Settling in

It is a little difficult to account for the last three days. They have been both overwhelming and underwhelming. In many respects I have done and seen very little, and yet here I am in the middle of Oxford with all that that entails (except that I am not entirely sure what it does entail, as I shall try to explain shortly). Of course, there have been many “settling in” things to do, such as getting set up with an office and a computer connection. The office is a large one that I am sharing with another academic visitor from … Monash (i.e., from the Melbourne area!), but we are also sharing it with the left over computers and materials from someone’s large project that have been placed here for temporary storage. In fact, I am not entirely sure yet what or who is going to be temporary, because at one stage I think I was told that I might end up in a different office later, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this doesn’t eventuate. Thus it is that office tidiness—my bête noire—is not solely my responsibility: the desk was already a bit untidy before I even arrived, and most of the stuff lying around elsewhere is not mine!

At the moment I have been catching the bus into the city from Anne and John’s place (on the west side of the city) and then walking north to the Department of Education’s buildings on Norham Gardens. Tomorrow, however, I should have a bike and this should make the journey (a) quicker and possibly (b) more exciting (but not too much, I hope). So far I have managed to get myself completely disoriented every time I have been into town, which is rather embarrassing. A great sense of direction is not one of my obvious strengths, I admit, but I’m not usually this bad. I’m sure it will all become more familiar with time.

The weather has not been great either, plus I’ve had settling in tasks to accomplish, and this has limited the scope of my explorations to date (which is why there are no exciting photos of famous buildings … yet). I’ve had a stroll around the park adjacent to where I’m working, and was just in time to see a display of large posters associated with the International Year of Astronomy with lots of fantastic photos of galaxies and novae and constellations. I’ve seen many of the images before but they are still impressive, and it was fun wandering around the path looking forward to see what was on the next board.

It is the first week back for students and so there is a certain kind of madness to the place at the moment, on top of all the tourists (although their numbers are starting to decrease now I guess). One of the mildly weird things for me is getting my own sense of “place” here. My status as a visiting fellow means that I officially “belong” in some sense: I have a swipe card that gives me access to some of the buildings and tomorrow I should have a staff card that means, I believe, that if I want I can go and work in the Bodleian library (I think I am supposed to go “oooooh” at this point!). On the other hand, I am still a transient on the periphery, not entirely sure where I am allowed and under what circumstances, and unaware of implicit and unspoken traditions that are assumed by the cognoscenti who probably don’t realise that there are any assumptions!

So, I anticipate lots of interesting experiences in the coming weeks. Today, for example, I had lunch in the dining room at Linacre College (not quite on the scale of some of the older more famous colleges, but with refectory tables and wooden benches), before retiring upstairs to a smaller sitting room for further conversations with the people I was with. The system of colleges here is different from what occurs in Australia in the residential colleges there, and, in any case, I lived at home when I went to uni, so this is all rather other-worldly, especially as the images that I have come from a variety of books and television shows, most of which are fictional.

Last night was a bit of fun. I went with Anne and John to sing with a community choir. I must confess that I have missed singing in a choir in recent years (not enough hours in the day what with one thing and another, and I chose to let it go), and so this was a welcome return to what I think is one of the ultimate team activities. It was a bit confronting, though, because it was all by ear rather than using a written score … and I have long been a visual person more than an aural person … not to mention the fact that my memory is dodgy. The big challenge was to learn my part (especially when there were other harmonies that could have fitted just as easily) and then remember it from one minute to the next. I was craving copies of the sheet music for most of the night!

Anyway, I am settling in. I have spent a couple of days doing some more really productive professional reading and having time to think about the implications for both my own teaching and for some of my areas of research. I had a really productive conversation with Anne about some of the issues today; these sorts of conversations—about the bigger picture of our work—are what really make sabbatical worthwhile. The next/ongoing task is to turn these discussions into useful outputs.