Coming to university, I realised that the stable, effortless reliability of my friends from home was, all of a sudden, precarious and difficult to maintain.
You may not know the name, but you have almost certainly eaten the pastry. Does the bakery behind Oxford’s favourite cafés hold its own at the counter?
We’ve come to think of boredom as an inevitable but unpleasant gap between activities, or as space to fill, but we’ve stopped seeing that space as worthwhile in itself.
'Places are not the same by night. They are transformed. Shapes and forms take on different sizes, colours and shades. Perspective becomes blurred, sounds sharper'
'There’s a wonderful feeling of freedom that comes from being in the water, especially here where it is deep enough to kick your legs out without touching river-bed'
'In such a forest there is of course much more than visual pleasure; there’s the sound of wind bending and creaking age-old timber, or the whiff of damp leaves, the smell of air, damp, imbued with life.'
'Port Meadow is steeped in myth; it’s the unploughed landscape, the land earned from resisting the Danes, a sacred spot where the Freemen graze their cattle'