For the winter holidays this year, my brother visited from the States. He’s also a Duke medical student, currently on his third (research) year. We did a bit of local touring in Oxford and London with Evan and her sister Lena, had Christmas dinner with Elo and Richard, and then set off to visit our cousin in Italy. Pictures from Italy will be in a post to follow, but below are some of the Oxford and London adventures.
As anyone who has been following the news knows, the world was scheduled to end today on the strength of the Mayan long-count calendar and a variety of other alignments and predicaments. The only way to fight this fate was to gather with about 5,000 others, including druids, neo-pagans, revelers, and my visiting brother Bill, to greet the sunrise and bring in the dawn that marks the end of the year’s longest night.
My brother and I drove to Stonehenge with a few other Wolfson revelers and did our part. A Getty Images photographer managed to catch us in the act, and we wound up on the BBC’s and Zeit’s coverage. On the way back to Oxford, we visited Salisbury Cathedral, a 13th-century construction housing one of the four remaining original copies of the Magna Carta.
This autumn and winter so far have been weather adventures. The story of autumn was one of flooding. Heavy rains throughout Michaelmas term in addition to construction at Hinksey Weir lead to consistently red and amber flags for most of the term. Just as things were starting to calm down in time for Christ Church Regatta, heavy downpours on already-saturated ground of the northwest Thames catchment area lead to flooding more extreme than that seen in 2007. Many boathouses were flooded, and even University squads had to find alternative places to row.
December so far has been dry but beautiful: an early dusting of snow combined with unseasonably cold temperatures have lead to a winter wonderland feel in northern Oxford, including the University Parks. Unfortunately the centre city area remains mostly snow-free, so no pictures of glittering old colleges this time.
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Each year, Wolfson College hosts a lovely Winter Ball. This year the theme was Venetian Masquerade, and the evening included a formal dinner, live bands and dancing, various bars and food, laser tag, and silent disco. The ball is always a magical evening, and some of it was captured by the official ball photographers, Phill Brown and Tom Rackham.
This year’s novice rowing term was a bit of a struggle, as the river was often closed due to flooding. Just when it looked like the conditions would allow the Christ Church Regatta (the main event of the year for novices) to go ahead, torrential flows from upstream resulted in catastrophe, including a Somerville College boat snapped to pieces. The regatta was canceled.
Regardless, Wolfson came out of the season with a strong fighting spirit. One of the men’s novice boats was in the only division to race in Christ Church Regatta before disaster struck. The women’s first novice boat performed well in Nephthys Regatta and then was victorious in a mini erg race organized by University College when Christ Church Regatta was canceled. And of course, the friendships formed and boat club dinner festivities made the season an unforgettable one.
Like the Head of the River Race, the Fours Head is a a head race over the 6.8-km Boat Race Course. Though Wolfson entered a four, I was a bit too uncertain of my lab schedule to commit to the race and so was training with Wolfson’s eight instead. Then, the day before the race, a plea was posted on the Oxford College Rowing website asking for a substitute rower for the KRSV Njord club of the University of Leiden, Netherlands. Needless to say, I offered my services and somehow was taken up on the offer.
Njord, founded in 1874, is the oldest Dutch national rowing association. My particular boat was made up of members who had been rowing for about two years, but as an “international crew”, we were entered in the Elite division alongside other top clubs and the likes of the Oxford and Cambridge Blues squads. Having start number 39 out of about 450 meant we were able to avoid the Tideway Head ritual of waiting for three hours on the water before the race started.
This race was the first and only time the crew rowed together, so the going was a bit scrappy, but there were some clean stretches and nice pushes, and we finished in a respectable 20:41.7.
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These pictures are courtesy Big Blade Photography and JET Photographic. Click for more!
Every sport is a subculture, and rowing is no exception. Rowers the world over obsess over their erg scores and can wax eloquent on how to set the boat for hours. There’s even a Tumblr. But in Oxford collegiate rowing, the eccentricity is even more pronounced. We obsess over two things: the flag status, which tells us whether the river is rowable, and the bumps charts, which show each college’s history in the famous bumps races.
Originally, the flag was flown from a boathouse overlooking the river, and bumps charts were painted on boathouse walls and kept in notebooks. Over the past couple of decades, official and unofficial online versions appeared, and a rower’s morning ritual came to include checking the flag status online to determine whether they’re needed at the river. While this was certainly an improvement, there had to be a better way. Discussing this with Susan Graham, another Wolfson rower and Oxford engineering student, we realized we’d independently come to the same conclusion: what the Oxford collegiate rowing community needed was a mobile app.
Susan and I got to work. We founded Feather & Square, LLP and released OxBump for the iPhone. In time, we would release three other apps, add iPad compatibility, and develop a host of additional features. We partnered with a radio station, were featured by the Met Office and Information Aesthetics, and our apps pop up in pubs OxBridge-wide. A fuller accounting of the apps can be found on the F&S Products Page, but there are a few screenshots below if you’re interested.
The highlight of Wolfson’s summer regatta season was Oxford City Royal Regatta. Raced over both weekend days, the regatta attracts a number of local clubs, some Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and composite teams just out to have a bit of fun. The Saturday races are over 1000m, and Sunday is raced over 500m. Each day has “sprint eights” events over the lunch hour, in which all eights entered are invited to race — without any handicaps or divisions aside from gender — over a 350m course.
The Wolfson men did quite well: we entered three fours and an eight (the eight raced both days). Each of the fours (including mine) won their respective divisions, and the eight won on Sunday. I was asked to substitute into Worcester College’s sprint eight (after drinking half of my victory Pimms) on Sunday. Though we had a good race, we sadly were bested by a squad of ex-GB rowers. (As that squad was rowing with a borrowed Wolfson boat and blades but rowing with lilac Durham University kit, they were hailed from the bank as “Pink Wolfson.”) The women had a harder time of it; their eight entered on Saturday, winning one lunchtime sprint race and two races in the afternoon, but in the end were edged out.
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These pictures of my four (and my adopted Worcester eight) were taken by Matthew Richie and Big Blade Photography. Click for more!
A few of the NIH OxCam students decided to take a long weekend in the Cinque Terre region of the Italian Riviera. After flying into the Pisa airport (and taking the requisite funny pictures of the Leaning Tower), we traveled on to our seaside flat in Riomaggiore. On Saturday, we rented some kayaks to explore the local coastline, and I took a scuba dive, seeing an octopus, a Moray eel, beautiful jellyfish, and a few barracuda. On Sunday, we took the train to Monterosso and hiked back to Riomaggiore through the Cinque Terre National Park. The journey was about 11 miles up and down the seaside ridges, made a bit more difficult by the detour around landslide-damaged trails between Corniglia and Manarola.
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Update: Now includes pictures from Michael Tee’s camera! Click for more!
Every once in a while, minor adventures arise that result in some good pictures that aren’t quite enough to warrant their own entry. Read on to see some pictures of a visit to Bath, touring Blenheim Palace with visiting friends, the “trashing” of a friend finishing her last exam, and a couple of snapshots of Oxford.
