Oxford - City of (non) Crenellations and Grotesques

We spent the weekend (after Stephanie's Saturday morning hobbies) in Oxford, visiting Emma, Steven, Ben, and Imogen. It was great fun to catch up with them, and Oxford was a very pleasant place to be. The children all seemed to enjoy each others' company too. It will be wonderful if we can get together again in Malvern sometime. These pictures were taken in the Oxford Castle area, after at least one of us overdosed (after pizza) on a chocolate-triple-glory.










There were some interesting etymological discussions over lasagne (amongst other chat about custard consistency, unfinished research & DIY, and the perils of sitting behind the right person at a church) on the nature of grotesques and gargoyles, and on whether the bumps on the spires might be called crenellations. It seems (according to the city's dictionary) that this term refers to the battlements on castles. I'll wait for further inspireation before trying to work out what the right word is.

We explored some of the inner-city colleges in varying depths - particularly Magdalen and Christ Church, but also University and Merton. We discovered that Christ Church Cathedral is supposed to be the smallest Cathedral in England, but the choir is good. They sang Walton Jubilate Deo, Leighton responses, and a plain Te Deum, Venite, and psalm for us this morning. It's at least the 2nd time I've heard the Leighton since we've been here, and I've seen them on various music lists a lot more than that. Must be top of the pops at the moment. It was slightly surprising to hear such an obvious breath in the treble solo "his mercy is everla...asting" after only a quaver of the high note. And the phrasing in the psalm singing was quite different from what I'm used to - it seems to be done purely by rhythm, and not by volume. I think I can generalise to the following rule: if the 2nd last or 3rd last syllable is stressed and the ones afterwards are unstressed, then make the stressed one 3.5 times longer than the others.

I have found that Hugin and autopano are very good at stitching a bunch of photos together into a panorama. I haven't explored them in depth, so it's possible that they can do clever things to straighten out images, but the fish-eye effect is interesting anyway. These four panoramas were taken from the top of the tower of St Mary the Virgin University Church at midday today. It's nice to be able to do these things, and to have the photos as a record of our visit, but if you want to see what it's really like, I have to recommend Google Earth.