Hurst Street, Springtime, 6 am

I wake at the unfamiliar hour to animal sounds. Noises like foxes fighting; exotic screeches carried down the street by wind or proximity. You are asleep until I stick my head out of the window, peering left and right past the dawn-bathed terraced houses.
"That sound," I say.
"Cats?" you say. Fall asleep again. I go into the bathroom, where the window overlooks a single street lamp. As I am watching it, through the blinds, observing the sallow glow against the almost-bright morning sky, it goes out. Apart from the emptiness it might be mid-morning.

Back in bed, the fox-sounds have stopped. Now it's only birds. Doves? In that way that early-morning birds have of making repetitive songs with their hoots and growls, they are like the worst pop song on the radio. Over and over again in my head (I'll forget the tune by afternoon). You are still asleep, and I ponder getting up, going outside, to see the street before anyone else sees it. Sunday mornings are best for this; no early commuters whistling past on bicycles, smugly more productive. All the drunks have gone to bed. For the first time in a long time I perceive how ugly all the cars are, lined up nose-to-tail, cows going to slaughter, in various shades of modern, various kinds of disrepair. There was one last year with a smashed-in window, that sat on the corner of Leopold Street and Hurst, and for months if you wanted to walk past it you had to pick your way through broken green glass. The houses still look bare--even the ones with gardens out front are still suffering the effects of winter gloom.

The thing about this street is, it wears its shabbiness well. Last night as we rounded the corner I said to you how I fond I was of the place where our street meets Magdalen road--of the pub with her bicycle rack, her evening-yellow windows, the red-and-green facades of the bookshop and the café, the weary half-rendered lettering of Silvesters ("E TERS STORES"), with its pots, its herbs, its kitchenware.

Not a soul about this morning, and as I try to fall asleep my mind is suddenly full of a Boston autumn, the crispness of the Charles River and the smell of rich people's houses in the Back Bay. Couldn't be further from where we are now. I close my eyes to picture the promenade in October better, the strange dome of the half-shell in afternoon light, the runners, the girls in skirts and light coats, stretching the days of sensible dressing out as long as possible. I think for certain I won't fall asleep but I do, with you and the pop-songs of the morning birds and the empty river of street that runs between James and Magdalen.

Cowley Road, 4:30 pm

Sometimes Simon & Garfunkel is the only suitable soundtrack. Even when the sky isn't cloudy. Today it's a wide sheet of azure that the Mediterranean would be jealous of. I like the way the building across the street, made of blackened red brick, slants, moves away from the Cowley Road at a precise angle. The graffiti scrawled in white, below the beetroot window frames: Total Texaco Fuel Oppression in Burma. A poetic structure, as I sit here listening to the hum of ice-cream eaters, smelling burnt toast. Watching balding man in an army-green coat, brown leather brogues, smoking. Joined now by a woman with black hair and black boots. She's taller than him, but they're both made in miniature, fragile, transient beside the brick. Three girls, one in pink, one in blue, one in green, passing by. The delivery bicycle with its vast basket, shiny silver bell (I'm reflected in the domed steel). The shadow of this building is slinking up the side of the one across the road. Stealthy springtime: before you know it the sky will darken and the evening will dawn, the drunks will come out to play, the chill will slide back into the air and the dark hairs of you thin arms will stand on end, soldiers at attention, reminding you of a photograph taken at that September party, when you wore the jacket of his uniform over your sleeveless dress and leaned against somebody's garden wall.

Drinking the City

Except for the part where I sank ankle-deep in a hidden bog on the southern edge of South Parks, my run this evening was unbelievably beautiful. The sky , and pink blossoms everywhere, and a rain of fragrant white petals, and a red sun over the spires, which, in the thick dusky light, looked made of silver and dreams, hardly real, maybe not real at all. All the big trees lining the park were still bare and through black boughs a wind came wafting.

I know it sounds strange to say (and not a little unhealthy), but sometimes I like going for a run when I'm already a little thirsty. That way the cool air feels like something to drink. I am drinking the city, I like to think. (Then I self-consciously remember that line from Belle and Sebastian's "Stars of Track and Field": "You only did it so that you could wear your terry underwear and feel the city air run past your body.")

After I got a stitch in my side running down Divinity Road I walked for a bit. It occurred to me that I need more walks in my life. (They wash the mind, clarify the thoughts, allow fully formed sentences to appear like ghosts in my head.)

Home again, I took the laundry down from the line outside. Earlier we ate bacon sandwiches in the garden. I don't know if the Man did it just to humour me or not, but we sipped pineapple juice, and he read me an op-ed piece on Obama while I read him Tim Dowling at the supermarket checkout. At one point I laughed so hard I worried the bite I'd just taken would drop right out of my mouth. Now the dark has sagged over East Oxford. The kitchen is glowing yellow (the yellow walls make that happen, I think). My very muddy shoes are in the middle of the hallway, and my left leg is spotted with dirt. I think I'll have a bath.

Oxford, Late Winter, Evening

I like to watch the steeples puncturing the sunset as I cycle home, showering the city with blood-orange colours, setting the tops of buildings alight. Such precise buildings: the filigree, the sculpted domes, the golden windows. The roads seem wider at this hour, and unpaved. I go towards home, towards the pub with the rusty bicycle outside, towards the café where magic (they say) happens. Towards the bare-wood-planked edifice of our love.

Earlier I ran mundane errands. I bought ugly things, useful things. I hate to spend my money on ugly, useful things. Razors, shampoo, tampons, condoms. I went to the self-checkout because I did not want to be seen. Please let them not think that this is what I do, what I do, in my red pencil skirt, my leather heeled brogues, my rust-coloured coat, after work, on a Friday evening. Let them not think that this city and this life has become so prosaic for me, because that would be an unfair representation, and even if I buy razors and tampons on a Friday evening while the air and the light is shimmering all around us, I also...

...have this thought: cycling to work, early morning. The sun coming down the wide, empty (unpaved) High. I had forgotten how much I love to see the city in this light. The closed, sour winter-me, so suddenly self-obsessed, so willing to be saddened or hardened, moved by the temperature, the darkened days, had forgotten this very simple thing; but all it took was a touch of light upon my skin to remember it.

(Still, strolling down Turl Street, I see a stationer is closing its doors for good, and in the Covered Market, past the fresh meat and leather and hot cookies, several shops wear signs: Sale. Last few days. Everything must go. I have thought for so long that the economy does not touch me, because I am poor anyway, I am in the throes of youth, but maybe, I think, I will miss the stationer, where I once bought a set of notecards, and the shop in the covered market where I once bought a blue satin clutch to go with my dress for a friend's wedding.)

On Beer and Human Company: How the Rusty Bicycle is Becoming a Part of the Neighborhood

So, finally, here it is, a proper post on the Rusty Bicycle! The landlords were kind enough to have a chat with me this afternoon, so I got to find out more about what's going on, and as far as I can tell, it's good things. See below...in the meantime, I think I'm off for a quick pint down the road, and I suggest you do similar...


On the corner of Hurst Street and Magdalen Road, deep in the heart of East Oxford and nestled between the Cowley and Iffley roads, used to live the pub where cheer and warmth went to die: the Eagle Tavern. Now it’s the home of the Rusty Bicycle, a wood-floored gem run by a pair of young, friendly landlords. My interest in the pub is partly selfish (it’s a matter of yards from my own house), but mostly, if I’m honest, cultural.

Hilaire Belloc, a transplanted Frenchman with an appreciation for all things English, wrote this in 1948: “Change your hearts or you will lose your inns, and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.”

Perhaps it takes a foreigner to see the truest importance of pubs; and if that’s the case, I’m certainly qualified. In my California youth, the pub was the pinnacle of exoticism, required a stretch of the imagination just to envisage. It’s one of England’s most famous institutions, built on simple foundations (beer, human company) that have outlasted every recent age, outlived every war and every movement for centuries. And today it runs the risk of becoming sterile. I am not an expert on pubs, but even I can tell that there’s a sadness in the hollow bellies of mass-marketed establishments like O’Neill’s, Wetherspoons, The Slug and Lettuce, places so often replicated, and in so many different locales, that they have ceased to be anything but a holding pen for the tipsy and the more-than-tipsy. The contrast to the Rusty Bicycle, which is still only in its infancy but, as far as I can tell, in good hands, is striking.

Alex Arkell and Chris Manners are fresh out of university. They talked about running their own pub idly, but had other plans until a passing comment from Arkell’s father, the chairman of Swindon-based Arkell’s Brewery, set them on a short path that ended at the Rusty Bicycle.

The turnaround was almost shockingly quick—they’re still breathless talking about it. Manners was heading to Berlin, he says, his travel companion had already bought a ticket, and then, suddenly, he was a pub landlord. The Eagle, true to its reputation, wasn’t in good shape when he and Arkell arrived, but four skips and a lorry full of rubbish later, they had purged the building of mold, carpet, rotting meat, and a weary atmosphere.

The renovation, funded by Arkell’s, resulted in a complete transformation of the pub, which now features warm wood floors, a fireplace, bold wallpaper, and an assortment of furniture handpicked by the young landlords. The result is a pub with personality, enhanced by the photographs and drawings, all done by friends of the landlords.

Still, say Arkell and Manners, the Rusty Bicycle is a work in progress. When I meet with them on a chilly Tuesday afternoon, they are busy hanging a dartboard. They are also looking further ahead, awaiting installation of the internet so that they can offer customers free wifi, as well as a phone line so that they can accept cards (they currently have a cash-only policy). They look forward to opening during the daytime and being able to serve food, as well, and hope to eventually feature live music, open mic evenings, poetry, and quiz nights. They’re still finishing things off, they say, and don’t want to rush anything, but, as Manners points out, “it’s all about not getting stale.”

And so far success, it seems, is on their side: they have sold more alcohol in two weeks of business than the Eagle sold in an entire year. But it’s when they start talking about their clientele, however, that Arkell and Manners begin to reveal what makes them so different—and so refreshing—in a city, a nation, of pubs.

“We don’t want to alienate the local people,” says Manners, and in East Oxford, this can mean catering to a hugely diverse range of people, from students to young couples to established locals who have lived here for years. The landlords say their main goal is to make everyone feel welcome, and that they especially want to draw in people who are looking for a nice pub to settle into for the evening. This, I think, surely this is the point of the pub? And am thrilled to hear them affirm it.

Publicity for the Rusty Bicycle has been almost exclusively word-of-mouth—which in itself has tied the pub even more tightly to the community, who have, upon recommending it, at least some small sense of ownership of it.

This sense of interactivity is crucial, and Arkell and Manners are making the best of it. They tell me that just the other day, they had a customer come in with a photograph of a rusty bicycle, and that they’re going to frame it and put it up; another customer, they say, wants to partner with them to sell his sculptures, made of old bike parts. They may be young, and lacking in traditional experience, but if they do want to be not just a pub but a local pub, they are doing all the right things.

“A good local pub,” writes Paul Kingsnorth in his book Real England: The Battle Against the Bland, “serving good local beer, is the ultimate antidote to placeless globalisation. At its best, it can be the perfect representation of a rooted, human scale institution serving good-quality local produce, which results in good-quality local enjoyment.” The world is huge and times, they tell us, are dark; things that are good, and human-scaled, may be just about all we can take these days. And, anyway, as Kingsnorth writes, “It’s hard to know what more to ask for.”

The Rusty Bicycle 28 Magdalen Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX4 1RB
Opening Hours are Monday-Thursday 6 pm-11 pm, Friday and Saturday 6 pm-1 am, Sunday 6 pm-10:30 pm, but check back shortly as the pub plans on opening during the daytime soon!

And Some More Rusty Bicycle:

Where it is...
An article in the Oxford Mail
Arkell's

Rusty Bicycle Update II

Another visit to the Rusty Bicycle tonight--a quick stop after a lovely evening. I keep promising to write more on this place and I will, but for now, a summary:

• We like. Very much. Warm, cosy, and exactly the pub you want on the end of your street.
• Some very trendy people; apparently some sort of message went out to the big-glasses American-apparel wearing Cowley road crowd.
• Therefore: good people-watching.
• But not sure how we feel about the cowboy-boot-wearing, Guiness-drinking Tibetan with no sense of social convention. I'm not usually very supportive of stifling and oft-arbitrary customs, but there are some that you just need, and this dude, he broke all the rules.
• The bike rack out front is getting lots of use. How very cool.

Rusty Bicycle Update

Looks like they share our opinion...can't wait to see what it's like inside. They're open as of tomorrow apparently, and as I also get paid tomorrow, I think we might be able to afford the luxury of a pint or two...

Of Eagles and Bicycles

The pub down the road, the Eagle Tavern,has been a curiosity for some time. It's at the end of our street, a matter of yards from our house, but I can count the number of times I've been inside on one hand.

There has never been anything overtly wrong with it; just another pub in a sea of pubs. The Vicar who lives next door (I don't think he actually is a Vicar, that's just what he's called), in the house called Seaview cottage (we couldn't be any further from the sea), who dresses impeccably, talks impeccably (like an overwrought English gentleman), and is certifiably loony, has been drinking there more or less every night since I moved in. Once a bridal party had their after-wedding drinks there, and a brawl broke out. The police moved in and carted off every single bloody-fisted male in a matter of minutes.

Inside, the Eagle was sad, as if all of the pub-ness had been drawn out with a siphon. No merrymaking here; just hard drinking, lone men drowning in bibulous despair. It had thick patterned carpet and stale air, and you got the feeling you could get lost inside, though it wasn't very large. Once we played pool and once we watched the football but even the drecepit facade seemed to warn us off having fun.

I mention this because the pub has changed ownership. A new sign has gone up; no longer the Eagle Tavern but the Rusty Bicycle. Though we think maybe it would have been cleverer just to hang an actual rusty bicycle outside, we're heartened by this move, and by the fact that, peering inside, it's evident that they've ripped up the carpet and revealed the wood floor. It won't be open for a while yet, but I am harbouring secret hopes that we may end up with a cosy little pub literally on our doorstep.

Joe Allen at The Cellar/The Community of a Street

So it turns out that the violinist-who-used-to-live-next-door (occasionally we could hear a few notes floating through the walls and into the kitchen) is actually part of this group, who we heard last night at the Cellar.  As per the wonderfully circular world of Oxford, Joe Allen works at the Corner Club, neé QI, which almost everyone we know has connections to.  I like this sort of smallness: not stifling but familiar; large enough still to be surprising, and pleasantly so.

The Cellar would probably more aptly be called the basement.  Cellar implies wood, and warmth, and (quite possibly) wine; but the place reminds me far more strongly of a friend's spacious under-house hideout--a dingy, dark, sticky-floored hollow perfect to listen to music by.  The beer is cheap and the ambiance appealingly sparse; and all confounded by a sense of wonder that you can be here, underneath ancient alleyways, listening to a thoroughly modern selection of youthful, pretty musicians.

Joe Allen, accompanied by Angharad Jenkins on the violin and Chrissie Sheaf on the drums, has a sound that reminds me of Damien Rice, or possibly Stephen Fretwell, with operatic elements (and the shining sounds of an electric violin, which I'm starting to think is something no band should be without...).  The threesome has clearly mastered the art of performance: that is, their music is, in rare fashion, actually enhanced by their physical presence.   At one point I was smiling so widely that a friend looked at me curiously (presumably thinking the £1.50 Foster's had gotten to my head); it was just that good, in a heart-soaring kind of way.

In bed later that night, we were aroused from our half-sleep (books on our chests) by a series of bangs, followed by shouts on the street which sounded distinctly different from the drunken yelps of late-night returners, or the fierce calls of virile men aching for a boozy fight; so we rose on our knees and peeked our heads out of the window.  Down the street, not half a block, we could see an enormous, orange crown of flames pouring out of an alleyway; billows of white smoke came running down towards us and we smelled the acrid flavour of something wrong, something electric.  

Firefighters had arrived on the scene silently, and we watched their figures dart and flit until the smoke had been shrunk and the fire reduced and our necks had begun to ache from craning.  A father and son went out into the street to assess the danger, but otherwise no-one showed any signs of stirring.  We could have gone on sleeping and never even known.  

The whole street seemed precious then, fragile, but ours: the violinist next door, who you know only from the sound of her strings and her Welsh voice, turns out to make you smile harder than you've smiled all day; and firefighters do their job with austerity, guided by the blinking blue lights of their trucks; and we are somehow in the middle of all this.

Life in an English Heat Wave

It's the summer of the ice cream van.  Maybe I was oblivious last year but the ice cream van wasn't around half as much as it is now.  All day, every day: the inanity of the song, as it weaves in and out of our neighborhood streets.  I can't even hum it now; it's just a constant backdrop.  

"Oh, give it a rest, will you?" we say when we hear the tinkling notes from afar.  We cringe as it comes nearer.  But I don't know if we really mind.  It means that it's summertime.  I never see anyone buy ice cream from the van, but maybe, in a weird sort of way, we're all just comforted by its presence.

It's been hot here.  Hot enough to hang laundry outside and have it dry alarmingly fast.  While I'm hanging our shirts and trousers and undergarments I notice a cat who has curled up at the far end of the garden, next to the potato patch.  He looks as if he's guarding the vegetables; he stretches a paw, yawns, settles his head against the warm concrete.  

At midday I open the window upstairs wide and stick my head out of it to get some fresh air.  I like being able to peer down; sometimes, at night, when we hear strange things, we do the same thing.  It's amazing how much you can see when the street doesn't think you're watching.  

I go for a run; I take a circuitous route that leads me to the top of South Park, where I find myself looking down at the spired skyline below.  There's a little haze hanging in the afternoon air, so that the spikes of Magdalen tower look soft.  On the swing set, a pair of teenagers are pumping their legs furiously.  

One of them, the boy, says, "I'm going to jump!"  The girl giggles coyly, but when she sees he's serious, she says, "Don't do it, Will.  It's too high Will."  She has very short hair, a sort of 1920's bob, and a striped t-shirt.

Her voice changes as he prepares to leap.  

"Will NO!  Will, I'm begging you, no!" She says.  She implores him so earnestly I turn to watch; he pumps his legs one last time and propels himself from the seat of the swing.  He is suspended; then he lands in an awkward cat-crouch, off-balance.  He falls to his knees, rolls sideways.  He whoops and begins to laugh very hard.  The girl, who had sounded so desperate, is laughing too.  Her shoulders are shaking with giggles and she ceases to move her legs, just rolling forwards, backwards on the swing.  

A woman walks past talking to a tiny, fluffy white dog.  The boys with the remote-control helicopter at the crest of the hill pin their eyes skyward to watch it hover; perspective makes it seem that it could be real, could be hanging just above the point of an Oxford tower.

I take a lukewarm shower and think of all of the things I need to do.  

I take the laundry inside to the tune of the ice cream van.

Hens Wearing Dancing Shoes

I was invited to my first-ever hen night recently. It was all very exciting, and I tried to be calm about it, but I got the email in bed just before sleep, so I rapped on my partner’s shoulder until he looked up from his laptop (yes, we really are that geeky) and said, “What?” and I got to say, with great, burgeoning pride (bordering on the excessive, really): “I’ve been invited to Sophie’s hen night!!!!” (You really could hear all those exclamation points.)

But later, I reread the invite and anxiety (as it does) crawled out of its dusty corner and started to gnaw and snarl. There was going to be dancing involved, said the email. An old East Oxford building had gotten a facelift and was reopening its doors and the words “a spot of retro disco” were flashing in my face, very loud, very clear, very, well, bright.

I’m not much of a dancer, you see. It’s not that I don’t want to be—or even that, a few cocktails later, I don’t try to be. I just don’t have it in me to understand intuitively how to move my body alongside a rhythm and a melody. I thought about that spot of retro disco, and very nearly decided not to go. Images of awkward teenage moments relived rose before me: a jangling of limbs, some shuffling, the question of what do to with your hands, and everyone else around me looking either like they had attended the Royal Bloody Ballet School or like they were actually quite literally having sex. I am physically unable to dance ballet, and I am morally unable to have sex in the midst of a teeming mass of other people.

But excitement, and the fact that I was frankly honored to be included, and fondness for the Royal Hen herself, all won out, and I acquiesced to my desire to participate, and found myself on a Thursday night having cocktails with a group of lovely women, and the first thing that occurred to me was, “I haven’t been with a group of all women in a very, very long time,” and the second thing that occurred to me was, “it’s really actually kind of nice!”

Something else soon became apparent to me, too. Like me, everyone else appeared to be more interested in ordering bottles of champagne and chatting than in scuttling down the road to shake booties and wave arms. It was only after we’d had enough champagne and snacks to bolster our confidence that someone tentatively suggested that we think about moving on; I was heartened, at this point. So we plunged out into the chill night and swam through the neon lights of the Cowley Road, past kebab houses and churches, to The Regal (neé the Bingo Hall).

It was shiny. And everything smelled of new paint. The bartender looked a little nervous, as if he wasn’t sure everything would hold together, and a suitably surly woman with enormous breasts and substantial thighs guarded the door, dressed in a suit and tie with a neon green armband. So this is a hen night, I thought. It occurred to me that it’s not a bad way to spend an evening, really. We ordered more prosecco and curled up in big plush leather couches.

Upstairs the disco ball was spinning and a DJ was playing music very, very loudly. There was a smattering of people on the dancefloor, but I was relieved to see that most of them didn’t appear to really know what they were doing, either. It was a strange group and we tried to puzzle out who they were, why they were here. The incongruity of a swanky shiny dance club nuzzling the edges of a churchyard and a string of seedy-looking barbershops really hit us, then. I wondered: will it last? Will it stay like this, sparkling and artificial? And thought: no. More likely it will acquire, as things do here, a flavor all its own, and the paint will start to peel and then it will stop being a sore thumb and start being a real place.

Then we forgot to keep worrying and danced. We had a corner all to ourselves and it didn’t seem to matter to anyone that my version of dancing is essentially to sway my hips and run my hands through my hair (a solution I finally came up with one night after years of having no sense of where to put them). We moved our way choppily through a series of bright but only vaguely disco tunes. Our cheeks got flushed (at least, I think they did, but it was hard to tell in the murky dark upstairs). And then I forgot to be stilted and danced. And that was nice.

We got tired, after awhile. We went back downstairs and felt woozy and all the shiny colors blurred together. At the bar they had run out of prosecco, and the card reader was broken, or maybe it was that it hadn’t been delivered yet--I couldn't quite catch everything over the din of an evening. So we drank white wine paid for entirely with one-pound-coins.

The night moved slowly; swaying, sashaying, a happy blur of hair and hands and bubbles; and when the edges of our vision had turned completely into a glitter of disco-ball colors and our heads were light and our tapping feet very tired, we headed home--one quick step out of the glitz and into the gentle quiet of residential Cowley where midnight winds silked our skin.