Without a trace...

Yesterday, worn down by a mere 5 hours sleep, I took a rapid train from Paddington Station to Oxford, where I am partaking in a 3 day long Festival of Research Methods - the kind of tedium an Inquisitor has to subject himself to in order to remain competent, and sadly especially important if one has taken a break from the daily nitty-gritty of one's work to go undercover in the Orient.

The first 2 days have proceeded well. Today I attended an excellent class on Latent Class Analysis, which presents some fascinating methods for keeping track of all the Enemy's tricks. The less said about the multi-level modelling topics the better; and the Data Visualisation sessions were disappointing, though it was interesting to learn that they are now building Difference Engines so powerful that they can paint by numbers. I have to watch those Difference Engines, lest one day they build one smart enough to do my job for me. Rest assured, the day will come!

Of course, I wasn't sure what to expect from a trip to Oxford - one never is. Since the last time I visited, deconstructionism and post-structuralism have become all the rage, and I had heard that the entire place has been deconsructed by a band of post-colonial crazies. I was right to be afraid, too - even the railway lines have proven vulnerable to this mob of foreign idealists, so when I arrived at the station to come home there was no sign of the train or the tracks, and a bunch of solid-looking working class chaps were wandering from platform to platform, trying to recover the linear model of space, time and causality so that they could get a train running. It must be terribly frustrating trying to run a service business in a post-structural academic town!

Still, despite the strange post-modernisms of the roadways and the oddly invaginated building, I was able to slowly stagger my way around town, and some of the older colleges have survived the predations of the new-fangled critical mob, standing in stately repose amongst the confusion. On a sunny day their ivory towers are stunning, the greensward of their commons most inviting, and the whole place resplendent with the pall of history. Oh pleasant green land! I thought as I picked my way past these splendid centres of learning, wandering through the mess of the deconstructed modern world, and wondering exactly how splendid would be the college where my conference is located?

Unfortunately it wasn't to be. My college proved to be a modern redbrick monstrosity, so overrun by the deranged ideas of modern "sensibility" that its avenues and byways made no sense, and I was constantly getting lost. Even the ducks in the estate managers pond were strangely misshapen, so profound and all-encompassing was the post-phenomenological rot beside which they must live. A most confusing edifice of confusitive confusion! Though once one found one's accomodation, one was reminded of the vast resources the colleges have available to them - my room was vastly superior to a typical hotel room, with a view of a commons and a river, and all the accoutrements of studious retreat one would expect of Oxford.

I was, of course, invited to dine at the high table in my first day of attendance. Quite a rare pleasure, to be waited upon by attentive and admiring students while one eats one's fill of the fine booty of 1000 years of scholarship! There were no dancing girls though, which is at least one lie my Cambridge-educated fellow Inquisitors have been caught out in. I shall berate them for it, and also for not advising me to bring a helmet - one needs all the protection one can get when the foundations of traditional English Intellectualism are being torn apart around one!