The Fairfaxes of Oxford

On Thursday - between job hunting and essay finishing - we took ourselves a three day trip, stopping first at Bath then travelling on to Oxford. Oxford, as you will know dear reader of my many blogs and musings, I have been to and adore already; Bath I had not yet visited, but had an idea of from my only loved Austen Novel, Northanger Abbey.

I did not encounter Mr Tilney, nor see a notable trace of muslin anywhere. In Oxford, however, I did encounter a fox, and if you recall - as you surely will - I was anticipating with great anticipation seeing a fox, and have found that energy rewarded.

In this first portrait, I have attempted to capture Fabian's initial anxious hospitality. He kindly agreed to pose for me, and appeared rather (quietly) flattered.

On Saturday morning I took an early walk around the Christ Church Meadow. I was unable to sleep any longer - we had booked accommodation at the last moment and were stuck for choice, and ended up in rather dismal digs, uncleaned and full of sweaty young men having night terrors on the bottom bunk - and with the incredible amount of light at this time of year I could think of nothing more delightful to do. (Sidenote: Light has begun to dribble in at 4.30 in the morning, and at 9.30 it is only just sinking on most days. This is terribly absurd, and I can only expect more light as midsummer approaches. In Winter I expect we shall get 45 minutes of light only, and then at the most inconvenient of times.)

Looking back towards Christ Church and central Oxford.

The Christ Church meadow is a large area of pasture maintained by the Christ Church college of Oxford University. It is bordered by the River Cherwell, the Thames, and the Shire Lake Ditch that joins the two just before they join of their own volition. At the far end is Christ Church. The Meadow is surrounded by other small fields and parks, and the Botanical Gardens (where Will and Lyra promised to meet every midsummer day, to sit on either end of a seat in their alternative universes).

It always rains when I am in Oxford, and the morning was low and misty. It was warm though, and I did not need my raincoat. The streets were quiet and empty of people, with all the gorgeous buildings of the city resting uncrowded and dreaming of earlier centuries. 

You may, perchance, see the small doe in the middle of this meadow.

Gooses.

I find sometimes, when I walk, that the world slips aside. Time becomes incidental and things do not matter so much. I found the Broad Walk at last, and followed beside it, beneath the tall trees. A water rat ran across the edge of the bank and vanished, and crows called up above me. Ducks and geese had their half-grown children gathered beside them in the grass, just waking, and not quite suspicious if I didn't look towards them. A few deer watched me pass from the meadow, and the long horned cattle ignored me entirely.

I think sometimes about England and how green parts of it seem, how filled with pleasant spaces for rambling. But of course, all of this is cultivated life. It is a long time since England was wild. Everything was stripped away for more efficient human subsistence, and the English countryside is idyllic because it is domestic. That typecast English love of nature is built on mastering and controlling it, classifying and collecting, sculpting and shaping. It extends to the world. My beloved Pitt Rivers Museum is a perfect example of this - a thousand fascinating objects taken from their origins and labelled in meticulous, miniature inked script and set on velvet under glass.

(One of my favourite places) The
Pitt Rivers Museum: everything
labelled and arranged,

But this is really beside the point. I came to the end of the Ditch and turned up an avenue of old trees towards Christ Church.

And you may not believe me, but exactly then I was thinking of foxes and wondering if at this time of day there may be a chance I would see one, and at exactly that moment I heard a couple of crows screaming and cursing at something up ahead on the path. A slender figure bounded across the path, noting the calls but rather unconcerned, then suddenly stopped and looked down at me.

It was a fox. He was larger than I had imagined foxes to be, and I thought at first I was being hopeful and it was really a dog. But no, he had the long bushy tail and a look that belonged to no domestic canine. He was greyish along his back and he held himself perfectly still for a moment as he looked down the path at me.

"Sorry - do you mind?" Although it was mildly chastising in tone, there was also a strong hint of social anxiety, and a tone of genuine inquiry. He looked confused himself as soon as he'd said it, unsure perhaps of what he really meant or wanted. "That is, I mean to say," he said, "er, good morning."

"Good morning," I said. Really, it rather was. I must have been smiling very enthusiastically at him, as he broke for a moment into an unguarded grin of his own, then hesitated again with it stuck awkwardly on his face. I noticed he was carrying a tea service, and at the same time he noticed me notice it. "Er," he said. "Well." And he noticed it had begun to rain a little more heavily, and that wearing my coat would surely make things uncomfortable for me, given the warmth of the morning. "I suppose, if you want to, you might like to come for tea?"

The crows, who had landed on the nearby trees to observe this encounter, now recommenced their shouting of abuse, demanding to know why I was worthy of his hospitality and they were not. He replied to them in terms of such colour I am physically incapable of reproducing them here (foxes and crows alike have different numbers of rods and cones in their eyes, and are able to see a different variety and quality of colour than humans).

And so it was that I was invited to tea not in a badger's den as I had intended ("Don't hope on that one," Fabian told me, for thus I discovered to be his name), but in a fox's den beneath not too far from the cattle race in the Christ Church Meadows of Oxford.

A golden scroll at the Bodleian's marvellous
Genuis exhibition, which I believe may
tell the story of the Fairfax Fox's history

Fabian's den was fashioned around the roots of a tree, a sound architectural decision. He had lined the walls neatly plastered with the same clay that made climbing up to the city's medieval motte-and-bailey castle in the rain quite a bother, and a heat pump quietly keeping things to the appropriate temperature. He had hung remains of previous meals up on the walls to form a kind of jerky and, in true bachelor style, clumps of fur and feathers attached to skin were scattered around. There was a distinctly musty and murky odour lurking - I had to reassure him multiple times that all was well and that his abode was, indeed, quite nice.

"At this time of year," he told me, looking around the enclosed space, "I prefer to live outdoors. Out in the meadow, underneath the trees. This is just for when I get a girlfriend, really." I wouldn't say he looked at me hopefully. He knew I was another species.

Fabian served me cream tea - a description that I, somehow, had never heard before. It was simply and magnificently loose leaf earl grey tea (in the most delightful silver pot) with scones with clotted cream and raspberry jam that his mother, who lived a little north in the Port Meadow, had made for him - it was this jam that had attracted the crows, who have a particular mad fondness for the condiments his mother makes. She had access to the finest raspberries at the Cripley allotments and to the memories of her ancestor Ceate the Great, who had once entered the local Oxfordshire Pie contest and won. (This involved a very elaborate and clever disguise, which in itself deserved some manner of award.)

Fabian himself was just on a year old (by our calendar; they rather measure time by the lifecycle of the harribot cricket, with a lifespan that usefully responds to the seasons more exactly than even a fox's sharp instincts can measure). He hoped to get at least two more in, and knew that if he maintained a healthy diet and lifestyle and avoided traffic could live perhaps a handful more still. But that would be quite an old age for a fox in England, let alone an urban fox.

And soon as I let that phrase slip from my mouth - for it was I that used the term "urban", not he - he leaned back, wincing and scowling simultaneously. He appeared to be deciding whether or not to ask me to leave and how best to do it without offending too obviously. I quickly apologised and cited my cultural crudeness. This seemed enough, and I watched his fox brows fall again into a more relaxed pose, which became animated as he told me of his links to a great ancestral past.

A house boat on the controlled canal

Fabian detested the phrase "urban fox," as many detest the labels given to them (though he did note a variety of urban foxes that were embracing the label and leaning into it; his description of them as alternative, sarcastic and obsessed with mustaches rather made me think of today's hipsters). He came from a long line of foxes, who could be traced generations back to before the founding of the university. Indeed, the Fairfax Foxes were one of the better known families in the area, and their lineage could be traced throughout Oxfordshire and further, reaching even to the borders of Wales and to the edge of the Lake District (wherein resided their enemies, the Fichlocks, with whom they had been feuding for some centuries).

He still had within him, Fabian said, the instincts of the true wild fox, and dreamed sometimes a vivid dream of running through dense pine forests from wolves, of hiding from hungry bears, of hi-fiving beavers - all now since destroyed by humans. I told him of my thoughts, walking beside the tamed rivers and ditches and plants. He turned his head quizzically, just as foxes and dogs do in anthropomorphic animated tv shows.

He asked, for the first time, where I was from and who I was. I told him.

Then he asked about Bath. "I've never been there," he said. "A faction of Fichlocks slipped in the year before I was born. At the moment they're too strong, but their time will come..." He narrowed his eyes at his tea cup, which was by now cold; mine was empty. Then, with an eager grin, "Bath!"

"Well," I said.