A couple of weeks ago, I braved a 4 hour train fiasco via Birmingham New Street station, aka the scariest train station in the entire country, to visit my sister Matilda and her boyfriend Jasper in Oxford. I’d never been on a train by myself before for more than twenty minutes, so this was actually quite the accomplishment! 😂
Tilly and Jasper met me at the Oxford station and we walked together to get some sushi for lunch. There must have been something up with the sushi though because Tilly proceeded to be violently ill for the whole rest of the day. That gave Jasper and I the opportunity to chat about politics for eight hours while she was in bed! 😂
The next day, she felt much better, just in time for the Oxford University open day which I wanted to go to. We toured an insane amount of colleges: Balliol, Brasenose, Christ Church, Corpus Christi, Lincoln, Merton, Magdalen (where Tilly goes), Oriel, Pembroke, and St Johns. As you can imagine, our feet were killing us by the time we finally all flopped into bed at 8pm.
I’d had a lovely day though, as I got to meet again with my friend Angelina. We met at one of the private school assessment thingies I was going on last year, and have kept in touch although been unable to meet up again because we live ages away from each other. So it was lovely to see her again and stroll such a beautiful city while at it!
My two favourite colleges were Christ Church and Merton. If I end up applying to Oxford, I would probably be doing a degree in PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) or PPL. PPL is psychology, philosophy and linguistics, but you pick two rather than doing all three, and I’d probably choose philosophy and linguistics. Both Christ Church and Merton offer PPE, but only Christ Church does PPL. If I decide to do PPE, I think I’d apply for Merton, but obviously Christ Church if I choose PPL.
We slept for as long as we could after that tiring day, but had to up earlyish to get the train down to London for a big politics event we were going to, which you can read about here. I had the absolute time of my life and can’t wait to go back again next year!!
Now, Tilly and I are back home, with all of her many uni belongings piled up in the hallway 😂 It will take us a long time to tidy everything up, but I’m so happy to have her home after a long term at Oxford.
Here are some photos from the open day. Don’t forget to look at the captions so you know what you’re looking at! And compare all that beautiful architecture to the first picture, which shows the modern monstrosity which forms part of St John’s..
