Thursday

My computer is in one of its slow moods (do I have a virus? Hmm.) so I’m not going to give you the answers to the quiz yet – it would require uploading photographs which are not yet on my computer. But I will give you some clues to the ones which nobody has yet got correct – 4, 5 and 8. All of them are in my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About, in the list so far, in the sidebar. That should narrow down the odds from all of literature!

My friend Mel and I spent the day doing a ‘road trip’ (by way of train, bus and foot) to Marsh Gibbon. We choose our destinations almost solely by their names – in the past we have visited Kingston Bagpuize, Horton-cum-Studley, Goring-and-Streatley, and Thrupp. We took a train to Bicester, and walked from there, stopping for a picnic in Launton. All was going well – we saw a bridleway sign saying ‘Marsh Gibbon, 2 miles’ – and the pathway took us past some utterly adorable piglets, very tiny and very confused, falling over each other and scampering like puppies. It was after this that the walk descended into anarchy – we wandered through field after field for about two hours, occasionally seeing a footpath arrow, but generally having to make our own guesses. Nothing was signposted, really, and any designated footpath which does exist was impossible to find. Fearing that we’d never see civilisation again, we eventually spotted the roof of some barns. Where there are barns, there’s a farm; where there’s a farm, there’s a road. And there was. We eventually got to Marsh Gibbon, where The Plough quenched our thirst.

I’ll leave you with my latest painting effort – Spotlight.