Sold to the Highest Bidder

Another fun discovery:  The monthly BL Auction in Radley's village hall.   Once a month, the village hall of Radley (the village just south of us) hosts an antique and junk auction filled with all kinds of interesting stuff.  It's an auction where antique and bric brac dealers attend to find treasures for their stores.  Most of the items there come from estate and home clean-outs.  In some cases entire boxes or lots are for sale -- you bid on the entire contents of a box.  I've never seen anything quite like it. 

You can view the items starting at 8:30am and the bidding starts at 10am.  The auctioneer is a quick wit and has a funny quip about every item. I've only been once so I don't know if the inventory I saw was typical, but here are a few highlights:

Handmade christening gown

Scrapbooks filled with old newspaper clippings

This is a box filled with one person's diaries.  The earliest one was dated 1934-35.  I wish I had bid on this box.  I could have bought it for 3 pounds (the minimum) and it would have been interesting to read about this person's life. 

I almost bid on item #171.  It is an old brass Welsh miner's lamp.  It sold for 23 pounds. 

I saw one women buy a whole set of Royal Dalton China for 3 pounds!  What a steal!

There were a lot of items and lots that no one bid on.  It takes a keen eye to find the treasures buried among the junk.  That is what was so fun about the auction -- it was a real treasure hunt.  I'm looking forward to going back, and now that I have a sense of how the auction works,  I may even bid on some treasure or piece of junk that I find.  I'll keep you posted. 

What Christmas looks like in Oxford

There is something simple, old-fashion and beautiful about Christmas in Oxford. Here are a few of my favorite images of the season:

The Great Hall of Christchurch

Christmas decorations on the trees in the Botanical Garden

Christmas lights on the High Street...

...and down Cornmarket Street

A store window on St. Michaels Street

The tree in a quad at Christchurch College

We haven't had any snow in Oxford yet but we have had rain

Lights by the covered market

The tree at the Bodliean Library quad

Runners from the Santa Run walking down Turl Street

Hand painted ornaments hanging in a stall at the Christmas Market on Broad Street

The Christmas Market 

The windows of Boswells

 The Snow Queen welcoming her guests at the Yule Ball in Oxford's Town Hall

The Christmas Carol Service at Christchurch Cathedral

Santas on the run in Oxford

Early this morning over 1700 Santas ran a 2 mile family fun run, storming the streets of Oxford. It was a sight to behold!  

 This was the 4th annual Helen & Douglas House charity run in Oxford.   

There are dozens of Santa runs during December in towns throughout the U.K.  Oxford's run was for a children's hospice care organization.

I was so impressed to see so many children, teenagers,  and families with children taking part. 

It was a bit surreal to see the stunning street of Oxford filled with Santas everywhere you looked.

It was also wonderful that there was a break in the weather.  It rained last night and it rained this afternoon, but the sun was out this morning for the Santa run.

Ho Ho Ho all the way down Broad Street to the traditional Christmas market and the hot chocolate and mulled cider that awaited the runners...

...and a ride on the carousel in front of Balliol College. 

J.R.R. Tolkien Lived Here

Earlier this week I was walking down a street in Headington, a village on the outskirts of Oxford, when I noticed this plaque on a house:  "J.R.R. Tolkien lived Here 1953-1968"

Tolkien attended  Exeter College, Oxford in 1910, and returned to Oxford briefly after the First World War to work for the Oxford English Dictionary.

In 1945 Tolkien came back to Oxford when he was appointed to the Merton Chair of English language and literature, which he held until his retirement in 1959. He lived at 20 Northmoor Road from 1945 to 1953, and then moved into 76 Sandfield Road, Headington, where he lived until 1968.

He used the garage as his office and it was here where he wrote the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  In 1968, the attentions of the fans at his Sandfield Road home drove Tolkien to flee from Headington to Bournemouth, where he remained until his death in 1973. I guess he was the J.K. Rowling of his day!

The following books in the Lord of the Rings series were published while Tolkien lived in the house on Sandfield Road:

• The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
• The Two Towers (1954)
• The Return of the King (1955)

The Harry Potter Studio: Christmas at Hogwarts

Today I spent the day at Hogwarts -- the Warner Brother studios in Watford, just north of London where the Harry Potter movies were filmed.  It was all decked out for Christmas and, since it was my first time visiting, it was simply magical. One of the reasons I love seeing movie shoots or a film studio like this one is that I like to be reminded of all of the thousands of hours of work that goes into the final product that we see.  What we see is a tiny part of the tip of an iceberg of a ton of hard work. I've watched film shoots that took hours to film a scene that turned out to be just 10 seconds of a finished film.   I think this is true of so many things in our lives.  We enjoy the finished product without much thought to the work, dedication, design, imagination, and hours of production that goes into the making of that product (whether is a film, a piece of art, or simply a product we use).  The "Harry Potter" Studio gives you an insiders view of the enormous scope and  process of the making of the eight Harry Potter films.  The movies we've enjoyed represent just a tiny tip of the iceberg.  The Warner Brothers studio shows you the rest of the iceberg and it is fascinating. 

Harry's Room at 4 Privet Drive: The cupboard under the stairs

 The entrance to Hogwarts and the Great Hall

 Christmas and costumes in the Great Hall (which, to my surprise, doesn't look much like the Great Hall at Christchurch, Oxford where the first sorting hat and dining scenes in the first movie were filmed)

 Some of the costumes the actors wore

 The detail in the costumes and props is amazing

 Just a few of the 3000 unique and individual wands used in the films. Harry's is at 3 o'clock, and Voldemort's is at 9 o'clock

The Gryffindor common room: These are the actual props and sets used in the films

 

 The huge swinging clock pendulum used in one of the films still ticks away 

 

 Gyffindor staircase

 Dumbledore's Office

 The Potions Classroom

 This gives you the idea of the attention to detail everywhere.  This is just a few of the 1000 jars in the Potions classroom

 Here is a view of part of the studio floor with various sets tucked here and there

 Hagrid's hut

 It was fascinating to learning about how the special effects were done.  Who knew that the quidditch brooms have stirrups!

 The Burrow -- home of the Weasleys

 The actual paper props used in the films

 How my kids once wished for a letter like this to arrive by owl

 The statue from the Ministry of Magic

 The Horcruxes

 The Knight Bus

  

 The actual bridge

 The Dursleys' home

 The detail and design of just about everything there was bind-boggling

 The flying car

 The model of Hogwarts used in all the films

 Whenever there is a shot of Hogwarts in any of the films, it is a shot of this model. I'm sorry I couldn't get the lighting right but you can see that again, the detail is incredible. 

What I loved best about the tour was seeing how an idea went from a descriptive passage in one of the books, to a conceptual drawing, to a model, then finally to a built set.  I have such respect for everyone involved in the process.  They nailed it! This is the architectural drawing of the Burrrow -- the Weasleys home.

  Here is a model of Hogsmeade

 Models for the Whomping Willow and the Hogwarts BridgeThe Hogwarts model lit as if it is night

At the end of the tour is Ollivander Wand shop. It is filled with over 4000 boxes of wands.  Each technician, make-up artist, designer, draftsperson, engineer, set designer, costume and prop technician, special effects team member, cast, crew, and everyone who worked on these films has their name on one of the boxes.  It is a wonderful reminder of the thousands of wizards that worked to produce the magic of these wonderful films.