Coca Cola A relief to escape from this dreary election
last weekend to Oxford—to be precise, to Magdalen high table, where (for a special occasion, at any rate) the food is excellent and the wine even better—and to talk of Democritus instead of democracy. The worldly dons are worldlier than ever, their parochial colleagues as parochial—but somehow less self-confident, over- conscious of the need for change. It's all this Franks Commission nonsense. Where are the reactionaries of yesteryear? But whatever the canker within, Oxford without was lovelier than ever, with the clean spring sunlight striking the remarkably successful new stone facings provided by the worthy Oxford Historic Buildings Fund, and Christ Church meadow—still, glowing with sun and mist—looking so virginally serene that no Minister, not even Mr. Crossman, seeing it then, could possibly have contemplated raping it with a motor road.
Alas, the Students' Garden at the House was locked, and I hadn't time to search for a key; but from afar it seemed as if the Iris Reticulata were doing well. I mention this because it is almost my only botanical Latinism, and that thanks to R. H. Dundas, one-time pillar of the House, whose only formal communication with the undergraduates in my day was to announce publicly, each year, the first appearance of the Iris Reticulata in the Students' Garden. Dundas —or D—boasted of having played truant from Eton as a boy to see the celebrations in London for the relief of Mafeking, and every year from 1939 until his death a few years ago wrote a rambling, idiosyncratic and oddly entertaining report of the doings of the House and its sons. It was in one of these reports, I think, that he published A. P. Herbert's signal tribute to the magic of his old university : Oxford! In all the catalogues of worth There is no name like Oxford on the Earth— The only name, they say, that sounds as clear As Coca Cola in the cosmic ear.
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