100 and 66.

My room is in a pebble dash former morgue, with an East facing view of a car park and a garage.

This is First Week in the Oxford calendar; the academic aftermath of nine short days of long walks and long nights, each ending with seventy pence shots of Bombay Sapphire at the College bar. Prices haven’t changed since its present buildings were drawn up in 1974. We have a punting lake and a croquet lawn, and the ghost of a six foot two baby who has been spotted around the Linton Road annexe gliding through walls and misusing the toilet facilities.

My bike is blue with leather handles, and every day I chain it to the rails of the Radcliffe Camera, though I have yet to go inside. That is tomorrow’s adventure.

I think this is going to be a wonderful year.

100 and 62.

I spent last night floating in the Dead Sea until six am, and today on the West Bank. But before I write about those, I have a badly written story of abject horror and disaster from Israel to share.

Two nights ago my sister called our father to let him know I was dead. It was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and the state shuts down for it. Every shop, every restaurant, every bar and every road is forcibly closed. Importantly for this story, there is no public transport and no taxi service. If you get stranded, there is no way back.

We had rented two bicycles: a 1980s Raleigh Chopper and a mountain bike. Our plan, after a day on the Tel Aviv coast, was to have a short evening sightseeing tour through the centre before returning to our hostel for dinner. But of course, nothing ever goes to plan.

At first it was exciting. With no traffic, the motorway becomes a playground for the city trikes, bikes, wheelchairs and pedestrians. We biked from Jaffa along the boardwalk, into central Tel Aviv, then, around roundabouts and over flyovers, onto the highway for miles, past synagogues, minarets, schools, parklands, crowds of hysterical children on stabilisers. Two hours in we stopped for a snack on a pavement. So far, so wholesome. What I didn’t realise when we started the journey back, was that I had left my phone there.

I thought I was leading us back to Jaffa. In fact, I was leading us the wrong way. Somewhere, not too far in, my sister lost sight of me. Using maps, she tracked her return journey and realised I was en route to disappearance. When she called me an agitated Israeli man picked up. She was not to know that he had found my phone, and assumed I was dead.

Meanwhile I continued to ride, oblivious. It was only a couple of hours later when I reached Netanya, a city twenty-eight miles from our hostel, that I noticed I was alone and no longer in Tel Aviv. It was at this point that I got a flat tyre and found myself stranded phoneless, mapless, lost and with no choice but to cycle back down the motorway. It is a hard task to describe cycling a sixty-mile roundtrip after several hours on a bike, half of it uphill, through darkness, parched with no water in Middle Eastern heat, with a dead tyre and no idea which direction you are travelling in. To cut a long story short, I am never going anywhere without a map ever again. 

100 and 60.

It is the first day in the St Andrews calendar and I am in London. Four years ago and seven hours away I remember the novelty of waves and bonfires outside my bedroom window, the only single in a university halls where roommates were mandatory. I went to the beach that night with a girl I met in the Student Union, later my academic sister, and now one of my best friends. She came for tea the next day and we watched golf from my carpet, the eighteenth hole of the world’s oldest course. My name is still etched into the door of my room with a view.

Until now, when I have thought of St Andrews I have felt only relief at having left. The clutter of angst and claustrophobia, the cold platitudes of isolation inevitable in any town whose citizens are bound to its three streets by virtue of having no easy means of escape.

This afternoon was the first time I decided I might miss it.