More notebook jottings

From yesterday's trip to Oxford this time:

*My new coat giving me a kick-ass shape, even when, as now, I'm definitely not feeling it.

*Passing the primary school playground on the way and seeing a flower shrine on the railings by the swings.

*S telling the story of the terrier who kept rogering her leg during a dinner party. The hostess put the dog in the kitchen several times, but each time it escaped and made its way straight back to S. Everyone else tried to ignore what was happening. Later, the same S said her mother had once knitted her a swimsuit in a fairisle pattern.

*Overheard, "I have not got an internet personality"

*Seeing the workmen at the closed Regent Street tube station measure something with their arms and knowing, just knowing, they were describing the size of a rat.

*Trying to work out what that part of the face between upper lip and nose is called. How H kept on saying 'upper lip' and both of us getting so cross we couldn't speak to each other.

*The colour-in poster of pubs in Oxford. Story: the mother who buys it for a geeky student son because it might make him seem cool. (Laughing to myself about this until realising I'd probably be this mum)

*Seeing all the Alice stuff in the Christchurch dining hall - "We're not altogether sure which was here first". The corner door in the panneling which was the inspiration for the rabbit hole. The magic painting where Mr Strange turns his head at a certain point of walking past.

*The man coming out of one of the college rooms with odd shoes.

*The flip flop cactus in the shop window - "it's solar powered and that's all it does. We've had the greatest minds in the country trying to work out if there is any point to it, and there isn't. I promise you."

*Story idea: from comment - "It's very safe in the centre of Oxford, everything you do, everywhere you go is filmed on CCTV camera". What if a girl wanted to be a model and spent a day posing for the CCTV cameras?

*H saying 'This whole city is a shrine to Stephen Fry'

*The book you didn't know you absolutely needed until you saw it - photographs of odd chickens.

*B saying about G: 'Of course he's not a dog man.'

*My first time in an Oxford don's room and I end up being the expert of the Archers, somehow I can't stop talking about it.