This is my third year of the Oxford Summer Programme, and I feel like I have come home. The heat wave has passed and things are civilised again, and Oxford is heaven. The first few days have been spent learning names and faces and exploring the city, as well as going to brilliant lectures and seminars. Today’s lecture was on the history of the dictionary, which is much juicier than you might expect. Many of us are getting ready for a trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon on Saturday, where we will see the RSC perform ‘As You Like It’, and which it seems every theatre company in the country is performing this Summer.
We are also starting to bunk down in the libraries for our essays, but it is hard not to be distracted by the four hundred years’ worth of books surround you in the Bodleian Library – much less by the 9 million or so more stored in the stacks below the streets. Everywhere you look there is something monumental, and I never get tired of it.
