I have been to Oxford hundreds of times, but I lately go directly to Hamilton Road, where my old friends from Ljubljana have lived for close to a decade. When we came to Reading in 1990, Lauren and I went to Oxford quite often, as it is only twenty minutes away by fast train, and we knew the town rather well. Since we moved to London in 1993, we have been to Oxford only to visit our friends, and we have been visiting them ever less often. I went to see them today, but beforehand I spent close to an hour walking around the old town. After so many years, I wanted to see whether the town had changed much. I was stunned to discover that I remembered almost nothing of the town’s layout, its key parts, or even its main reference points. From time to time, I would recognize a street or a building, but the town as a whole simply baffled me. If seven or eight years are enough to forget your way about a small town, how many years does it take to forget your way about anything as intricate as a woman?