Map of Eynsham
Posted on | July 7, 2010 | 2 Comments
To amuse myself while recovering from a trapped nerve, I thought I would do a little gentle doodling in the form of a hand-drawn map of Eynsham, the village where I live.
Click on the map to enlarge it.
It’s my Eynsham and my drawing, so I make no apology for it not being to scale.
It’s not even accurate; huge chunks of the village are not shown, but you could use it to navigate your way around the village.
I drew what I think are the nicest or most important buildings, shops and houses; sketched in some of activities, history, nature and things you can find here or that stand out for me.
Here’s the title with the all important factual geographical information: click to enlarge
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I could probably do a bit more fiddling on it here and there but it feels pretty much complete now.
If it’s not too pricey, I’m going to see if I can have a few reproduced.
Here’s the area by the river. Click to enlarge. What’s that highwayman doing there?
Eynsham under snow
Posted on | January 6, 2010 | No Comments
My village of Eynsham in west Oxfordshire rarely gets snow. But yesterday it began to fall about 4o’clock in the afternoon and continued to fall for the next 12 hours. I went out about midnight last night to see what was going on. The view down the Pug Lane alley at the back of our house looked so pretty:
And Mill Street looked beautiful with three inches of snow:
The Bartholomew Room in the Square still had its Christmas lights on:
At the village Post Office all was quiet:
This morning nearly eight inches of snow lay on the ground.
I haven’t seen snow where I live so deep since the winter of 1981. I went for a quick potter round the village. The roads hadn’t been treated and there were no buses:
My favourite shop in the world was open for business:
The snow had settled very picturesquely on the church tower and porch:
I trudged down towards to the tollbridge to see if any traffic was getting through anywhere. But judging by the tracks, only a few cars had braved the elements:
Down by the Thames, the snow lay deep on the branches making everything look like a Japanese print by Hokusai:
I was fascinated with the birds I saw; a dozen long-tailed tits flitting, a goldfinch singing by the Wharf stream, and best of all, perhaps 30 redwings plucking berries from a tree. Here’s one I managed to get quite close to:
They were suddenly startled by a hungry sparrowhawk – I saw his unmistakable silhouette swoop over me against the white sky.
On NBC Nightly News
Posted on | December 13, 2009 | Comments Off
After last week’s auction and media scrum over the Swinford toll bridge, I thought it was all over. It seems I was wrong! On Friday I was asked by NBC news correspondent Mike Taibbi to join him at the riverside to be part of a news item he was making about the quirky and maddening matter of the bridge. What a lovely man he is. I especially love him because he put a couple of my paintings in his report. Thanks so much for that Mike!
Here’s the report, which aired in the US yesterday to who knows how many million people, 12 December 2009:
Toll bridge for sale
Posted on | May 13, 2009 | Comments Off
It’s true! When I found out I couldn’t believe my ears; indeed, I actually had to sit down. 
The Swinford toll bridge is for sale for £1.65million, apparently, and there should only be one buyer: Oxfordshire County Council (OCC).
OCC had the chance to buy it and incorporate it into Oxfordshire’s road system back in the early 90s. But they didn’t. The opportunity to buy the bridge comes up so rarely – perhaps only a couple of times a century – that if they don’t act now we may have to wait another 20 years, possibly longer, for another chance.
OCC are likely to say they can’t afford it. But that’s rubbish. Yes they can! And it couldn’t be simpler. Make the bridge users themselves pay for it over a number of years by continuing to charge the toll for a fixed period (a number of years). After which, with the money recouped, they can scrap the toll, stop the highway robbery and get west Oxfordshire moving again. The Act of Parliament, which allows the bridge owner to collect a toll, doesn’t say a toll HAS to be collected, after all.
Do the decent thing, OCC. Buy it now. Buy it for the people you’re meant to be serving. £1.65million seems remarkably cheap to me, and in the light of the current row about MPs’ expensesis little more than beer money.
What I fear is that OCC will whine: “we can’t afford itâ€, which really means “we can’t be botheredâ€; and yet another private greedhead owner will buy it, creaming off the profits from this cash cow at the expense of bridge users in West Oxfordshire, who will line his pockets every morning and evening with their wasted time, wasted fuel, and their patience while simultaneously damaging the environment with needlessly-emitted exhaust fumes.
Buy it OCC. Buy it now.
There’s more about the toll bridge, including a short film, here.
Scrap the toll on Swinford bridge
Posted on | December 27, 2008 | Comments Off
Although I haven’t been actively blogging here about the problems created by toll collection on the Swinford bridge for some time, they remain. 
I thought that rather then get my rants mixed up with stuff I blog about here, I’d create a website especially to do that. So I’ve just launched this website which clearly sets out all the problems on that lovely bridge, offers some practical answers and is intended to be a rallying point for a campaign to scrap the tolls.
The aim is to get 1000 signatures on the online petition; a number significant enough to excite the interest of the local press. The current number of signatories is 664, so only 334 to go!
Swinford Toll Bridge radio ranting
Posted on | May 13, 2007 | Comments Off
Cripes-a-lorcy, it’s been a busy week! Apart from being frantically busy at work, I took my motorcycle theory test on Thursday – which I passed. Also this week, my online petition to scrap that stupid 5p toll on the Swinford Toll Bridge reached 600 signatures. To be honest, I haven’t promoted this very widely, except through this blog, so thanks to everyone on the grapevine!
The 600th signatory (thanks Emma! ) happened at a fortunate time for me as it allowed me to tell BBC Oxford about my painting River song, which I’ll be exhibiting during my artweeks show which opens on Saturday 26 May. River song is my response to the environmental impact caused by the needless, selfish, stupid toll collection on the glorious Georgian bridge, and how I felt I must speak out:
I was interviewed by Bill Heine of BBC Radio Oxford who asked me about the toll. I told him about the true cost of the 5p toll: the nightmare queues causing a completely needless waste of hours of people’s lives for all those stuck in it, and the choking fumes caused by all those idling engines over this fabulous river setting.
He also gave me a really nice plug about my artweeks show. Thanks Bill! Unfortunately I didn’t hear myself broadcast. Unlikely but I wonder if any readers of this blog did?
Oh, if you haven’t signed the petition, and you’d like to, it’s here. Don’t know how much good it’ll do but, but at least I’ve done something. Sure beats moaning!
Namibian San bushman rock art
Posted on | March 2, 2007 | Comments Off
In Damaraland in Namibia, near a place called Twyfelfontein, is a remarkable collection of rock art carved into the huge red stones of the mountains.
Less than 150mm of rain falls a year here
Twyfelfontein means ‘doubtful spring’ in Afrikaans, and in this almost totally dry landscape, even a doubtful – by which I think they mean sporadic – spring is worth noting. The quantity and artistry of the petroglyphs suggests that the spring flowed rather more reliably between two and six thousand years ago, when the rock art is said to have been made, than now. It is surely because of the access to water and the proximity to the Huab river (which only becomes a watercourse after the rains) that San bushmen and women chose here to make their marks. But the resident San population left the area in the 1930s when Damara herders moved in.
Most of the petroglyphs depict animals. Here’s a rhino
And here’s a zebra with my hand for scale.
Like petroglyphs the world over, they are almost impossible to interpret. Here at Twyfelfontein there are more than 2,000 engravings carved into over 200 stone surfaces. Most are straightforward depictions of animals, but what they mean and why they were made is not known.
Here’s a giraffe and some human footprints
The usual shamanic or ritual purposes theories are wheeled out. Perhaps they were a record of local game or totemic animal.
Curiously this lion has strange hands instead of paws an even one at the tip of its tail…
To me and Moth the most surprising carvings were the ones of concentric rings and dots swirls and circles – just like ones we have seen on British and French stones.
One website I found said of them: ‘ … the concentric rings look at first sight like a bicycle but are in fact waterholes on a rocky map.’ Yeah right!
Me in a silly, but very practical, hat for scale
The same website interpreted ‘the unmistakeable outline of two seals and opposite them a penguin.’
Here’s the sea lion shape….
The guide who escorted us around the petroglyphs site also told us they were sea lions.
And here’s the penguin shape carved into the stone at the left of the photo
And while the San may well have trekked to the 150kms to the coast for salt, I find the sea lion and penguin theory of these shapes totally unconvincing, especially as they are stylistically so completely different to all the other animals shown.
Here’s a random panel with all kinds of stuff packed on to, including identifiable animal tracks.
The fact remains that even though we can mostly read which animal is which by their figurative representation, we can no more interpret or understand them than we can the more abstract marks. Just like European rock art then…
Daylight robbery and misery
Posted on | September 29, 2006 | No Comments
I recently got an email from Paul M from Witney who works in Oxford. Like thousands, he suffers the hell that is getting over the Swinford Toll Bridge every morning. I thought of Paul as I rode effortlessly past the traffic on my motorcycle yesterday morning, stuck in the impromptu car park that Eynsham had become after yet another death on A40.
Paul told me: “I am sick of paying for the privilege of sitting in a jam every day … Everybody who uses the bridge is of the same opinion – the toll needs to be stopped… until recently I felt that I was the only one going mad about this.”
No Paul, you’re not. You are one of thousands who sit silently, patiently, Britishly queuing to pay that stupid 5p. After yesterday’s disastrous waste of time, Paul goes on: “It is fair to say I was absolutely furious and I refused to pay when I went passed.” Good on you! He turned his frustrated fury into action. (I like that a lot.) He spoke to the Oxford Mail and Fox FM and got some print and broadcast coverage highlighting the daylight robbery that is the toll collection.
I’m hoping to speak to Paul very soon to see where we go with this next. It’s clear that talking to the politicians, no matter how well meaning they are, is not going to be enough to persuade them to act. Words alone will not solve this problem. Massive public support and a series of actions is going to be the only way to banish this 18th century anachronism.
If you were caught up in the queues, abhor antiquated laws, time wasting, do what you can right now and SIGN this petition! If you feel moved to join our struggle, email me and tell me or leave a comment here.
Cocktail of despair and smugness
Posted on | September 28, 2006 | Comments Off
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Yet another fatality on the A40 caused chaos on the roads around Oxford this morning. The A40 was closed for several hours and inevitably traffic diverted over the Swinford Toll Bridge, just outside Eynsham where I live.
Longstanding readers already know about my hatred of the toll collection on that bridge, as earlier this year and mounted a one-woman campaign to get the tolls scrapped. Once I had spoken to all the politicians and decision makers, I could go no further with the campaign on my own. |
I needed a bunch of active supporters, and to devote every moment of my so-called ‘free’ time to it. I could have mustered a bunch of angry bridge users fairly easily. But devoting my free time? My free time is essentially my painting time, which as it is I don’t have enough of. I would have had to stop painting. I couldn’t do that. I needed to find another answer.
The answer was the purchase of my small orange motorcycle, which renders traffic jams an irrelevence and waiting frustratedly at bus stops a distant memory.
So when I started my bike this morning at 8 o’clock for the 20 minute ride into town (the journey used to take me 40 to 60 minutes) and saw the traffic queuing right back up into the village, my heart sank. ‘You poor sods’ I thought, knowing exactly the feelings of frustration of those stuck in cars, vans and buses. ‘You poor sods’ I thought as I rode effortlessly past at a steady 30mph, grateful to drivers who use their rear-view mirrors and pull over a bit to ease my overtaking. ‘You poor sods’ I thought, as I had to stop to let an oncoming vehicle pass, grateful for the opportunity to flick a bit of hair out of my eye. ‘You poor sods’ I thought, all that wasted time.
The toll bridge staff were still collecting tolls, causing a needless bottleneck, profitting out of the additional traffic. It makes my blood boil that this highway robbery is not illegal.
But while I was whizzing along on my virtually non-stop 20 minute ride, feeling sorry for all my fellow road-users caught up in the chaos, an strange, uncomfortable feeling decended on me. A curl of smile appeared on my lips. I felt smug. Smug as a really smug thing in a smugtown. How I love my tiny orange motorcycle!
Traffic? what traffic?
Posted on | August 10, 2006 | Comments Off
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Earlier this year I spent a good deal of time ranting on this blog, as well as in the media, about the problems caused by the traffic queueing to pay a measly 5p toll at the Swinford Toll Bridge close to my home in Eynsham, west Oxfordshire. I spoke to politicians, mounted an online petition and looked into ways of solving the problem for the benefit of all who have no choice but to waste their time every working day in pointless traffic caused by 18th century transport policy. |
In the end, although many people I spoke to agreed with me, I couldn’t find enough people willing to actively help me leafletting, talking to the press, campaigning and spending time to make a noise about it.
In the end my solution was a selfish, personal one. I bought a small motorcycle.
What a difference it’s made to my life! The benefits are massive! Door-to-door journey times from home to work and back are halved and there’s no more waiting around at bus stops or getting frustrated in traffic queues. Even though my bike is restricted to only 30mph, I always get to town faster than the bus. I get to wear a lovely pink leather jacket. It only costs me £2.50 to fill my tank which lasts an entire week. I ride slowly and steadily past queues of stationary or slow moving traffic. Other motorcyclists (some of who wear those sexy leather trousers) nod at me. This last point is important to a woman in her 40s!
It’s not all easy rider, though. There are downsides. I can no longer wear skirts to work. And I sometimes suffer helmet hair, when my usual fluffy barnet is reduced to being squashed to my head. Ah well. It’s a small price to pay.
shopping basket
