This is my final night at Merton. On the way home from the Oxford Playhouse (went to see Noel Coward’s “Design for Living” tonight) wandered around the gardens a bit waiting for the moon to rise. Finished the paper last night (well, 4:00 AM this morning) and was sufficiently together (after three cups of tea at breakfast and two more during the morning break) to ad-lib my way through what I thought was a remarkably coherent presentation of said paper.

So I took the afternoon to play tourist. I even brought the camera along. Took pictures of the mistletoe (what? I haven’t told you about the mistletoe yet? well, hold on a sec...), the wallgoyle by the night gate and the view from “my” bench in the garden. Climbed two of the towers in town (Carfax and St. Michaels Northgate); Carfax has five bells from 1684 hidden away, St. Michaels has seven (I think) assorted that I got to climb through -- the smallest must be less than a hundredweight and is hung in one of the windows! -- but the St. Michael bells are hung for chiming rather than ringing. If I’m up early enough tomorrow there are several other spots where I’d like to get photos. And after spending far too much money shipping a box of books because I’m worried about airline-imposed weight limits, I had to buy a bit of light reading for my travels -- figurative sense only, though, as a new hardcover caught my eye.

Right, so about the mistletoe. My room in Rose Lane overlooks the college vegetable garden. Don’t ask me why the college has a vegetable garden -- we certainly don’t get the vegetables in hall, and the beet greens have been calling to me since I first got here -- but it right there under my window. Around the far side of this vegetable garden there are several elderly apple trees with very few leaves at all. The biggest bit of green on them are these big blobs of mistletoe. Some of these blobs are huge! At least a couple of yards in diameter. I had to get pictures. So that’s the mistletoe; maybe tomorrow I’ll tell you about the Space Alien Thistles.

Yesterday was the last field trip for the Anglo-Saxon Archaeology class. We didn’t go very far afield -- just to Dorchester-on-Thames (about seven miles away) and Wallingford (maybe another ten miles) -- no more marathons like the drive over to Sutton Hoo during the first week. As we walked into the churchyard our tutor mentioned that it was places like church gardens that little bits of old stuff tended to turn up. About three steps later along the rose-line path he reached down, say ‘Here’s a bit of medieval pottery.’ Two more steps: ‘This is Roman pottery.’ We were quite impressed! Especially since both bits were little more than grey-black lumps. We handed round the bits but one of my classmates claimed them. After visiting the church we walked the bank of the Roman town until we could cut across a ploughed field to an Iron Age earthwork. I got lucky with a bit of terra cotta catching my eye; it turns out to be a rather interesting bit of Roman pottery with an unusual double rim -- possibly a lid or maybe a rimmed plate. Rather spooky to think that I could just pick up a potsherd some 1,900 years old.