Amrys and I have returned from from a brief sci­en­tific expe­di­tion to Oxford. Our mis­sion has revealed much about the life of a Foonyor Barzane in his nat­ural habi­tat. Major adven­tures include:

• Get­ting the insider’s tour of the Oxford cam­pus. Funny-looking men with bowler hats (“Excuse me! Excuse me please!”) ensure that nobody else gets beyond the room where they shot that Harry Pot­ter movie.
• Hit­ting the out­door gar­den pub scene. It was 75 and sunny every day, with sun­light until 10 PM. Eng­land, I am cer­tain, has the most favourable weather of any place.
• Mak­ing com­pli­cated attempts at a few home repair projects. High­lights include: pump­ing algae from the back­yard pond (I had packed an elec­tric pump from Cruft­labs), mend­ing a bro­ken stereo speaker, and re-orienting the rooftop aer­ial to max­imise BBC recep­tion. None of these actu­ally suc­ceeded, but who could imag­ine a vaca­tion with­out wires, hoses, or exten­sion ladders?
• Punt­ing (nau­ti­cal def­i­n­i­tion). Jeff made this look pretty easy. With great con­fi­dence, I pro­pelled us swiftly into a low-hanging tree and whacked Amrys on the head with a 15 foot Al-yoo-minium pole before I fig­ured out what I was doing.
• Grillin’ out: burg­ers, sausages, chicken, and Pimm’s. And good company.
• Attend­ing the Green Col­lege Ball. The black-tie social scene in Oxford is unpar­al­leled. As is the rate at which British uni­ver­sity stu­dents can con­sume free alcohol.

I’ll put the pic­tures online in about two weeks. Since the British author­i­ties don’t except film from their air­port X-ray reg­i­men, Jeff is mail­ing them to me.