read out to the crowd by one of our group from the copies we brought, timed pretty well.  When they were pronounced man and wife, the party popper’s went and the champagne was corked.  When the groundskeeper pulled his truck to the back of the throng so we could hear the distant music and hear the mumbled words people grew more peaceful.  And finally, when they fixed the speakers (at the very end, right at God Save the Queen) the crowd stood and sang with all the congregation of Westminster, the city of London, and probably a pretty big portion of the United Kingdom.

And all was well.

Then the crowds dispersed, spraying themselves along the lawn after being so tightly packed, and briefly gathered again to watch two sweet kisses and a few oldie but goodie planes fly over Buckingham Palace.  We gorged ourselves on cakes, tea, and champagne and slowly, one by one, drifted back to our homes where we could watch it all again in HD.

Packed into the crowd yesterday, no sound but my friend reading the service, Union Jacks at the ready, I watched two people get married.  And I won’t forget it.  It was anything but meh.

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On laundry

Posted in English Living with tags on April 12, 2011 by cmerritt42

Laundry, in the United States of America, is as follows:

  1. Take a pile of clothes in a certain color scheme (such as white or white-ish, dark, and somewhere-in-between-hope-it-doesn’t-bleed).  This pile can be, say, the height of a small child.
  2. Insert the clothes into the washer, which, let’s say, is the height of a small adult.
  3. Dump copious amounts of washing powder, liquid, and weird little containers filled with fabric softener.
  4. Wash.
  5. Pull said pile of clothes (now damp) out of the gigantic washer.  This will be like playing tug-of-war with a moderately-sized sea monster.  Stuff the train of clothes into the dryer, which is equally the size of a small adult.
  6. Put in dryer sheet.
  7. Dry.

The time to complete all the laundry within the house: couple hours.

Laundry, in the United Kingdom, is as follows:

  1. First, contemplate the size of the house you have been allotted.  If the house has been “lovingly extended” then you may have room for a washer and a dryer.  If space has limitations you may have just a washer.  If you are super fancy you get a washer/dryer.
  2. Separate your clothes into 33 small piles no larger than a house cat.  This is because, considering the space within the washer or washer/dryer you cannot fit anything bigger.  You may be tempted to think that you can get something in there which is bigger, but if it fits it will only unbalance the machine or, in the case of the washer/dryer, come out only partially dry.
  3. If you do not have any form of drying mechanism you need to consider how you are going to dry your clothes.  You have two choices: outside on a line or inside on radiators and/or hanging from various areas around the house (ex. cabinet, shower curtain).  Chances are you will utilize all of the various means as: A) It will eventually rain or become to cold outside. B) You will run out of room on the line. C) You don’t wander out into your garden, with the low fence, in your underwear to hang your underwear.
  4. After you have worked out the logistics it is time to do a load of wash.  Place the small house cat pile into the washer, along with a packet of detergent, which can be colour/non-colour/bio/non-bio/eco (I don’t really know the difference) and set your machine to cover the white, white-ish, etc. cycle.
  5. If you are in my home you need to remove all items from around the washer/dryer.  If you leave them there then during the spin cycle they may take off and fly around the kitchen as the machine vibrates so much.  So you are aware, the vibration is so strong you can feel it if you are in the bath.  Upstairs.
  6. Wait 3 hours, as the machines are designed to conserve water and slowly, lightly coat the clothes until they are just slightly damp and scrubbed.
  7. When the load is done set about decorating your home with damp clothes, and perhaps the outside as well.  If you have a washer/dryer now is the time that you find out whether the load you put into the machine was small enough to dry.  If not, set about decorating your home.

Realize, that since the laundry has been placed into 33 small piles it will take, on average, 15 days to successfully do laundry.

The only thing that makes the English way of laundry more interesting and fun that United States laundry is that it takes so long to do it you forget what you own.  So when a shirt comes out that you barely remember seeing before it’s like a big surprise.  You also become very adept in deciding what dirty really means.

Despite all sometimes I sit and dream about the beautiful, gigantic front-loaders I used to have.  Yep, thems where the days.  Thems were the days.

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The Explination on Usage of Moon Pies to Get Exercise within the United States for the residents of the United Kingdom

Posted in English Living with tags , , , on April 9, 2011 by cmerritt42

Firstly, apologies for the long absence.  I, being of American stock, have been touring the various illnesses of Britain over the past three months which rendered me into a coughing, feverish mess.

Sometimes, it’s fun to point the differences between Americans and Britains.  On the whole we are rather similar.  But, as they say, we are two nations divided by a common language.

Take the moon pie, for instance:

The Moon Pie. Source of all that is good.

The moon pie, or MoonPie is a pastry which consists of two round graham cracker cookies with marshmallow filling in the center, dipped in chocolate or other flavors. (Source: Wikipedia, font of all truth.)  These can be comparable to:

The Tunnock Tea Cake. Heavy on the marshmellow.

1. The Tunnocks Tea Cake (a biscuit with marshmallow fluff on top and entirely covered in milk chocolate)

or

The Wagon Wheel. A compressed Moon Pie.

2. Wagon Wheel, which is a biscuit with a marshmallow centre and covered in a chocolate flavoured coating.

The main difference between the MoonPie and Tunnocks Tea Cake and Wagon Wheel is you do not have to walk in a circle to get one.

In the USA, preferably the south, you are often invited to participate in school fairs.  These fairs are often fundraisers and consist of milk can toss, dunk tanks, and locking your friends in a cage for fun.  But one of the highlights is the cake, pie or MoonPie walk, in which you place a series of numbers in a circle on the ground.  You then play music and people walk over these numbers until the music stops.  A number is called, and if you are the lucky person standing on that number, you get a pie.

A delicious, vaguely nutritious, MoonPie.  If you were particularly lucky you scored several MoonPies, which would negate, if not reverse entirely, all the walking you were currently participating in.

I recall participating in many of these events, none of which would be completely feasible within the UK.  This is because:

  1. The weather in the UK is completely unpredictable.  If you ever want to get into a knock-down, drag-out fight over doppler technology, by all means, come to England.  Weather here can go from sunny, to freezing, to raining, to fog, to sunny in about an hour or so.  Also, there isn’t a lot of “space” in buildings from Victorian times (or earlier).
  2. Even if you move the pie walk indoors you would have a complete communication breakdown over what a pie is.  Imagine the shock of being handed a steaming lamb savory when your heart was set on peach.  Fruit pies are not common in the UK.
  3. You would have to figure out the level of drunkenness for participation.  Are you looking at this being a one-cider giggle, or does this only seem like a good idea when you are three sheets to the wind and screaming Oasis songs at the top of your lungs?

When I explain this novelty to my colleagues at work they sit and smile accordingly.  Some make little “humming” sounds as if to state that this southern idea is good, and perhaps at their next village festival they my implement the idea of wandering in a circle for cake.  But, sometimes I think it’s an automated response from listening to me drone on for two years about such American things.  (y’all v. ya’ll, the concept of the south rising again, pick-up trucks in general… and so on.)

The main point of this piece, however, is the fact that since I’ve had this conversation at work I really, really want a MoonPie.

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Stress for 2011: Sorted

Posted in English Living on January 13, 2011 by cmerritt42

If you ever want to see me go into a full freak-out, melt down, dry-heaving banshee of a woman, ask me to navigate you to Croydon.

Croydon is the home of a much larger, much more intensive immigration center.  Unlike the sunlit hills of Solihull, it is an efficiency-driven machine with guides at every corner and floors denoted by bench color.

Getting there, however, has too many options.  One option which goes against the GPS and causes, at best, the closest thing I’ve had to a complete nervous break-down.  Mercifully it ended with us being 30 minutes late and the guard at the door saying in the softest voice to a woman who would’ve disintegrated otherwise, “No worries, these things happen.  You’re here now.”

The disintegration possibility was due to our current visa expiring tomorrow and the looming possibility of a very expensive trip home.  In order to avoid this we signed ourselves up for 7 solid hours of stress, heightened to amazing levels by trying to drive through Greater London during rush hour.  The goal was to turn our paperwork, photos, supporting documentation, and whatever necessary body parts in to ensure our application was accepted and our visa was extended two years.

The first time I experienced this the UKBA was having rolling strikes, which moved our initial appointment to a very empty office in the north.  This time, the UKBA was in full swing, meaning that security checks, guides, and representatives were rampant, alongside the It’s a Small World of applicants.  Three floors were allocated.  You were given a floor and told to live there, clinging to a 3-digit number which defined your entire existence.  Since there was so many of us this meant that every 30 seconds a number would be called for someone to go to some desk, which had its own number and a big glass wall between you and them.  Reading was nearly impossible, as every 5 words I would hear the cheerful pre-recorded voice beckoning someone to go meet their fate.

The current visa application for a Tier Two + Dependent is over 100 pages.  So imagine, if you will, a room full of benches and people sitting nervously with 100 page manuscripts stating why it would be really nice for the UK to let them stay there.  Around me there sat the occasional representative, who was calmly going through material with even more stressed out people than myself.  I distinctly recalled, though again I was breathing sheer fear at the time, one of them questioning every class the woman ever took while in college.  Another stood with a completely unraveled woman at the window, saying over and over, “We can’t do that, her visa expires on Sunday.”

And all the while a little clock in the back of the room goes tick, tick, tick.

They must train the UKBA staff to cope in natural disaster environments considering the amount of stress that exists in those waiting rooms. Perhaps that’s why there are the big glass walls between us and them.  I don’t know.  Perhaps they know that one day the stress level will get so high we all start popping like confetti cannons.  No evil motives, just the amount of time, work, and money gets to the room of applicants and it’s the first internal natural disaster caused by man and stress.  Spontaneous human combustion. Maybe they’re banking on it, keep immigration down.

Anyways, you wait a lot.  Granted, if you mailed in the application you got to wait a lot more, but in this case it’s all condensed.  When you go in they give you a handy flow-chart that explains all the steps, which is nice, except the flow chart should show the mythical time area where minutes feel like hours, and an hour feels like 30 hours, especially after that nifty “police check” which – even though I’m completely clean – makes you wonder as the time slowly goes by… “Did that burnt-out headlight I got in 1999 end up on a police record?  I swear I paid the ticket and presented insurance at the administration offices like I was supposed to. Oh God, they’re going to deny me the right to stay in the UK over a burnt-out headlight.  Oh God, Oh God, Oh God…”

And then you hear your 3-digit number and jump 10 feet out of your chair where you are instructed to sit while they enter your information.  In the case of Croydon, the benches you sit on lean so far back you perch on the end so you can converse with your case worker.   The case worker is friendly, kind, and has to enter the information into the computer at a blisteringly slow pace, because, well, it’s a government computer under government process.  So there is a lot of dead time.  You sort of slide back on the benches and look at all the other people who are sitting at the benches with you.  I thought about waving friendly to all those who were with me, but I feared the confetti cannons, so mostly, I just sat and tried not to explode myself.

And when the words came, “It’s fine, I’m processing everything now and will be back with your letters…” it’s like a clear bubble of calm surrounds your little bench.  And when you rise up, letter in hand, it’s like you can levitate above the bench and float out the door.  Or, in our case, run because we had 3 minutes left on the parking meter.

So, in short, I’ve used up my allocation of stress for 2011.  I’ve heard that the government is considering allocating more stress after April 5th, but I have no intension to apply for any more.

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The Belief in Snow.

Posted in English Living with tags , on December 18, 2010 by cmerritt42

So, on December 17, 2010 I passed my second anniversary of living in England.

Before I moved to England, I did research. Primarily this research was born out of two things:

  1. I had never lived in a place which has “seasons.” Unless you count the two seasons of the south: Summer and Not-Summer.
  2. I had never had a full excuse to purchase boots, and I looked at this as an opportunity.

The research yielded that, during the “winter time” the average temperatures for Oxford would be in the mid to low 50s F.  Snow was a rare occurence.

And so, armed with that knowledge I a) purchased boots and b) found some comfort that I would not be exposed to things I was not familiar with, such as snow.

My first Christmas passed in a bit of a blur (I ended up with the flu) but it was highlighted with a visit from my bestie and his wife.  We were going to explore my new city, and so we went to the Oxford Castle, which for most would be called the Oxford Mound of Dirt.  To be fair there is grass on the mound of dirt.  (‘Castle’ is the Norman word for ‘Mound of Dirt.’  Really, look it up.)  Behind this mound is a Victorian jail (or gaol) with attached Saxon tower.  Today the jail/gaol is part museum, part posh hotel, and you can get little tours.  I don’t remember much of the tour guides talk except that when he lead us to the top of the Saxon tower he spoke of a queen who escaped the city in a white cape in four feet of snow.

I recall this because my mind said to me at the time, “Ha. It doesn’t snow in Oxford like that anymore.”

Fast forward to February, and I was standing in two feet of it.

The British news was in an uproar. Actually, they always are over something, but at the time this was new. The roads were closed, airports shut, and by goodness gracious there was not enough salt or snow plows and everyone was going to die.  At the time I was hunting for work, so none of that phased me in the slightest except for interview days.  I built a snow man, snow bunnies, and a snow dragon.  And when I found my fabulous new place of work I biked in in the glorious start of Spring.  The freakish weather gone I thought, “Well, perhaps Oxford just does snow a bit more regularly than the dusting we get in the south every ten years.”

Fast forward one year later, and I was walking in four feet of it to work.  This first year anniversary of living in England saw absolute shut-downs all over the city of Oxford.  It happened right around Christmas so people were loathe to return to work, even when it turned out that the snow was more of a powder than an icing.  Oxford University had to threaten its staff with deducting holiday time to get them to come back, and it was at that moment I realized:

It snows in Oxford EVERY YEAR.

Based on my findings it is the British populace, or at least the media, who like to believe every year it doesn’t snow in England.  What has to happen is the actual event itself, which is always deemed worse than the year before, before they will even believe that it really does snow in England.  And then, like as if locked away, their memories will spring forth all the years it has snowed in England – which is every year.

So, as I sit here typing this as the inches pile up outside my door I will say this, “I believe in snow.  I believe that next year it will snow.  And I can buy more boots.  Yes, lots and lots of boots.  Because it will snow this year, and next year, and the year after that.”

Now, just to make it last long enough for a white Christmas.

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Why Weird Al is Necessary

Posted in English Living with tags on December 7, 2010 by cmerritt42

I got to see “Weird Al” Yankovic perform his first concert in London last night.

Now, I’m unashamed to admit this, this was my fourth concert.  I’ve seen him once in Orlando and twice in Houston prior.  I have always loved going to his concerts because they are a literal melting pot of everyone.  From designer suits, full-on goth, to t-shirts and jeans.  Age ranges from the young at heart to the really young.  There isn’t any color preference when it comes to skin tone.  I generally don’t ask sexual or religious preference but I’m pretty sure it’s as weird as is required for one of his concerts.

The joy I find in going is not only the fact that he and his band put on a heck of a show, but the fact that when they do I can watch a man in his 60s in a sweater vest pumping his fist to “White and Nerdy,” then high-five a man with a mohawk two seats over when it’s done.  You can look at these kinds of things as world lessons.  That we really shouldn’t take all our labels and monikers so darn seriously, that we should just go through life having a general good time and toss away all the stereotypes that block us from reaching proper enlightenment.

What I’m saying is that maybe, perhaps, we could Dare to be Stupid.

Or, perhaps a bit more honestly, we could just remember that life is just a journey, and to walk away from the opportunity to laugh and enjoy it with as many different people as possible is a terrible waste.

Thank you, Weird Al, for reminding me to not be so serious all the time, but to seriously enjoy my time.

 

 

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Poppy Appeal

Posted in English Living with tags , , on November 5, 2010 by cmerritt42

November is Poppy Appeal Month.

During the month everyone goes around, bundled in their coats, with little paper poppy’s on their collars.  It’s to commemorate all the men and women in the armed forces, including those who are no longer with us.

I think it’s a rather cool idea, poppy month.

As a scholar of the Classics, I remember that poppys in ancient times were funeral flowers for warriors.  The reason being is that often in the places of battlefields, long after the dead were removed, poppys would grow.  For me, poppys are symbols of hope and promise.  A sort of “bad things happened here, but beautiful things can happen too.”

Now, I’m not a war kind of girl.  I don’t like the whole idea, and I wish beyond words that no man or woman of any country would ever have to walk willingly into bullet-laden and bomb scattered fields.  But the fact that people do, and do so willingly gains a lot of respect.  When I pin on my poppy I think about all the people who have come before me, and I hope that in the future there will be less and less need for conflict in the world.  We need a lot less of that.

So, if you happen to be in the UK, please buy a poppy.  If you’re not, hug a solider.  And if you are just a regular old civilian if you could please do your best to make November a month of peace in your life, do so.

It would be nice, in the future, for the poppy to be nothing more than a pretty flower in the field.

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You, too, can matriculate from Oxford

Posted in English Living with tags on October 21, 2010 by cmerritt42

So, my former flatmate has reached the “middle point” of his Masters at Oxford.  As part of this achievement he has ascended to the point where he is allowed to wear subfusc (better known to most as a school uniform).  He also gets a college (Kellogg) and with all this shiny new stuff he can participate in the act of matriculation.

Matriculation is a ceremony in Latin telling all the Oxford students they are now real live students of Oxford and not just students in Oxford.  (and apparently if you don’t go you can’t ever graduate, ever) It takes place in the Exams School or the Sheldonian Theatre and if you have £40 pounds you can do it too.

Wait… what???

That’s right, if you have the mad skills, you can matriculate from Oxford.

Matriculation takes place over a day, usually a Saturday, and the focus is to MATRICULATE EVERYONE.  Because it is such a mad house only family and friends from overseas come out to witness it.  In our case our flatmates matriculation took place at the Examination School, so it was direct off High Street (a main street of Oxford).  Family and friends were regulated to an alleyway across from the glorious gates where, every half hour, about 500 students marched in and then out about 10 minutes later.  It was, truly, an impressive thing to watch.  First, the person for the college would march up and line the students up in scrunched rows so not to be hit by cars.  Then, police would spread the lines and on signal everyone would go into the Examination School.  Because there were so many students it felt like Oxford was just birthing them out of thin air, subfusc at the ready.

We waited and took hundreds of pictures when our flatmate appeared.  His Mom came from Turkey and she cried and told us how proud she was.  Surrounding her were several other Moms, Dads, Brothers, Sisters, Cousins, and friends, all doing the same thing.

But in all this madness it struck me – if I were to get a hold of subfusc and dart into the line I could matriculate.  Because Oxford has Masters and PhD programmes, all sorts of people of all sorts of ages were in those lines…

And then I would know the ancient ceremony.  And there I would probably stand in the hallway, clutching my very worn out copy of Wheelock’s Latin and frantically looking up the verb “to go.”  (Dang me for only utilizing the Romance language of Italian since graduating with my Classics degree 10 years ago!)  But I would get through, past a guy holding some big stick (words from my flatmate) and back out through the gates – a changed woman.

Mock me all you want but I am sort of considering it.  Maybe next year I’ll crash Encaenia and get me an honorary degree to match my matriculation.

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Winner!

Posted in English Living with tags , , on October 17, 2010 by cmerritt42

First, for all those people who through some odd reason have been directed to my blog in the search for It’s a Small World song lyrics, here is a link.  I am guessing you didn’t mean to come across a short blog about how we should all stop hating on each other for silly reasons.  The world would be a way more awesome place if we could all ride on slow peaceful boats down a river, sing songs, and go eat our body weight in churros after wards.

But that is not the point of this blog.  The point of this blog is I am a winner.

That’s right, losers, I win.  I am a winner.  I have achieved and won the most highest honor in the history of honors.  I am the most amazingest of amazing ever.

And that is because I have a week set aside to the Blue Cheese Gnocchi Burger at Atomic Burger, courtesy of their brother restaurant Fratelli’s.  You see, I had this whole “inside track” to the new Fratelli’s in Oxford. Namely, that they were taking the worlds most perfect food, gnocchi, and adding the worlds most perfect cheese, blue, to it.  It was as if Jesus was moonwalking through my living room.

But I was at a loss.  Because, you see, despite this knowledge of blue cheese gnocchi I was worried heavily about not being able to balance this with protein.  It is like Jesus came, but forgot his sparkle glove.  And we all know you can’t moonwalk through a living room without a sparkle glove, even if you are the Son of God.

So I asked Atomic Burger, who is a fratello of Fratelli’s, if they could put the most perfect creation of food sustanense on one of their burgers, thus creating a new spiritual experience in my life.

And they said yes.

So now I have the joy of waiting for them to let me know when I can come and eat the most perfect food ever to exist on Planet Earth ever.  And when I do, and the heavens open up and Michael Jackson comes down to perform on Cowley Road with the angels, I will smile.  And giggle.  And order a peanut butter milkshake to go with it.

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Oxford Initiation.

Posted in English Living with tags , , on September 16, 2010 by cmerritt42

I’m officially Oxfordian.

For over a year and a half I’d been slogging it as an ex-pat, but now I’m truly one of the Oxford people.  Surely, my habit of recycling and composting everything places me amongst the high echelon of ex-pats, but now… now I am one of them.

School’s back in session, which of course means that the once peaceful streets of Oxford are now cluttered with sleep-deprived parents dragging children by the hair to institutions of higher learning.  As I made my way across Donnington-Weir Bridge I noticed clusters of four-door sedans doing their best to make space which defies the law of physics in the bike lanes. (I’m sorry, madam, but your four door is not a motorcycle.)  I even had to tap on one car to have a man, sans any children, react in surprise to see a person in a BRIGHT YELLOW JACKET trying to cycle next to him in that lane he was trying to usurp as his own.

“Geez,” I thought, “I need to be more careful.  People are really driving weird today.”  So I turned onto Abingdon Road and proceeded to be taken in another direction by a car which decided that myself and my little bicycle needed to go elsewhere.

This is one for “I didn’t see it coming.”  Because, well, I didn’t.

I had gotten up to speed (well, speed for my bike) when a black four-door Focus proceeded to overtake and turn into the street ahead.  What this lovely individual did not realise was that I was also being taken with her, screaming, around the corner.  I had enough sense to realize I had to ditch the bike because if not I very well could’ve become a new undercarriage feature.  I hopped off and fell, gaining a scrape that bled worse than it was, and found myself standing in the middle of the street chanting, “I’m okay, I’m okay…”

But the woman kept driving.  She never even looked at me.

I could see the faces of two children pressed against the glass of the backseat.  I ran after the car, the kids looked at me, puzzled.  A woman had pulled her car around the corner and parked it.  She jumped out of the car, ran up to the lady who appeared to be in a slow chase out of the scene, pointed at her and said, “YOU HIT HER! STOP!”  The driver did.  Then, without another word she marched straight up to me and helped me to the side of the road.  She picked up the bike, she helped reconstruct my wire basket.  And she scowled at the lady who proceeded to sit in the car.  She kept asking over and over if I was alright.  She said it was horrible, she’d witnessed it, she said, “She just hit you.  There was no reason for it, she just hit you like you weren’t there.”  We were both stunned that I had no other injuries and the bike was fine.

The driver got out of the car.  Approaching me all she could say was, “Sorry.”  She then backed away, slowly, got in her car and left.

The woman who had rescued me was more concerned with me than to carry on with the lady who had hit me.  Though, in hindsight, we probably should’ve made a complaint.  I rolled into work late and had some rousing bike accident stories told to me, and a stern warning to do everything in my power NOT to cycle near schools at the start of term.  Now, I’m still shaking a bit but overall I’m plus one bandage and minus one sense of trust over Oxford drivers.

So, to the lady who stopped the woman who hit me: “THANK YOU.”  I really, truly appreciate that you did your best to help me and I’m really grateful that I didn’t end up more hurt.  I’m glad that there are wonderful people in Oxford, and fellow cyclists, who understand and can reach out to help those who have accidents.  Because, had you not been there, I’m pretty darn sure the woman who hit me would’ve kept going and never looked back.

And to the lady who hit me, just saying sorry isn’t enough.  You had two children in your car who you are in charge of setting an example for.  Your decision to drive away, even after a pause, is unacceptable.  Granted, there really wasn’t more you could do but if you can hear me on my little blog: PAY ATTENTION TO CYCLISTS.  Especially in Oxford, I mean, COMMON, we’re freaking everywhere!

And Finally, to Oxford.  I think you should keep me now after my initiation.  I survived, I love this weird town, and I’m not done with you yet.  So stop trying to bump me off.

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