Oxon

B. and I spent a few days this week in Oxford: not visiting anyone, just wandering around relaxing and looking at stuff. We were staying at the Randolph, Oxford's biggest, poshest hotel (thanks to a massively cheap special offer on Tesco's part), which we found snooty and intimidating, but we managed to have a good time anyway, with plentiful trips to George and Davis'.

To an extent this was a horribly self-indulgent exercise in nostalgia, revisiting our old student haunts, but they're not wrong when they say you can never visit the same pub twice. Of course some of them had been redecorated (although some not -- this is Oxford, after all), but the main difference is that when I was a student in Oxford I drank Guinness, while B. drank cider. We used to hang around all the good pubs with our friends, but we would have been entirely blind to their attractions in terms of real ale.

This weekend we were able to remedy that, and we discovered that The Lamb and Flag has its own golden ale brewed exclusively, while the Turf's range of good beer outclasses any of the pubs in Bristol. I curse my student self for squandering such opportunities with his callow philistinism.

We also found a smashing exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (which appears, peculiarly, not to have a working website), mostly consisting of temporary rooms and buildings buried in sand. Copies of the artist's book were being sold, and I snapped one up -- it's an anthology (mostly science fiction) in which even the title page, contents page etc are taken from other works, which is surpsrisingly disorientating.

It's rare to find art that's unashamedly influenced by SF, but this Mike Nelson chap seems to have absorbed Aldiss, Ballard, Dick et al, as well as some of the more depressing Soviet SF authors, and taken them to heart.

One of the rooms featured a film projector playing back a lecture given by a conspiracy theorist, in which he explained that corporate logos were all symbols of various masonic lodges and illuminati. There isn't enough of that sort of thing in contemporary art, damn it.