Mist hung over Oxford. Mist draped itself across the rooftops, masking the city’s towers and spires and muffling the peals of its multiplicity of church bells. Mist slid along the cobbles and mud of the streets. Mist flowed around the dome of the Radcliffe Camera and shrouded the cupola of the Sheldonian Theatre, Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece with its palisade of sagely stone heads. Mist rippled and writhed through the air, turning the sun to a pale silver disc. “Makes one quite nostalgic for home,” Holmes remarked as we headed along the towpath on the east bank of the Isis, past Christ Church Meadow. “A London fog is yellower and more mephitic,” I said. “It leaves a foul taste in the back of the throat.” “An Oxford mist runs it a close second. This is in many ways a dismal place, Watson, dank and damp. Built on marshland, which tells you a lot. Floodplains all around. Cambridge University is no better, perched amid the Fens. What is it that compelled the founders of our two supreme seats of learning to choose such low-lying, uncongenial sites for both?”
