Oxford

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I believe that the people from Oxford should receive the New Zealand prize for literal naming. We are proud of our naming abilities. We have:
One Tree Hill: so called because it had... one tree
North Island: because, you know, it's North.
I'm sure we can all think of many other examples. However years before we even got going on the literal naming thing which we mark as part of our national identity, the people of Oxford were well ahead of us. Incidentally the name Oxford is a prime example, you see, there was a lot of Oxen in the area and only one part of the river where you could ford them... yes, they called that spot Oxford. When they built "the College of St Mary" it turned out that they already had a "College of St Mary", so they called the new one "the new College of St Mary". This got shortened to simply "New College" which is how it is now named. 620 years later, it's still "New College". Incidentally, the "Old" College of St Mary is actually known as "Oriel College", which is just typical.
We did two tours in Oxford. The first tour was a walking tour of Oxford, the second a tour of the Bodlien. You would think that with subjects as dusty and arcane as this, it would be hard to make them any more boring. You would be wrong. It appears that the tour guides of Oxford are all university lecturers who were fired for being too boring. These guys appear to have been paid by the word with a bonus for every name or date that they use. More importantly though, we found out that the Bodlien is a copyright library. The idea being that each publisher in the country would send them a copy of every book that they published. At the time that they set this up, it was a new concept and amounted to about one book every month or so. These days they get a full van load of books every single week. Their library has over eight million books. Only the librarians are allowed to actually use the library, and to make sure of this, the books are alarmed. If you want to read a book, you have to make a request for a book, it is then delivered to a reading room, where you can then, read it. The Bodlien is not a lending library, you may only read their books on site. In a famous example of this, Charles the 1st asked to take a book out and they said: no.

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