We stopped for water in the professionally quaint canal side village of Thrupp today. Thrupp is such a great name that Paula and I have been saying to each other for the past couple of days, echoing it back and forth.

“Thrupp.”

“Thrupp.”

“Thrupp?”

“Thrupp!”

Thruppity-thrupp Thrupp-Thrupp.”

I admit it’s not the most fun thing you could do with your mouth, but it’s up there with whistling Terrapin Station or eating a Hershey bar.

The water pressure in Thrupp is really low. We last filled the tank two days ago, and we’re fairly frugal with water, but Paula had time to cook bacon and eggs, and we had finished eating it before the tank was full. Apart from that we gave Thrupp a miss, fearing it might not live up to the advanced publicity. The locks were not too busy, so we headed on into Oxford.

Towery city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded;
The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did
Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers;

So said Gerard Manley Hopkins, Victorian priest and poet. Then he added some unkind words about urban sprawl.

Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours
That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded
Rural rural keeping—folk, flocks, and flowers.

That would be where we are, out in the base and brickish skirt, because most of the moorings in Oxford are either 48 hours max visitor, or “Agenda 21” sustainable development permanent moorings. There is one little stretch of seven day moorings about two miles from the city center near the neighborhood called Jericho, so here we are. Jericho is where the Gyptians moor their boats in Golden Compass, so I’m keeping an eye out in case Lyra finds her way here.

It was mid-afternoon by the time we got here, but the Ashmolean Museum was still open, so we headed over there. We did not have time to do all of it, so we’ll be back for more tomorrow, but here are a few of my favorite things from what we have seen so far.

This guy is from India, about 200CE.

I love the expression on his face.

For my circus friends, here is an ancient Greek drinking cup with a female acrobat doing a handstand on a potter’s wheel, while a male clown pulls the string to turn the wheel.

I hear they are now working for Cirque du Soleil.

Here’s another acrobat.

She’s Etruscan, and was possibly the handle of a larger piece. The Etruscans were contemporaries of the ancient Greeks who lived in Italy before Rome became a thing. They were also, so far as I know, the last Europeans to depict female genitals in art until the Nineteenth Century. I think this says a lot about European attitudes to female sexuality, and none of it good.

This is an Etruscan mug from about 400BCE.

Even that far ago, trade and travel in Africa and the Mediterranean meant that black faces were not unknown in Northern Italy.

This statue of Venus has been “restored” periodically over the millennia. Her torso is from about 150CE, her legs are probably from the early 1600s and her head is from the 1700s.

I don’t know why she’s putting her hand over her crotch, she doesn’t have any genitals.

Here’s a fragment from the Epic of Gilgamesh dating from about 1700BCE plus or minus a century or two.

It’s from Iraq. However, I thought these, from the Middle East around the same period were much more interesting.

The prism on the left is a table of linear measures and square roots, and the lump in the middle on the right was someone’s math homework. They were trying to calculate the area of a field and got it wrong. That’s OK, I’d probably have difficulty doing math in cuneiform, too.

So then we went for a drink in the pub that JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis used to hang out in…

and they had Nanny State non-alcoholic beer. Hoppy-Hoppy Joy-Joy.

Finally, a word to the demolition crew.