A visit to C.S. Lewis

Well, the holidays are over and David went back to work today. How sad! Although I still have two weeks until school officially starts (which is mighty nice), the libraries open back up today and I need to catch up on the reading list my supervisor gave me for the break. We are going to have our first tutorial in the "Oth" week of term (yep, that really is a word, at least at Oxford), which I think may be next week!

On Sunday I had a really nice New Year's Day surprise. David needed to go to B&Q (which is like Home Depot) to get a special screwdriver for a cell phone, and I went along for the ride. B&Q is in the Headington part of Oxford, and I mentioned along the way that I really do need to find C.S. Lewis' grave sometime. Most of you who know me well know what a huge fan of him I am, and I have been meaning to visit his gravesite since we arrived, and especially since we got Wilma.



Lewis lived in Headington, and I knew that he was buried in a churchyard called Headington Quarry, but I had no idea how to find that. Well, lo and behold, on the way to B&Q we saw a sign for Headington Quarry! Turns out it is an area of the town, not the name of a churchyard. So David, awesome husband that he is, turned off in the hopes we might be able to find it. And sure enough, before long we saw a sign for a parish church on Quarry Road, and I knew that had to be it!

We parked and walked along a really lovely, leafy path back to the church. It was a small, stone Anglican church called Holy Trinity, and next to it was an old graveyard. It was wonderfully quiet and peaceful. Fortunately, I had seen photos of Lewis' grave, so I knew what to look for. We enjoyed looking at the other tombstones on our search, many of which were from the 1800s.

And finally, in the back corner of the cemetary, David found it! I was disappointed I didn't have my camera with me, but David saved the day with his cell phone that has a camera.




It's a humble grave, which is fitting for him. It was dedicated by his brother Warnie (a main character in the movie Shadowlands, for those who have seen it) and later joined by him, who died 10 years later.

It was so neat for me to visit the grave in person. I've read almost every single thing Lewis has written, including his letters, so that I almost feel he is a friend. His writings are a big reason I became such an Anglophile, and also, I must admit, a small part of the reason I applied to Oxford! He was such a wise, reasonable, intelligent, interesting, imaginative, and very funny man. I really wish I could have known him.

(For more about Lewis, see my biography of him on ReligionFacts here and a great website dedicated to him called Into the Wardrobe.)



I had planned to bring flowers, but I'll have to return another time for that. In the meantime, David found a discarded pile of mostly dead flowers nearby, and picked a few of the nicer ones to lay on his grave. Someone else had been there before us and left a sprig of red berries.

Looking at his gravestone, we realized that Lewis died on David's birthday! Three years earlier, though. I had known that Lewis died on the very same day JFK was assassinated (which means Lewis' death didn't get much press), but hadn't remembered the date.

So that was a really nice start to 2006, and a fitting way to kick off another term at Oxford.

Later that day we finally went to see Harry Potter, and that was fun, too. Definitely darker than the previous ones, as they've been saying.

Yesterday was a fun day out on the town. We started our New Year's health resolutions off right (albeit a day late) with a good walk through the University Parks into town, and then went our separate ways for some shopping and wandering around. David got a pair of headphones that are made in Germany but they didn't have in any of the German stores David looked in, and I got shampoo that claims to end the winter static in my hair that is driving me crazy, some lovely face cream from Origins, and treated myself to a People magazine (the equivalent of almost $6 because of the import costs) from Borders.

We met back up for lunch at ASK, an Italian place with really good pasta and pizza. The food was delicious and we had a fun time showing each other what we'd bought and chatting. It felt like we were still on vacation, but back in our hometown. We were tempted by the buses on the way back, but persevered and walked all the way back home. It was quite warm compared to freezing Cologne, which was a nice change.