Beyond Folly Bridge

The year was 1972, the month was April, and I was in Oxford to attend a weekend symposium on leftist politics organized by a group of Canadian graduate students at the university. Having just crawled across the finish line of my own postgraduate degree, I was at the start of a summer-long hitchhike around Britain and in no mood to sit incarcerated in an overheated room while a dozen of my compatriots lectured one another about nationalizing the banks, banning nuclear weapons, and the perils of selling water to the Americans. The pros and cons of Manitoba’s NDP government, elected in 1969, were weighed with convincing authority by a doctoral candidate from Winnipeg who hadn’t been home in six years.

Long-winded intervention followed zealous discussion followed dry presentation while I waited to hear my friend Steven deliver his paper on the exploitative practices of a Canadian...