A Strange Dream

So a few months ago, I heard from Van that our friends Sarah and Ally were going to be coming through Oxford en route to The Hague for the Charles Taylor trial. I sent Sarah an e-mail and we agreed to meet up at the Kings Arms pub one Friday night.

I arrived to see Sarah and Ally already at the bar, drinking Scotch with a short, fashionably dressed, older Pakistani man. Sarah, who is doing her doctoral research on legal stuff in Sierra Leone, introduced him as Saleem, her former flatmate from Freetown. Saleem turned out to be the head of police in Siera Leone's capitol city and a really nice guy. After a couple of drinks, I was considering winding my way back towards Cuddesdon, but Saleem's childhood friend arrived, and I didn’t want to seem unsociable.





His friend, another older Pakistani man, was dressed in an immaculate, beige, cashmere coat, Dior shades (inside the dark pub), and a Rolex encrusted with, as Little Wayne might have said, so much ice you coulda skated on it . Along with him were a retired policeman (also in sunglasses) and the registrar of Christ Church, a genial man from Rhodesia (not, he insisted, Zimbabwe). They stayed for one drink, and the first fellow, glancing repeatedly at his diamond watch, said that he would rather go to his usual place.






We walked over to the Randolph hotel where he was warmly greeted by the manager, whom he told to prepare a table for 7. The Randolph is quite pricy, and I was already apprehensive about the price of drinks at the bar, but when I gave Sarah a worried look, she answered with a reassuring one that seemed to say, 'we're probably not splitting the check.'






We had a gargantuan meal which lasted for hours; so many hours that I missed my bus. I asked to borrow Sara's phone to call a taxi and she said that I could probably just stay with them at Saleem's friend's house. The friend, who I came to like enormously after talking theology with him for an hour, said that this would be fine, as long as I didn’t mind the place. He and his wife, he said, had bought a modest little house and a car to keep in Oxford so they could come visit their son when he was here in college, but that it was nothing special.





He and the retired policeman went to drop off the Registrar of Christ Church while we walked towards the house. On the walk, we passed the house above where Saleem lived when he was doing his undergrad at Oxford.





The retired policeman returned to pick us up in the friend's Oxford car, which turned out to be a new Bentley, so that we wouldn't have to walk all the way. We pulled into the stately gated drive of a two storied brick mini-mansion. Our host offered us drinks, but had difficulty finding suitable glasses, as there were no servants, and he didn't know where they were kept.




We stayed up talking for an hour or two and finally sacked out, each in his own opulent bedroom.




Early the next morning, Saleem came in to wake me, saying that he, Sarah and Ally were going hunting. They were late and didn’t have time to give me a lift to the city center, so they dropped me off somewhere on the Ring Road.






Before I was properly awake, I was standing on the side of the highway in an unfamiliar suburb – it felt like a dream.