An isolarion is apparently a 15th-century depiction of a particular geographical location in close detail, in isolation (get it?) from its wider context, and that's the approach that James Attlee has taken with his account of his "pilgrimage" up and down Cowley Road, East Oxford's shopping artery. This diverse, messy street, which for so long has been neglected by the town council, is a mecca for locals and students alike delving into the various shops and services which simply aren't available in the city centre.

Of course, recently the town council did a lot of redevelopment on Cowley Road, making it a nightmare to navigate for cars, trucks, and bikes alike, and consequently even less pleasant to stroll around on for pedestrians. This would seem to me to be evidence that the sort of jolly, multiculturally diverse, wonderfully shambolic and deliriously unplanned Cowley Road that Attlee so loves is only possible when the authorities aren't paying attention to it, and Attlee sometimes approaches that idea himself. But more on that later.

James Attlee lives in Oxford, and has (as far as I can tell) lived near the Cowley Road for more or less the same amount of time I have, and so he's got no excuse for his wild conceit that Cowley Road is some sort of fortress of the "town" (locals) in its constant conflict with the "gown" (students). As Attlee points out, the student population in East Oxford is rising; as he glosses over, there's always been a fair student contingent there because funnily enough students tend to gravitate towards cheap housing. Attlee begins his journey in The Pub Oxford (back before it stopped being a Scream pub and reverted to the old name of The Cape of Good Hope), and talks as if it's the dividing line between town and gown, a lone beacon of student-ness in a ocean of local colour. This ignores the fact that there's another Scream pub halfway up Cowley Road by the old bingo hall.

More generally, I have to strongly disagree with Attlee's assertion that the influx of students will necessarily wreck the diversity of Cowley Road, overcoming it an ocean of Starbucks outlets. Let's forget, for a moment, that for at least as long as I've been in Oxford (seven years, and as far as I can tell that's about as long as Attlee's been around too) Cowley Road hasn't exactly been a chain store-free place, with Tesco's, KFC, Boots and Blockbuster Video all having outlets there. Unless students have changed utterly since I was an undergraduate, I find that they tend to love cute little non-chain stores as much as anyone (and more than many), and I'm pretty sure the colourful non-chain stores that are scattered up and down on Cowley Road are more than a little grateful for the regular influx of student cash. Some stores on Cowley Road would doubttless have gone under long ago if it wasn't for regular injections of gown-tainted money - where would costume shop Bead Games be, for example, without the dizzying variety of student theatre productions that are produced every year?

Let's face it, students love cultural tourism, and love to sound erudite and clever. In this book, Attlee acts like a cultural tourist and constantly goes off on tangents to show how erudite and clever he is. (He witters on about Munch's The Scream when he's at the pub of the same name.) Although this book and the various chapters are mercifully short at my count 75% of the book is accounted for by Attlee begging the reader to acknowledge how smart and knowledgable he is, as well as autobiographical stories which we really aren't interested in, James, because you honestly aren't a very interesting person, we came to read an anthropological study of the Cowleyroadians and a history of the area, not some dumb story of how cool and interesting you were when you were 22 and hanging out with Italian hairdressers who may or may not have been printing fake money down in London, stop talking about London James, you're trying to talk about the Cowley Road in Oxford, remember, OXFORD, NOT LONDON, JAMES, SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR CRAZY CRAZY LIFE YOU SELF-CENTRED BORING LITTLE TURD.

Ahem.

Something which illustrates Attlee's hilarious knack for missing the point is his anecdote about his Millennium Eve party on Cowley Road, where he fell over and cracked his head on the Victorian kerbstones. He proceeds to bemoan the removal of those kerbstones as part of the ongoing developments on Cowley Road, but considering that said developments have turned the street into a weaving serpentine nightmare that makes life dangerous for driver, cyclist and pedestrian alike I honestly think the fate of some old kerbstones is of a very slightly lower priority, don't you think James? Then again, if Mr Attlee wants to track down those kerbstones (now, apparently, propping up the pavements in Iffley Village) and smash his head against them yet again in the hopes of finishing the job he started on New Year's Eve he's more than welcome.

The thing about Attlee is that he has a personal agenda that he's promoting with the book; he's got his own, highly specific idea of what Cowley Road is, and is vehemantly opposed to anything which conflicts with this vision. Occasionally, this prompts him to go out on a limb; he tells the tale of how at a local planning meeting in the consultancy period which ultimately gave us the wriggling nightmare which is Cowley Road today some of the attendees complained about shopkeepers leaving grocery crates stacked up on the pavement, because this impedes their progress. Smitten by the aesthetic beauty of people selling stuff from the pavement, Attlee springs up and says

"Isn't it more interesting, more stimulating to have to negotiate your way along a footway, to move from side to side occasionally as you pass through a city, rather than always straight ahead, even if you are using a wheelchair?"

At this point I smack my forehead and wish that Attlee's encounter with the kerbstone had left him paralysed from the neck down so that he could have some personal experience of what it's like to be in a wheelchair. Attlee casually dismisses the rights of disabled people to navigate the street not because the grocers in question would find that their business suffered if they were forced to move all of their stock indoors, not because actually most of those crate-piles are carefully arranged to let people through anyhow, but because it is more aesthetically pleasing to James Attlee if we have to dodge and weave while walking down the pavement. Get off the road, oh you cripples of Oxford! James Attlee has a beautiful aesthetic vision and your wheelchairs are not included.

On occasion James's attitude will slip into being absolutely reactionary and parochial. There's an incident where a friend of his from North Oxford suggests that he might buy the bakery on Hertford Street once the old couple who run it retire (according to Attlee they've already considered closing but were emotionally blackmailed not to by weeping kids) and perhaps fiddle with its range a bit to throw a bit of nice sourdough bread into the mix as opposed to the Hertford Street bakery's usual fare of slightly too dry loaves. As someone who used to live around the corner from Hertford Street this sounds like a cracking idea to me; perhaps this buddy of Attlee's would also open the bakery at an hour when I'm likely to be able to go and buy bread. But wait! This man is proposing CHANGE! And it's change of a most insiduous sort, because it's change which gives people what they want and makes things just a little bit less sloppy and unprofessional. Thank God James Attlee, hero of the neighbourhood, is here to save the day; Attlee tells us how he snapped at his friend that

"We don't need a new bakery; we are fine with the one we've got."

To be fair, Attlee realises that he's sounding a bit like an inbred yokel screaming "This is a local shop for local people, there's nothing for you here!", but seriously, James, when you think you might be sounding like a tit, that could possibly be evidence that you are, in fact, being a tit, and you should perhaps consider the possibility that you are, in real life, a bit of a tit, and that your fancy art job in London may in fact count against you ever having the sort of working-class acceptance you clearly crave from the jolly multiethnic inhabitants of Cowley Road you so lovingly patronise with this steaming pile of shit you call a book which treats them as if they are a delicate tribe of the Amazonian rainforest who will die of the common cold if outsiders have the temerity to actually invest in the area and bring money into the area, you know what money is, right? It's the thing which turns "loss-making money pits" into "viable businesses". It's kind of important to have if you want to preserve your beloved Cowley Road shops. It's what you probably made a fat stack of selling this book to your fellow art gallery beardstrokers, this book which reads like it was written by an Oxford undergraduate even though you apparently despise students (along with the local council, the government, the university, and all the other institutions and locations without which Cowley Road would never have existed in the first place).

Attlee's powerful aesthetic vision of the Cowley Road is so mighty that it actually warps the structure of space and time. He includes the Hertford Street bakery in his nebulous idea of what Cowley Road is, but claims that South Park is not in the vicinity of Cowley Road - it's about five minutes' walk from the western end of Cowley Road, up St. Clements' (which is itself kind of a little colony of Cowley Road all of its own). Attlee's artistic vision transcends fact and truth, and has pushed South Park away from Cowley Road just as it has sucked Hertford Street towards Cowley Road.

Now, don't get me wrong, this book isn't without merit. When Attlee shifts into journalist or historian mode, and tells us stories of the history of East Oxford or gives an in-depth profile of a particular Cowley Road institution, the book really shines, and his artistic background means that his input into various proposed pieces of public art proposed for the street is bang on the mark (he supported the idea of putting cryptic brass ingots into the pavement, a fantastic project which prompted by fiancee and I to spend a fun afternoon strolling up and down Cowley Road trying to work out what they mean). It's when Attlee's personality, beliefs and politics come into the mix that he becomes unbearable.

Ah yes, his politics. Attlee displays the sort of apocalyptic hyperbole tied in with wide-eyed naivity that you don't usually see outside of student politics, and which makes me somewhat embarrassed to have the sort of left-leaning views that I have. To me, the Iraq War is a needless, shambolic mess perpetrated by well-meaning idiots who were at every stage terribly keen to do the right thing but also so devoted to their personal ideas about diplomacy, military strategy and mass psychology that they couldn't help but make a terrible mess of things. To Attlee, it's the beginning of a holy war which threatens to destroy civilisation completely. To me, climate change is a serious issue which will doubtless ruin many lives, but (as is too often the case with these things) it will affect the world's poorest countries to a wildly disproportionate extent. To Attlee, the world is spiralling towards hell, cyclists are noble heroes who risk their lives on the roads for the sake of making our world a better place, and we are nearing the end of humanity's tenancy on Earth. To Attlee, seeing his son and the child of a Muslim friend of his playing a first-person shooter on the console has uncomfortable parallels with the Iraq War. To me, kids playing together happily is about as positive a sign of multicultural tolerance, acceptance and understanding as you are likely to get. Attlee's attempt to tie in the day-to-day life of Cowley Road with global geopolitics is painfully ham-fisted and makes me suspect he's a total bore at parties.

Isolarion is a decent resource if you want to look into the history of Cowley Road or get some interesting profiles of some of its residents, but you may find you have to skip over the bits where James Attlee attempts to wedge his beliefs, ideas and personality into the book. His brute-force efforts to cram the major issues into irrelevant contexts are sufficiently jarring that the pace of the book is wrecked - it feels odd and disjointed, as if the chapters were been jumbled up at the last minute and Attlee didn't bother to rewrite them to fit the new order. Yes, James, I understand that you are angry at the Iraq War. So am I. But does the fact that a war is happening hundreds of miles away mean that we can't have nice, fun things ever again?