Like many American tourists, I visited the first
university in the English-speaking world not because of its history or its
tradition of academic excellence but because of its connection to a dorky and
awkward teenager with a scar on his forehead.
That’s right. I waited in line at the University of Oxford to
glimpse sites from the Harry Potter movies. I posed in the Hogwarts Great Hall and
snapped photos of the spot where Professor McGonagall greeted first-year
students in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” I dressed in wizard robes
and ran around the streets shouting “Expecto patronum!”
Just kidding. I only do that in London.
As you can imagine, mingling with dozens of Harry Potter
fans from around the world (let’s call them Potheads for short) was annoying
and exhausting. While walking through the Great Hall, a dining hall at Oxford,
I felt like a cafeteria tray that a student had shoved onto one of those
conveyor belts that takes the trays away for cleaning. An attendant herded me through
the hall, encouraging me to keep moving so everyone else could have time to
take their photos. Meanwhile, Potheads were bumping into me from all sides, and,
on my way out of the hall, a fight almost broke out between an angry American
mother and a teenage Italian girl on the stairs.
I was relieved to escape to the quiet of the Cathedral,
which has served as Oxford’s
Anglican cathedral since the reign of Henry VIII. It was here, in a conversation with a helpful
historian, that I uncovered the true magic of Oxford. Believe it or not, there’s
more to this university town than its Harry Potter movie sets.
The historian approached me as I was looking at a memorial
for what I think must have been the world’s first emo couple. The stone carving
showed a man and a woman sitting at a table with a lovely skull centerpiece,
looking pretty miserable.
“She was a gambler, that one,” the attendant said.
He launched into a story about how the husband had died and
left his wife all his money, only for her to gamble it all away. She ended up
winning it all back, probably just in time to fund the lovely memorial. The
historian told me more scandalous stories about the adultery and mistresses of
other people memorialized in the Cathedral’s sacred space, and I began to
realize why I found Oxford so charming.
It wasn’t Harry Potter or the Potheads who leant Oxford its
appeal. Rather, it was the people—its current and former
residents and its melting pot of visitors—who made it appealing. Their stories shone through the ancient stone
of the Cathedral and whispered in the rows of books that have been preserved in
the Bodleian Library for
hundreds of years.
Oxford is magical because of these stories, which do not
always have happy endings but are all the more powerful because their
characters, like the memorial’s couple, have flaws. It’s magical for its
perpetual youth, exemplified by the students in graduation gowns who I saw
milling around the town all day. And it’s magical for its simple British charm,
encapsulated by the man in the plaid coat smoking a cigar who passed by the window while I was eating at the pub.
For these reasons, this hidden magic, I would return to
Oxford in a heartbeat, even if I have to take the bus instead of apparating there.
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