St. Hugh’s College main lodge from the interior courtyard
No, I don’t sleep very well in my new digs. Too many sounds, even with earplugs. I expect I will adapt. I’d better….
I did have the most amazing dreams. My mind spend the night processing a couple of not so pleasant past events into peaceful resolution, merging my actual experiences with fragments of unknown historical figures comforting me. I wake up feeling comforted, if weary. That seems a fair exchange and I think about the significance as I shower until I realize I have less than 27 minutes to dress and get to the dining hall for breakfast before they close the doors.
17 minutes later (it’s a big campus with lots of stairs!) I enter the student’s dining hall. It’s pretty much empty by this time, though a few stragglers like me do make their way into line.
Breakfast consists of dry scrambled eggs, one overcooked piece of bacon, two deep fried “hash brown” patties which I just cannot eat, a small cup of weak coffee, and a banana. I manage to pocket an orange and kid’s size apple juice for later.
Breakfast eaten, I make my way outside to see the lovely grounds of St. Hugh’s College. As I stroll across the gardens, a man begins to set up a croquet court. They certainly didn’t have that at the University of Oregon.
However, my friends and I did set up our own croquet court underneath the freeway overpass on many of the weekends when it wasn’t raining in Eugene. 
We would get dressed up in our hippy whites and, drinking cheap champagne, we’d hold raucous tournaments that lasted for hours.
No one comes out to play here, though. The weather is grey and threatens rain. Most of the usual students have just gone home for summer break. The college seems to be filling instead with an interesting assortment of people. Some are summer session course specialists like me. Some are clearly wealthy youth from other countries enrolled for summer term.
One young man from China proudly sports his Oxford garb. A couple of young women from France chatter companionably away as they stroll by, arm in arm. One of them has a shaved head and is wearing a school uniform. A finely dressed gentleman is speaking to an equally finely dressed woman. I catch what I believe to be the rolling sounds of some Eastern European language I can’t quite make out. Croatian?
I overhear part of the heated conversation of a couple of young women with North country English accents. They are discussing the phenomenon of “the Oxford Lad”, which I discover refers to upper class young men who flaunt their privilege, sexism and homophobia. They are disgusted that the rugby team hired a stripper and that Oxford chose to allow this to happen.
“It isn’t about free speech, at all.” One of them states. “It’s about continuing the outdated traditions and elitism of this university.”
“It doesn’t feel safe to be a woman anymore,” her friend says, “there’s some kind of backlash. Oxford is filled with hypocrisy”.
Later, I read an article in the student journal about a wealthy young woman from a “good family” (her words) who decides to do sex industry work for a summer job so she can finance her trip to Greece, a trip her family doesn’t want her to take.
She justifies her decision by writing that all women end up having sex with men for money, food, etc. anyway whenever they date, so she just chooses to do it “consciously”, with a request for “an allowance” from her sugar daddies up front. 
“It’s all a bit of a lark, really”, she writes. “I can dine out on the stories from this for years. And in the short term I make $400 pounds a night a couple of nights a week from sad, middle aged graduates of the colleges in town whose wives won’t give them blowjobs or who enjoy the odd bit of kink.”
This causes me to remember the daughter of an old friend of mine who has done something very similar to this in America, turning it into quite the cottage industry for herself.
Meanwhile, the referendum for Brexit carries on all around me
and at home, I discover that the Democrats have a good, old fashioned sit in to try to force the Republicans to simply put to the vote a bill they introduced to ban the sales of assault weapons to people on the no fly watch list. Of course the Republicans respond by recessing congress so they can regroup.
The world is spinning, rain is falling, bigotry is rising and feminism seems to be morphing into something which posits the objectification of women as progressive.
I head out for a walking tour of old Oxford before my course begins.
