A spicy mix of Oxford stories from a house once belonging to a city sausage maker.
Josiah Pullen liked to walk. Believing the exercise helped him stay ‘vigorous and healthy’, he made the same journey every day for 57 years. Sometimes both in the morning and evening.
Peter Forbes, has been setting up at Gloucester Green market since six thirty in the morning when I arrive at nine. You can’t miss him. “I’ve got the best pitch,” he grins from behind his peaked baseball hat. “I get to choose because I’ve been here the longest. When people come round the corner from George St, I’m the first stall they see – all these shiny things.”
Painted during three intensive periods over a period of 25 years, to those who live in the city they are instantly familiar snapshots, illustrated vignettes that cleverly capture that sense of surprise that many of us feel at the sight of a soaring medieval spire over a modern rooftop, or a field of meadow flowers glimpsed through the railings of a bus busy high street.
This was ‘real tennis’, played with a net that sags in the middle, on a funky inside court to a complicated but intriguing set of rules more akin to a game of ‘quidditch’ than that played on the lawns of Wimbledon. And although today I am heading to the one surviving court in the city, it seems the game is still alive and kicking.
Firm believers in art made for public spaces, they were also keen that their work was accessible, sensory, tactile, carving the polysterene moulds by hand using household tools like potato peelers and nutmeg graters to produce a variety of concrete finishes.
Every so often while out walking I will come across something or somebody that takes me by surprise. Stops me in my tracks. And so it is on my regular route to the University Parks when I encounter Dan Arnold and Trigger.
They are hidden all over Oxford and beyond. Outside, amongst the trees of parks and gardens, positioned in courtyards and parking lots. Huge ancient, crowned heads, features blackened with time, hair interlaced with lichen, lips softened by moss, some so weathered it is hard to see there ever was a face shaped out of the blocks of stone.
I find January and February the gloomiest of all the months. When the days are still short and the weather wet and cold. I become desperate for a pick-me-up, something to lift the spirits, a promise that there are brighter things on the horizon. And then suddenly pushing up from somewhere beneath the sodden soil, the first of the snowdrops appears.
It’s extraordinary to see what is achieved in such a tight space – Masoud and his team navigating the area, taking orders, scooping, cutting, frying, filling, it’s like a tightly choreographed ballet.
I am delighted to present for your amusement some engravings by George Glover from William Stokes’s book ‘The vaulting master or the art of vaulting’ in the hope that they will amaze and entertain you as much as they have me.