1500

It's not yet eight o' clock , it's still dark (or was when I started writing this), there's snow still on the ground and the cars are white with frost and the footpaths dangerously slippy, and this is my 1500th post hennce the laconic numeric title. It's just over two years (November 2015) since my thousandth post here and when I started I wasn't sure how far this would go. Lot's of friends have started blogs and then left them and I have a few friends who still have current blogs such as the BBC writer Paul Campbell's cleverly titled Scriptuality and a few others.

On the positive side it's Saturday morning so I don't have to go to work and it has been a very intense but satisfying week, managing to get the impossible tasks and donkey work done and not having to worry about the coming week.

I need to shower, take drugs, get dressed then go out to shop for essentials after I've posted this, and start towards my 2,000th post my going on about nothing in particular.

This morning I'm attempting to record stuff to the PC, and while the guitar sound is great the original device I was using created a half second lag on the sound from hitting the string to hearing it, and lets face it Alvin Lee could have played a hundred notes in that time (see Ten Years After playng "I'm Going Home" at Woodstock to see what I mean. Techically it's just very fast and in tune , the song is just basic rock and roll and blues time. My daughter Kirsty was well impressed when I played her this.

I do find it amazing that I metion things on this blog to find I've never mentioned them before in the eleven years I've been writing this. Here's my first post and in the first couple of years the posts were barely notes and now you get a couple of hunderd words. I think possibly the longest post is about two thousand words when I sat down one day in Craster just to see if I could actually do it and it's here.

Anyway I need to kick start the day and I will leave you with Alvin Lee and Ten Years After at Woodstock.

Remember Then ...

... one your biggest problems at New Year was remembering to date your cheques with the new year. It's amazing how in such a short period of time technological advances have made cheques virtually redundant. Barclays did something recently were you could photograph the cheque and send that electronically, but that was just a more complex way of doing normal electronic transactions, while making it more open to fraud. I'm not sure it caught on.

Anyway just one of the ways that life has improved, we have simpler ways of spending money but less of it to spend.

I'm just writing this here because it came to mind, and well , I am just about to crawl into bed. We've got a full day of football tomorrow so hope you have got some fun to be had too.

It's also an excuse to play "Remember Then" by Sha Na Na . I can't believe that I have never included them before, they appeared at Woodstock (I have "At The Hop" on the soundtrack album) and in the film Grease, and I had a couple of their albums in my teens which I didn't replace on CD, although I do have an huge rock and roll section in my collection

Anyway it's time for bed and we don't go back to work til Tuesday

Seven Days in Woodstock (and Oxford)

What do you think of when you think of Woodstock . Jimi Hendrix , rock , debauchery , mud? You can find all that on the DVD , but I'm on about a small village near Oxford on the map here with it's own website here (doest everyone have one these days?).

We stayed there with friends earlier this year in a building that at some point had been a pub, but was now rented out to parties of hedonists such as ourselves.

Woodstock itself is very small and one of the few streets ends up at the gate to Blenheim Palace which is huge , impressive , and has grounds designed by Capability Brown , populated with killer geese ,

and a groundsman's cottage that seemed permanently flooded even before the latest biblical deluges.



They had a exhibition of Churchill (he was born there you know) , and for the first time in my life I noticed the amazing similarity between Churchill and Buddha!!. Why they had Buddha in a Churchill exhibition I'll never know.

At Churchill's request, he was buried in the family plot at St Martin's Church, Bladon, near Woodstock, not far from his birthplace. In the fields along the route, and at the stations through which the train passed, thousands stood in silence to pay their last respects. In 1998 his tombstone had to be replaced due to the large number of visitors over the years having eroded it and its surrounding area. A new stone was dedicated in a ceremony attended by members of the Spencer-Churchill family.

Bladon is quite small , and it must have been hell there for Churchill's funeral , but worth a visit as the Church is very pleasant , though the graveyard is right next to the primary school....which was nice.

The village itself has several pubs, The Punchbowl being the Charver Magnet. The Crown , opposite the punchbowl had a lot of big screens and was pleasant enough. They have a restaurant but it wasn't open while we were there. The rest are the pubs are safe enough as long as you can afford the prices. The Black Prince had great location next to a stream / marsh though the insect population seemed to be fairly active around there.

Opposite our domicile there was a chip shop, nothing strange about that, however the portions of chips would do about 3 people , so a good place if you're hungry.

Also theres a shop called Hampers , great for all your exotic foods and nibbly things , again , at a price but well worth it. Alternatively there is the Co-Op!!!

It's all very touristy, middle England , but none the worse for that. Parking's easy and your convenient for Oxford and surrounding villages.

Oxford itself is architecturally very pleasant but it's full of blood students. Still you can get a drink , see where Morse drove his jag , got drunk and solved the odd murder and theres a few churches with towers that all offer the "best view" of Oxford. It's worth putting in the effort to haul yourself to the top of one of these , even if your a total f@t b@st@rd like me!!! and you'll be rewarded with views like these!!!