Sunday in Oxford

[louiselux]

We went to Oxford yesterday, partly to mooch about the bookshops, partly to go to the botanical gardens. It's 20 minutes on the train from Reading, which seemed the perfect travelling distance.

So we mooched a lot and found a new second hand bookshop, where I scored heavily in quality if not in quantity: one copy of Dracula, Prince of Many Faces by my old friends Radu Florescu and Raymond T McNally. It's their follow up, many years later, to In Search of Dracula




An art installation in the grounds of what was the old gaol and is now a branch of the up market hotel Malmaison (Bad House, fittingly). The junk furniture is apparently arrayed to imitate the layout of the old cells.



Nice book shop near Oxford Castle, stuffed full of genre fiction, run by a very nice man who told me it was his dream to run such a shop. He was a part time heating engineer too and had blueprints spread out on his desk - multitasking to make ends meet. He was great.



My book yay!



Dramatic iris is dramatic at the botanical gardens



There was a patch of bobble-headed alliums surrounding huge silvery artichokes



A huge crumpled leaf



My decision-making story die, 50p each from Borders. I haven't had any decision making crises yet, but am looking forward to having one soon.



Lemon muffin, omg. It was delicious with a latte.



Portrait in a bin - Matt is next to me, reading Patrick O'Brian, and I am reading my new book and taking photos.



My feets, randomly. I'm chucking these plimsolls soon, because it is now impossible to stop them smelling bad.



Cherry beer on the way home and more healthy water. The wee bag is an incredibly useful present from i_am_zan - a tiny insulated cool bag, with a tag that says 'lube sheep' on it. I use it fortaking my milk and probiotic yoghurt drinks to work

Comments

[eyesofshinigami.livejournal.com]

Your pictures are GORGEOUS. *____* Those flowers are incredibly beautiful! And I even like the one of your red tennis shoes. *laughs* I recently had to get rid of a pair of mine for just the same reason, but luckily I got a new pair. *laughs*

Very, very cool. ♥

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Thank you! The irises were amazing, whole long beds of them in different shades of blue and yellow.

RIP shoes, damn I really need a new pair.

[eyesofshinigami.livejournal.com]

Oooh. That sounds really lovely! I'm such a sucker for pretty flowers. ^___^ I've never seen irises like that before.

The best thing about Converse is that they're so versatile, and once you break them in they're actually comfortable. ♥ I literally wore mine until they were falling apart. :D

[avierra.livejournal.com]

I like your portrait in a bin, it is quite striking.

Lemon muffin. Mmmmmmmmmmm.

Have you learned anything interesting about Dracula?

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Apparently, just as Turkish janissaries where about to attack Poenari castle, Vlad's wife threw herself from a balcony of his castle in Transylvania, after reading a message fired into their bedroom by a relative, who had just escaped from enslavement by the Turks. The river below is known as the 'princess's river'.

No one knows if this is true or not, but it's the only written down references to Vlad's wife.

[despina-moon.livejournal.com]

Have you read The Historian? Might be right up your alley - slow but interesting.

Lovely pictures! Cherry beer? I'm very fond of raspberry and black currant lambic but I don't think I've tried cherry yet.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

I haven't - I'll look out for it, thanks!

Cherry beer is so good, guh. It's quite strongly flavoured, so in that way it's a bit dangerous to drink because it tastes so innocent. I do recommend it. The brand I like best is Bacchus.

[glass-icarus.livejournal.com]

fantastic pictures! especially the iris, omg. &hearts &hearts (and the lemon muffin, hee! :D)

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Thanks! The irises were spectacular, honestly.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

That muffin looks delish! And yay for the book, too.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Books and cake, it doesn't get any better.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

It really doesn't.

[seraphim-grace.livejournal.com]

have you read the tom holland vampire books, I stopped about six years ago so there is probably another ten since then but they're based around the most wonderful conceit
lord byron's diary was burned because he was a vampire
the first one is a bit of a literary joke, it's what if Polidori was right and Byron was a vampire, the second is stoker investigating the mystery around Lucy Ruthven and other mysterious deaths around his theatre
the third is Lord Rochester and the settling of america, and has a rather interesting thought on the plague and has the main character with milton trying to decipher the voynich manuscript, and the fourth is ancient egypt and suggests Nefertiti was a vampire

they're great because they're really well researched, Tom holland is a literary scholar first so he knows his stuff, even little details
like vampire polidori's breath smells because he drank acid, and the second one has vampires in the raj with proper Kali worship, it starts as rudyard kipling, goes to sherlock holmes and ends up more robert louis stevenson and it's deliberate.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks! That sounds really good, especially the taking it across diffrent cultures.

I think I have actually perused this in Watestones recently. It does sound right up my street.

[athena8.livejournal.com]

These photos are lovely!! You take amazing pictures. ♥

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Aww, thanks!

[trensaddiction.livejournal.com]

That iris is amazing. Botanical gardens are the best.

Also, I find myself tempted to try making a lemon muffin like that one now - was the filling more of a lemon curd, or some sort of custard?

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Botanical gardens are full of wonders ordinary mortals can't hope to imitate, like 40 foot long beds of blue and pink and yellow irises.

The muffin had a sort of lemon curd filling, or possibly more like a thick lemon sauce. It wasn't quite as rich as lemon curd. Mmm lemon curd. It's been years since I had that.

[devikun.livejournal.com]

Oh hey I had that book once!

Looks like a pleasant day rambling about. Your beer is quite strange to me. Are you sure it's alcoholic?? ;) And does it *really* say Bacchus on the bottle??

Plimsolls, Chucks, Dunlops. Three words, but they are they same thing! I find this very cool. I have a red pair of Cons actually (as in Converse All Stars) and I love them to death. Well I haven't yet, but I probably will. They replaced a pair of black and white Pony's which I *did* love to death. Why do we get so attached to our sneakers that we will wear them even when they are torn and stink???

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

It is cherry beer, and it is alcoholic, I promise - 5.8% abv. :D It does indeed say Bacchus on the bottle - it's the brand, and they do raspberry beer too, although cherry is my fave.

Apparently, it's brewed in Belgium, which I never knew.

Dunlops! I never heard that one before. There's nothing like a pair of battered old converse. It's so hard to throw them away.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Ah, that looks like a fruit lambic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambic#Fruit)! They come in a variety of flavors, although cherry and raspberry seem to be the ones that turn up on the store shelves most often in the states.

(I've been fed several varieties of the stuff, in a quest by beer-geek friends to find a brew that didn't make me gag...no go. I could still taste beer under the fruit. Looks like I have to stick to cider!)

[devikun.livejournal.com]

I love them so much I've got no less than about 5 or 6 pairs! Well they're not all Cons, most are Dunlops. Also called Volleys, full name being Dunlop Volleys (http://www.volleys.com.au/flash/street.html) (beware, embedded music!). They are nice and cheap (like Converse used to be), pretty trendy and with a great deal of sentimental cred for Aussies - an iconic domestic brand worn since about the 1940's by our tennis players (and we love our tennis players here almost more than our cricketers).

Oops! Sorry about the bung tag!

[baka-gaijin.livejournal.com]

ooooh Lemon Muffin! You can't go wrong with adding lemon to something.

And a pic of Mr & Mrs Lux!

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Heee, indeed. Lemon is generally a good idea!

[kickingrad.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, that picture of the iris is gorgeous!

[scribblemoose]

Lovely photos, and it sounds like a really lovely day, too.

Also very inrigued by Matt's reflection. I've often wondered what he looks like ^_^