It’s all Becque’s fault.

I had it all carefully planned, taking advantage of a happy coincidence of dates: Friday 5th September, the Orieladelphians 40th dinner in Oriel, and Thursday 4th September a community energy conference in Oxford Town Hall. One return trip, three nights B&B in Oriel, sorted.

The community energy conference was PoweringUP, organised jointly by OxFutures, an Oxford based community energy group and DECC, the Department of Energy & Climate Change. It even had an address by the Secretary of State, the Rt Hon Edward Davey MP. (That’s enough copying from the agenda – Ed.)

When I spotted that the event was on only the day before the Orieladelphians, it seemed obvious that I should volunteer to go as WREN’s representative, so I booked places at the conference and the awards ceremony following it. (See April 17th blog for more about WREN, or go to the website here – but do come back again.) I also bought my rail ticket, opting for a standard return with flexible trains. That’s flexible trains as in you can choose which one to go on at the time. Most trains are flexible enough to go round bends. This was indeed fortunate, as mere days later I received a doom-laded missive from Stephen, this year’s Orieladelphian president. Young master Becque had booked a holiday in August, carefully avoiding the dinner. Then he changed the date of the holiday, or allowed it to be changed, so that it carefully did not avoid the dinner.

The first reaction – “You’d better book a plane ticket home quickly, before it gets even more expensive” – was replaced by a can-do change to the date. Oriel could do it a week later, could we? It happened that we all could, so we did.

So I came up for the conference and had an enjoyable Thursday talking community energy with representatives of other groups, local authorities and commercial enterprises working in the field. It was the first time I had been in Oxford Town Hall, and hadn’t realised just how big it it is and how splendidly Victorian the main hall. There were some interesting people, so I handed out business cards and got a few back and we ended up in the bar of the St Aldates Tavern sometime around 8 o’clock, where I am sure the talk became even more interesting, if I could only remember it.

My travel plans the following week firmed up when we booked an appointment with a solicitor in Taunton to discuss a legal matter (as you might imagine) and were joined there by number one daughter Ellie, who lives in Oxford, as older readers might remember. So I went home with her on Thursday, had dinner in Atomic Pizza surrounded by old comic book covers (“got that one, and that one, and that one…” to the point of exasperation) and wandered into Oxford centre on the bus next morning.

I arrived at Oriel at about 10 o’clock, expecting to be told that it was too early to check in, and was not disappointed. They would allow me, though, to leave my suitcase in the Lodge. While I was locking it, a woman came in to say that the rooms were all done and ready. “It seems you can check in,” said the porter, so I did. The room overlooked the building site that third quad has become in the latter stages of the refurbishment of the Rhodes Building. The main activity seemed to be digging trenches, though I use the term ‘activity’ advisedly.

On Ellie’s recommendation, I went to the Story Museum on Pembroke Street, which had an exhibition of photographs of authors dressed as a character from their favourite children’s book. The photographs were placed in a setting from the book. So we had Terry Pratchett as (Just) William Brown in the Outlaws’ meeting shed, Michael Rosen as Till Eulenspiegel in a trick location, Benjamin Zephaniah as Anansi the Spider hanging from the ceiling, Frances Hardinge as the Scarlett Pimpernel hidden in a cupboard and so on. You could only see the Borrowers down a microscope and the scene from Narnia was entered through a wardrobe, of course with hanging fur coats. It cost a slightly eye-watering £7.50 to get in, but was a lot of fun. An attendant said that they had had more groups of adults than children.

After lunch at the Bear (an enormously thick sandwich plus salad) (plus a pint) I pottered around a bit, ending up in Blackwell’s, where I found some books for Diana, including Stanza Stones by Simon Armitage (See Culture, 17th September 2013) which contains not only the poems but the story behind them. And lots of photos of Yorkshire.

At seven o’clock, Orieladelphians gathered in the second quad, outside the Senior Common Room. Guests this time comprised Hazel, wife of the former Provost Ernest who sadly died earlier this year, and Syd, a former SCR butler who butled for us at dinners many years ago. Syd (and we) had been concerned that he wouldn’t make it due to ill health, but he was standing there with two sticks, accompanied by his daughter Marina.

The Menu – mostly accurate

The dinner table was laid for our absent friends as well as the nine still-existent chaps. Stephen had done a deal to get SCR wines rather than the Conference ones initially offered, and wisely allowed head butler Asefay to choose them to match the courses. The dinner was excellent, and we will pass over the matter of the Half-Baked Alaska with hardly a mention.

We adjourned to the small SCR for further port and brandy, all except Thomas who adjourned to the small SCR for non-alcoholic beverages. The change of date meant that he had to travel home that night, rather than stay over. He was not downcast, however. As he explained, the change had meant that he could spend the previous Saturday sailing in glorious weather.

After Thomas left, the rest of us got stuck into the port and brandy some more, before leaving for bed at some time after 2.30. Though in fact Ranulph and Ashley stayed up even longer talking. We assembled, most of us, for breakfast in hall (though not Ashley, nor Stephen), and after checking out, moved on to Brown’s cafe in the covered market, for further coffee and tea and in some instances, food.

A few days later, I got an email from Ashley: “Very probably linked to the [inability to get up for breakfast] is the realisation that the residual functioning neurone charged with the task of remembering the provisional date for next year’s dinner has perished. Steve and I think Friday 11 September 2015 … was agreed.” Actually, he was right, because I had managed to get it into my phone calendar and could look it up. Whether my neurones would have been up to the task otherwise, I am less sure.

Last Friday, 6^th September, was the Orieladelphians Dinner, the 39^th of its kind, organised by Ranulph. It was the first of its kind for which I had to travel from Cornwall rather than Surrey. Clearly I was going to go by train. Years of experience have taught me that driving the morning after an Orieladelphians Dinner is not a good thing. It’s not even legal. No, there’s no special Orieladelphian driving laws been passed; it’s just the application of good old drink-driving ones. In addition, taking the train is cheaper and quicker than driving myself to Oxford, especially with a senior railcard.

I realised I didn’t have a senior railcard. I applied for it online and it arrived the next day. Remarkable. The next decision was how to get to Bodmin Parkway station. I could catch the hourly 555 bus from right outside our house, but it is carefully timed to arrive at Bodmin Parkway 50 minutes before the train departs, or ten minutes after, if you care to think about it that way. Diana had an appointment so couldn’t drive me there. I eventually worked out I could drive myself in the other car, pay for two days parking (the princely sum of £2.60) and have the car available to drive myself home – the extra hours on the train being sufficient, I reckoned, to up the levels of blood in my alcohol stream to a legal level.

I bought my tickets online and collected them from the ticket machine at Bodmin Parkway when taking daughter’s friend to the station a few days later. On Friday morning, I set out in the little car, allowing time for getting caught behind tractors (Cornwall is a proper agricultural county and this time of year you have to expect tractors). I parked and used my phone to pay for two days parking. It was too far from the end of the car park to walk to the ticket machine, buy the ticket, walk back to the car to display it and walk again to the station platform with my luggage.

Chatting to a uniformed gent from the Bodmin and Wenford (steam) railway who had set up shop on the platform I learned that my reserved seat, being in Coach D, would have its own TV screen. Possibly in consequence, Coach D was very full, with most seats reserved, and I had to cast out someone from my seat. She tried to tell me it wasn’t reserved, and indeed there was no reservation ticket on the seat, but I had my receipt and she had to go. I found the reservation ticket torn in two on the floor a few minutes later.

The most interesting thing on the TV was the journey map, that told where you were in real time. The system was obviously lifted wholesale from one used on airlines, because it also showed the speed and altitude. Altitude? On a train? I want my trains to remain on the ground, thank you very much.

The seat next to mine was reserved from Plymouth. A guy duly got on at Plymouth, put his bags on the rack and sat down. Just before Exeter, he got up to “get a cup of tea” and I didn’t see him again. I assume he changed his mind about the tea and went for a meal in the dining car all the way to Paddington instead. It was pleasant to have no one next to me, but I did have to keep fending off people who wanted to sit there.

After tracking alongside the M5 for a good few miles, going easily past the cars speeding in the outside lanes, the railway ran inland and alongside the Kennet and Avon canal, where we would no doubt have easily passed the narrow boats, had there been any. I changed at Reading and arrived in Oxford in the mid-afternoon.

The dinner itself was 7 for 7.30 pm. I decided that this year, after flouting tradition with a white tuxedo and yellow bow tie and cummerbund the previous two years, I would be the epitome of sober respectability in unremarkable black dinner suit and black tie. This was remarked upon. “Don’t you normally wear a horrible mustard tie?” they said. “Not this year,” I said. “I am the epitome of sober respectability this year.” (These might not have been the actual words used.)

At pre-dinner drinks, only two of our usual guests arrived, Gill the former Steward who let us back into the college in the early years, and Syd the former SCR Butler. Neil thought that Ernest, the former Provost, had been ill. There were nine Orieladelphians present, the nine survivors, since Edward’s death earlier in the year:  Ranulph (president, at the head of the table), Paul, Neil, Thomas, Christopher, Steve (next president), Peter, Ashley and me. Five extra places were laid. We always have the extra places laid but we don’t always have them laid with bread rolls.

The dinner was good. I remember especially the broad beans, about eight of them arranged in a straight line between the meat (loin of lamb) and the other vegetables (confit potatoes and crushed minted peas). My late father, a broad bean afficionado, would have been greatly disappointed by the quantity. The wine was excellent. I remember especially the Montbazillac pudding wine. At least, I do when jogged by the printed menu, a copy of  which I liberated, as usual.

After dinner, we adjourned to the small SCR and I found myself in a seat altogether too close to the occasional table with the brandy bottle on it. At some point I left to go to bed. I have no idea what time it was. I have no real recollection of leaving the SCR, but I did get to my room and I did go to bed. Perhaps fortunately, I had a ground floor room.

During the night, I woke up needing a pee. There was a nice convenient en-suite shower room and loo. I drank a couple of cups of water, this being a good thing, I thought, to deal with alcohol in excess. I found myself sitting on the floor of the shower room, not at all sure how I’d got there – certainly there was no conscious decision on my part to sit down. I returned to bed.

My alarm went off at 8:15, which gave me enough time to get in to breakfast. My head ached a bit, but not in a hangovery sort of way. I put my hand to it and found encrusted blood. I looked at my pillow and found small blood stains. I tried to wash out the encrusted blood and it came away, to be replaced with fresh blood. I wasn’t bleeding badly, though. Clearly, I deduced, I had done more than merely sit down on the shower room floor, but what, exactly? I dressed and went to breakfast.

The lady behind the counter insisted on giving me two of everything – fried eggs, sausages, rashers of bacon – but I couldn’t eat it all. This was a hangover symptom, but I didn’t feel particularly bad in any other way. My stomach wasn’t queasy, I didn’t have a pounding head, I just didn’t feel like eating much. Rosie noticed. “What have you done to your head?” she said. “I think I must have fallen over,” I said. Ashley thought that this was quite likely. “You did leave the room sideways last night,” was his considered medical opinion.

After breakfast I went back to my room to pack. Sitting on the loo, I saw a red smear on the tiles about a foot up from the floor. So that’s where I went down, I concluded. It was in a nice clear area, under the shower. No protruding radiators or towel rails, just a smooth tiled wall. This was in several ways fortunate. I cleaned the blood off and checked out.

I met Ellie for coffee at Oxford station. She had the coffee, I didn’t bother. I did buy a tuna sandwich, in case of feeling hungry at lunchtime, and as I bent down to put it in my bag, she noticed the blood, which I had to explain, somewhat shamefacedly. Back home, Diana was suitably sympathetic (i.e. just enough, without going overboard, given the self-inflicted nature of the injury) and Tris was outraged by the thought of her father behaving more outrageously than herself. It wasn’t until Saturday night that I noticed the tender spot on the back of my head and Sunday morning the bruises on my elbows, fleshing out the picture, as you might say.

So much for sober respectability. Next Orieladelphians, I’m wearing a clown suit.

I was all set to knock out one of my usual trivial pieces, this time about going on the beach barefoot yesterday (after all, it couldn’t be that cold. Yes, it could) when I got an email from Neil with the sad news that one of our fellow Orieladelphians, Edward, had died suddenly on 22nd March. He’d not long reached 60, which is no age to be dying.

We’re not sure what the cause was – Neil guessed heart attack, which is as good a guess as any at the moment. Immediate reactions from other on-line members included “bloody hell!”, “dreadful shock”, “dismayed”. Diana, when I told her, said she’d miss his conversation at the annual Friends & Family dinner. The next one of those is in less than two weeks, so I imagine it will be a bit subdued – although I’m less sure that Edward would want that.

Edward and I were assigned to share rooms in our first year at Oriel in 1971 and we’ve been friends ever since, despite his becoming a monk of the Order of St. Benedict and my veering away from the C of E to become an atheist.

I shall miss him, too.

Original post: Friday, 30th September 2011

There are troubling signs that this blog is evolving into being all about dinners and lunches – six of the last twelve postings [if you care to go back and look at the archive on my old site]. Well, you can’t fight evolution – here’s number seven out of thirteen.

It was the Orieladelphians 37th annual dinner on 2nd September, a Friday, as they all are. Christopher was the President. He had contacted me a few weeks earlier, in my self-appointed capacity as keeper of the archives (or to put it another way, as Steve of course did, “Kevin, you ought to get out more”) to check what the menus had been over the last couple of years, so as not to repeat them. This shows admirable conscientiousness, paying attention to the details that no one actually notices. No one remembers what we eat from one year to the next. Even I have to look it up, on the menu cards I purloin (no longer surreptitiously, since everyone now knows I do it) from the table each year.

I have objective proof of this. One year we had exactly the same food as the year before and no one realised. I only spotted it some time afterwards when I was filing the menu card. And no one cared. “Bloody good dinner!” we all said, both times. The only dinner that we all remember, that we never let Neil forget, is the one where he decided to have a large and splendid piece of fish, but no meat course. The dawning horrified realisation that after the fish knives and forks at the place settings were only pudding and cheese implements, swiftly followed by the production of the actual pudding, rather than something meaty, made an indelible impression on all present. Though it is the absence of the meat that is remembered, not the food that we ate. There is even some debate about the fish itself – turbot? halibut? No one has tried anything that experimental again.

There is a sameness about the annual dinners that is reassuring. The same ten people turn up, and they are largely each the same people as they were the year before, changing gradually as many years pass. There are five regular guests who join us for the pre-dinner drinks. Weather permitting, we all meet on Second Quad lawn outside the SCR. This year we were standing right behind a notice saying something to the effect of: “Do not go on the grass.” Ha! That notice is not for us! We stood right there on the green stuff.

Last year, Neil caused a stir by wearing a white jacket (see archive blog entry  for 10th September 2010 “OOGs”). This year I took my own white jacket as well as the black, and since the day was hot and summery, in contrast to the week, indeed weeks, preceding it, I decided to wear it, with barely a comment at all. As we stood on the grass with our champagne, word filtered through that Judge Neil would be late. He was on the M1 somewhere North of Nottingham, stuck in traffic. He arrived at around 9 o’clock with some excuse about having been given the wrong case to try, the four day case rather than the three day case, meaning he couldn’t leave Durham until late. Anyway, the staff had saved him most of the meal and he worked his way through it while we drank port.

In the course of dinner, it emerged that long-missing original member, John Chettoe, is still alive. The linguists of our year, of whom Christopher was one, decided at the Gaudy to have a reunion themselves and tracked down the aforementioned Chettoe. He came to the first few of our dinners, then declined one, then stopped responding to our invitations. So we stopped trying and ejected him from membership. Occasional stories would surface. He had joined GCHQ. He was a spy. He had been abducted by the Soviets. He had gone over to the Soviets. It turns out that he had joined GCHQ, but as for the rest, probably not. (Unless – perhaps joining GCHQ was just a cover story…)

We adjourned to the Small SCR, snaffling the remaining port and bottled water to go with the coffee and brandy and whatever else was in there. Several people got very pissed. At the end, it was just Neil and I and we discovered it was about 3 a.m. I hadn’t pulled that late a night at the Orieladelphians for twenty-five years or more!

We both made it into breakfast, though. And it was a bloody good dinner.