Oxford

The 30 December 1967 saw the last train run on the Varsity Line. For more than a century, it had carried passengers between Oxford and Cambridge, ranging from codebreakers bound for Bletchley Park to a young Peter Hitchens. Pieced together by local railway companies between 1846 and 1862, it was an enviable achievement, even if C.S. Lewis sarcastically named it the ‘Cantab Crawler’ due to the train’s more relaxed pace of travel. Alas, despite dodging Dr Beeching’s axe, Harold Wilson killed the line off. Wanting a railway between two of our greatest cities should not be a radical idea Fifty-nine years later, I am living with the consequences. Like all great sibling rivalries, it started with one of us getting something the other did not.

The berries on the elder are ripe, falling and staining both city streets and country fields alike with their purple-black juice; the last tomatoes are ripening while the plants let their leaves die off, putting all their energies into their final fruit. Dahlias and sedum - and Michaelmas daisies - flower in borders where half the pleasure comes from the russet and brown of decay. There are more hours of darkness than of light. ‘That strain again! It had a dying fall.’ Today, September 29, is Michaelmas, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels. Coming shortly after the autumn equinox, it is one of the quarter days inherited from the Middle Ages, dates which long ordered life.

“Altogether Elsewhere.” The title page of an unpublished travel book caught my eye during a recent clear-out. The author, Matthew Leeming, was a character who deserved to be famous but somehow never made it. He was imaginative, witty, fearless and greedy – wonderfully greedy. He inherited his father’s ceramics company and ran it for years with great success. He loved being rich. “Money,” he used to say wistfully, “eases the pain of being alive.” To pique women’s interest, he claimed to be off-limits. ‘I’m training for the priesthood,’ he confided He invented businesses out of thin air. In Oxford he lived in a neighborhood called St. Clement’s and he created a summer school by printing a ream of luxury notepaper with an imposing letterhead: “St.