The Silver Stream

Prologue

The woman was bored.  This tour just seemed to go on.  Oh Oxford’s dreaming spires were gleaming in the mid-October sunshine and the city was hustling and bustling with students drinking coffee and using skype or twitter.  Gangs of girls giggling over the fact that some celebrity had taken his shirt off in Strictly Come Dancing.  Boys were talking about the football or rugby.  Then there were others who were genuinely interested in studying and had piles of books by their cups of coffee and typing in notes on their Ipads.  Technology had certainly grown since she was their age.  

Mind you, she had seen some of this in its infancy and beyond when she travelled with that man.  If it weren’t for him though she would not have achieved half as much as she had without the thought of hearing his commendation.  History of Oxford just got overtaken by the present.  

Quietly she slipped away from the crowd and walked around the beautiful city on her own.  She brought herself a cheese and onion pasty and can of diet coke and sat on a chair to watch some street entertainment.  Far more exciting than that old buzzard in a tweed jacket yammering on about the cornerstone being set by … Blah-blah-blah …

Young and old mingled here.  Most just hurrying along with shopping bags.  Others hanging around like her just to bathe in the atmosphere of the bustling city.  Obviously they were tourists like her.  Tourists, oh how she wished she could be a proper tourist again.  One that travelled to worlds unknown, to life yet to be discovered, to the birth of stars that had long since died.

Behind her someone was strumming a guitar to the Beatles.  Acrobats performed to the side of her.  Some sort of carribean jazz in front of her.  Cacophonic.  Wonderful.  The real city.  After throwing her wrapper and bottle in a nearby bin she was about to go into HMV when she stopped at the sight of someone she had never thought she would see again.  And she had not aged.  She was still a young woman.  How unfair, she fumed.  Some people just age better I suppose.  

Unaware that at this very moment she was being eyed up by several men, glancing at her attractive pair of legs.

She was about to shout out to the girl but a boy joined her.  Tall, dark and handsome.  They seemed to be a young couple.  Both held HMV bags so obviously had bought something.  What was preventing her from yelling out the girls name?  By the time she was about to the girl and the boy disappeared into a cafe.

Never mind, she knew it could not be her, still very uncanny likeness.  She was too young for a start.  

2

The Interviewing Committee of Oxford University glanced at the bundle of papers before them, very impressive.  The man sitting the other side of the desk was smart.  Wise looking.  Very charismatic and extremely charming.  He knew the right things to say and showed the right amount of respect and deference due to the longer serving Professors.  

“Well, Professor Hjalte Stream, we shall let you know - but I think the committee are agreed you are high on the list.”

“I look forward to joining the English department.”

“One question?” a very stern looking woman jumped in with.  

“Yes, Professor Roberts?”

“Why Oxford?”

“And not walk in the hallowed footsteps of C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien? How can I not?”  This raised an eyebrow.  “Wasn’t Joseph Addison known here as an essayist and wit.  There is walkway named after him is there not?  One day, maybe I can have one too.”

“What is your preferred method of teaching?”

“By psychiatry.  How can one delve into the darkest thoughts of the poet or contemplate the spirit of a romantic without it?”