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.

Here in the House which was the Site of Our Budding Love

1.

I suddenly feel weary with the anticipation of a Saturday. Here I am at my desk, which is not a proper desk but a slab of coarse wood, which used to be the kitchen table, staring out at the garden behind the house thinking thoughts of Springtime, Springtime which is still just beyond our reach. There are yellow flowers and a few misty buds, but the trees are still blank, the grass still pale, the dead leaves of last year still plastered to the frosty pathway.

We're in the time-between-seasons; you wake up one morning and here it is, Spring, and you put on a light coat, you dispense of your winter boots, but by mid-afternoon it's Winter again and shivering you cycle home against a fierce wind that belongs to January, not March.

2.

I need a chair big enough to swallow me. I don't want to sit at my desk with my legs crossed neatly, dangling toward the ground, I want to fold them beneath myself, I want them to have freedom and space. The thing is of course that none of this furniture is ours, but now that we've lived here--how long? nearly two years?--it fits us. It owns us if we don't own it.

I think about this sometimes (I've probably written about it before, too). What anchors us to this house is not possession. All that we own, between us, is a bed. You could say that's too symbolic to be true, but it is true, and the only reason we even own the bed is because some friends were getting rid of it and thought that maybe we would want to graduate from a folding futon to a proper mattress-and-headboard bed.

So we have a bed and our books. We sound portable. But I don't think we are as portable as all that. Here is the site of our budding love. How do you take that with you when you go?--say, the memory of sitting on the kitchen floor, midnight, two weeks in, picking apart a chicken carcass from the fridge, sipping a gin and tonic; the memory of the first walk to the bus stop, the smell of early summertime and the sunlight and the way he puts his sunglasses over your eyes because it's early and you need a shield, and a piece of insurance, something to tie you together.

Because the thing is that while we're here, they aren't just memories; I can actually see a two-years-younger version of ourselves sitting in the garden watching the nine o'clock sunlight fade behind the East Oxford terraced houses. I haven't actually converted these things into memory yet. I know I need to start doing it, like a computer caches old emails (if that's what they do), or my mind will start to feel cloudy and crowded, but. But.

3.

(A little truth about myself: sometimes I mix up Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth. And Henry David Thoreau, because of Walden Pond. All those Ws. Even though I've been to Walden Pond. One sticky Boston summer. I ate potato chips on the way there, bikini beneath black dress, and it was clear as anything but when we drove up to the pond the world suddenly clouded over and a few drops of rain hit our heads and then a crack of thunder, a fissure of lightening across the sky. So we didn't swim in Walden Pond after all.)

4.

I'd like to wear a summer dress, today; or a pair of cutoff denim shorts, like I am seven again, and a fluttery blouse that lifts in the gentle wind. I'd like to see all of our clothes--his shirts, my knickers--our sheets--hanging on the line in the garden. That's the nicest thing, here, in summer. Looking over the fences and seeing that everybody on the street has hung their washing outside.

And the days of the barbecues. Walk outside in the early Sunday afternoon, smell the char and the smoke from next door, or from your own garden. One day we spend hours outside, into the night, lying on a blanket. The boys burn old pieces of wood in the barbecue just for fun. We leave all the plates and bowls outside until the next morning.

5.

So it's funny to think that for all that, it isn't ours (ownership being a thing about money, not memory). Still, here we are on a Saturday, doing our laundry, our dishes, he bringing me tea while I work, Billie Holiday drowned out by the sound of the washing machine shuddering its way through another load, passing through this in-between season and into another.

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.

In the Dark

My knowledge of electricity is so poor that I can't even tell you what's gone wrong with ours, only that something has. A lightbulb upstairs burned bright for a moment, there was a popping sound, and all the lights went out. We still have electricity--plug-in lights work, computers are charging happily--but our house is dark and here I sit, on the couch, having hunted for the fuse box and failed. It's just too dark to look for a fuse box. Kind of a catch-22, that. Are we horrible people if we leave it till morning? Don't answer that.

What I can't decide is if I should, in present circumstances, escape by having a run. Because here's the problem: it's also dark outside the house. Not much of an escape; but at least I could feel the night city air on my face and pretend I had a glowing house to come home to. Here the light from candles flickers and the orange glow of streetlamps patterns the curtains, forms blocks on the walls. It's a strange in-between feeling. I'm almost too restless to sit still; almost to restless to move.

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.