A Day In Oxford

In fact it turned out to be rather less than a day, as my car conked out on the way to the fair city and I had to be got going again by the good offices of the AA. Anyway, I did all the things I'd planned to do with Dr Bones only not in quite the order we'd planned.
After lunch we went to the Steampunk exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science. Dr Bones has already visited this as have a party of devoted lunatics from the London Goth Meetup. I thought it was highly amusing and I especially liked the Tank Cathedral model which gives a new meaning to the phrase 'Church Militant'.
I even bought a fob astrolabe which will make an appearance sometime - the closest thing I'm ever likely to achieve to the fob orrery I once offered to commission from a friend, a commission he couldn't fulfill having failed to work out how to convert the gears from something twelve feet across to a version small enough to fit in a waistcoat pocket. Shame.
From there we sampled the new Ashmolean Museum. Of course the Ashmole isn't new at all, it's been there since the 1700s, but it was massively reconstructed last year. For two terms or so while I was an undergraduate the Ashmole's sculpture gallery became very familiar to me as I was passing through it, and past the Alfred Jewel, most days on my way to the Classics Library. The Library moved out to the new Sackler Building a few years ago, allowing the rebuilding of the rather dowdy old Ashmole.
And what a rebuilding. I think this is now the most stunning museum space I've ever seen. Some of the displays aren't finished - we kept coming across objects with no labels or labels with no numbers next to the objects to tell you what they referred to - but the sheer aesthetic is wonderful, with a breathtaking, and massive, central stairwell full of light opening into the darker, intriguing gallery spaces off the staircase. The statue hall off the central well has busts and statues arranged in a delightful irregular sequence that encourages you simply to stand in one place and admire the angles and juxtapositions. And we were very taken with this exploded Grecian redware pot which reminded us of the 'dinner service' art installation at Waddesdon Manor.

Calling this 'The New Ashmolean' is no exaggeration: the place really has been utterly transformed. In fact, the great sculpture gallery is the only part that remains unaltered.
Oxford looks beautiful beneath blue skies and flooded by chilly sunlight (less so at other times). I even warm to the architecture much more than I once did. I'm planning my walk for the London Goths on Gothic Revival buildings, and now whenever I see a pointed arch my heart does a little jump of delight.