My 1979 trip to Oxford and London

In my recent post on my Freiburg year abroad, I mentioned that my first time leaving the country was a trip to England.  Somehow I was accepted into a multi-week economics course at Oxford.  Of course it was not the real Oxford, just some program for foreigners held on Oxford campus.

I didn’t much care for Oxford, and I suppose I still do not.  It struck the 17-year-old Tyler as rather backward and ancien regime.  Everything seemed so old and static, and also slightly rundown.  I walked around plenty, I did go punting, and I also got drunk for the first time in my life (out of three times total?).  I enjoyed only the first three of those experiences.

My fondest memories are walking across town, through a residential neighborhood, to a very good fish and chips place.  I sat on the curb and ate out of the newspaper wrapper.  That was pretty divine, keeping in mind I come from Kearny, NJ, where fish and chips was a major Scots-Irish “thing” until recently (the town is now Latino and Lusaphone).

I realized quickly that I knew a lot of economics — almost everything presented in the lectures bored me.

What did influence me was hearing and meeting Madsen Pirie, who of course is still around.  Here was an actual logical positivist!  That shocked me.  At age seventeen, logical positivists were to me boogeymen who had been refuted by Karl Popper and Brand Blanshard.  But all of a sudden, there was one right in front of me, bowtie and all.  The biggest thing I learned from Madsen is that behind each view is a human being who has counterarguments.  That may sound deeply stupid, but so many of our most important learnings take that form, namely emotionally internalizing something that ought to be obvious, and thus developing better habits of thought.  Anyway, Madsen’s lectures at least were fun, even if the content was familiar to me.  I recall also David O’Mahoney, of the University of Cork, giving a good talk on competition and cooperation.

One weekend a few of us decided to take the train up to Edinburgh, egads what a debacle that was.  Somehow we ended up sleeping in a boxcar with a bunch of soldiers around us (how did that happen!?  I have no idea).  It was freezing cold the whole time, even though this was August.  And the train kept on stopping, maybe the trip took eight or nine hours and had neigh a smooth moment.

Edinburgh was cold too, and I was not prepared for that.  Somehow I ended up walking around in a bathrobe, if only not to freeze.  I recall seeing monuments to Hume and Smith, being satisfied, and wanting to turn around and go back.  Just as I do not recall how I ended up in the boxcar with the soldiers, I also do not recall how I was wearing a robe in Scotland.

The last week of the trip I spent in London.  As I have narrated in the opening chapter of my GOAT book, my main activity was to walk across town to the British Library and read old pamphlets in the history of economic thought.  That was wonderful.

I quite enjoyed 1979 London, which I much preferred to Oxford.  For one thing, it had great music shops, including for sheet music.  Most of all, I soaked up the “rude boy” atmosphere of the city and its slight tinge of danger.  I was an avid Clash fan, and this was before they sold out with their London Calling album.  The whole Clash worldview was laid out in front of me, and I kept on thinking of “Safe European Home” and other early classics.  Piccadilly was a great place to hang out to imbibe that mood, which in retrospect seems remarkable.

I walked, walked, and walked more.  Hardly any of the city seemed well-off, and it was very definitely an English city, unlike today.

I was staying in a hostel, and three or so nights before I was due to fly home, someone broke into the collective room and stole a lot of money.  I didn’t have much left, and didn’t think I could get a money transfer quickly.  So for a few days I bought and lived off Wonder bread, and scavenged abandoned fruit from dumpster bins.  I also found a chess tournament (how??), and played some speed chess with people who in turn bought me a meal.

That all seemed like an appropriate way to end the trip.

At the time, and given my interests, England seemed unambiguously inferior to The American Way Of Life.  The grit of London appealed to me, but I had my own version of that back home in NYC and New Jersey.

And so I flew home, and made no immediate plans to travel abroad again.

It was not until I started listening to Beethoven, and reading German romantic poetry, that that was to change.