The process of uprooting my Fine Upstanding Self from these antipodean foundations is now steaming forth with vim and vigour. Visa applications, snide remarks regarding the NHS, international driver's license jiggery-pokery and startling varieties of sturdy winter boot are being tossed about the household like so many circus skittles. I have become some sort of bureaucratic Critical Mass Event, and all my dreams seem to involve signing paperwork.
Item number something-important: finding accommodation. Various machinations with my degree mean that I am effectively a triple threat of Non-Oxford-Establishment (an international [1], part-time [2] graduate student in the Continuing Education faculty [3], which as far as I know also offers courses in Gardening and How One Discusses Pesky Electronics With One's Grandchildren). Living in halls- the full, elitist Hogwarts experience, complete with Latin dinner services and hobbing the nobs over sherry- is forcibly out. I am Hagrid, in a hut, with Flobberworms.
(I am neither here nor there about this. I do have a nasty feeling that other graduate students, on discovering that I live in Off-Campus Accommodation, will assume that I have been expelled from quarters for devious proclivities involving sea creatures.)
Finding this Hagrid-Hut has been a new and interesting adventure. I'm not really very picky. I just want somewhere halfway close to Oxford, with cooking facilities (beyond 'boiling all my food in a kettle'), a bathroom, some kind of heating system which won't require me to pad about in winter with hot water bottles on my feet, and a variety of sleeping apparatus. A roof and floor would be all right. Maybe some windows. Possibly a door.
I would, admittedly, prefer that the sleeping apparatus was not either suspended from the ceiling, accessed via ladder, or flipped down from a wall, all three of which have been offered as options. The latter would make me feel like a piece of ironing.
Neither- and I didn't really expect that I'd ever need to make these specifications- do I really want to live in somebody's unheated, stone-floored converted barn/outhouse/chaff house, which has incredible amounts of space, but is also in the middle of a large field somewhere near Over Worton (where? precisely) and possesses no windows. And living in sloping, thatched attics poses a problem, since at 5'9", and being roughly the 'grace' equivalent of a drunken goose, I would end my life in an increasingly less entertaining series of concussions.
(On the Over Worton note: does anybody in England put their placenames through a once-per-century giggle-proof test? In the Oxfordshire area alone, we have Marsh Gibbon, Little Tingewick, Hinton-in-the-Hedges, Gagingwell, Burnt Norton [which is slightly below Norton, and presumably is where they put all their flammable rubbish], and the immortal Upper and Lower Slaughter. The English must have stiff upper lips through having to say their addresses to foreigners all their lives. MARSH GIBBON.)
I'm learning the tricks, though. To be suspicious of the word 'bedsit', which sometimes means a flat but often appears to mean that one shares (with ten other people) a bathroom, a kitchen, and possibly a bed and one's nicer clothes. To be suspicious of an 'electric token meter' (Want More Heat? Please Insert $2!). To beware persons who write back to your enquiry informing you that they, alas, are currently based in Italy/France/French Polynesia with their sick uncle/mother/Pekingese, but to please wire a token amount of money to them via Western Union to prove it is 'worthwhile' their coming back to England.
Wonder if there's a suburb called Flobberworm?
