Dreams and Anglish

Friends,

Greetings from Oxford University! My second term here began a fortnight ago, and I'm happy to be back. The square peg of my American-ness has by this time had its corners filed to fit the round hole of British culture. I now use words like 'fortnight', for example. And I never, ever say 'pants' when I mean 'trousers'.

At roughly the age I am now, my father permanently absconded from his homeland - for Love. My English grandparents are frankly hoping that I'll do the same. 'Have any young ladies caught your fancy at Oxford, Nealson?' Grandad Munn asked on New Year's Eve. 'How are you getting on with them?' I returned his gaze with what I imagined to be a sincere and good-natured expression and said, wanting, Neville Chamberlain-like, to appease his curiosity without fueling his acquisitive impulses, 'English women find me too guileless, Grandad; there's not enough irony in my worldview. Only Irish women give me any attention'.

'Oh'. His disappointment was evident as he looked down at his glass of Port. Were he not an ex-Salvation Army officer I imagine he would at that moment have finished the wine in a single gulp, extinguished a cigarette, and flicked the butt into the empty chalice just for effect, perhaps muttering as he did so: 'Life, it seems, is more talented than we...'.

He's not the only one expecting me to emigrate. My former roommate Alex Oldfield predicted one hot night last July, as he reached from his bed to arrest our oscillating fan mid-arc, like a man wringing a chicken's neck, that this year I would 'become thoroughly Anglicized and never come home again'. Owing to my father's influence I've been partly Anglicized since childhood, of course ('We didn't win the War by not eating our beans!' - a favourite dinnertime maxim), but my experiences this year have by no means entirely expurgated the American elements of my personality. My current roommate Charley Mull serves to keep me balanced in this respect, as do my numerous consortations with other American students and even, at Christmastime, Devon Abts, with whom I spent a splendid day in Milan browsing through bookshops, drinking expressos, and dodging falling particles of 'building fuzz' (her term) beneath the scaffolding of the Duomo.

It's been great to read of the happenings in all of your lives. I hope you continue to enjoy 'the life that is truly life'. Even if you don't always feel your being suffused with a bouyant Pauline optimism - although I do, thanks to a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and Earl Grey - take heart: a friend and I recently agreed that it is possible to have existential angst and still be a Christian! In England, of course, one keeps such matters entirely private; but I suppose it safe to assume that a blog entitled 'Dreams and Anguish' is something of a liminal zone, an area of 'cultural remission', you know?

Keep in touch!

Ta,

Nealson

(P.S. The 'Ta' should be read as inflected with heavy irony)