It’s the little things that refresh.

Vacation time is different things to different people. For some it is going places new, for some it is going places old, for some it is staying home. People use vacations to visit family and catch up with all the gossip and some use it to get away from family and become the gossip. For some it is the time to pursue hobbies, or perhaps simply lay in the sun until you become a raisin. However you choose to spend your vacation time, the goal for all of us it is to come back refreshed.

For thirteen out of the last fifteen years August has been Festival in Edinburgh for me. First it was a busman’s holiday, then it became a way to renew the vows with the art that has been important to me all my life. But most importantly, I think, is that it was a way to stay in touch with the friends I had made in the UK.

I have shifted my search for spiritual refreshment from the festival to classes at Oxford. This is good for me, as I have found this even more rewarding than I had expected it to be when I first took classes there last summer. While keeping up with friends is still important I suggest that after all my trips to festival they can drop down to Christ Church to see me.

There are a lot of things that I am looking forward to with great expectation. For example, if you think of me on the first day of class on Monday the 10th, you should know that at that very moment, I am probably in the back room sitting on a barstool enjoying his first pint of the day, or perhaps the last pint of the night. Time doesn’t matter it is always the pint that counts.

Chances are good that I’m at the “Eagle and the Child”, a famous Oxford pub where J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S Lewis would meet one night a week to discuss the news of the day and to discuss their writing. It is interesting to me that not only were they at Oxford at the same time, but they also taught, Tolkien at Merton College and Lewis at Magdalen College. However for most of us, their greatest claim to fame was they were the giants of “high fantasy.”

To the students of Christ Church, my college, while all of this is fascinating, it seldom comes up as a topic of discussion when we are having a pint at “The Bird and the Baby.”