"On the Road Again" - Canned Heat, 1968

(Perhaps you were expecting me to use the Willie Nelson version instead?)

There are a couple of local "road stories" I thought I'd mention today, for Lord Celery's readers.

One is from last week, but John and I didn't know anything about it until the weekend. An RAF Harrier jet crashed near the village of Tackley, in Oxfordshire. This happened at around 5pm local time, last Thursday, on the A4260. That's the road between the village where we live and Oxford. And had I been driving back home from work that day, that's about the time I could have been in the vicinity of Tackley. But I was at Canary Wharf, in London. And thank goodness for that.

Here are two links to the story....one from the BBC's site and the other from "The Times" online site.

It's remarkable that the pilot was able to avoid crashing the jet into either the village of Tackley or into the nearby Sturdy's Castle pub/hotel. And it's also incredible that no one was seriously injured...including the pilot, who reportedly ejected just before the crash.

But the A4260 has been closed since the accident for crash investigation and for repairs, and I doubt it will open until at least Wednesday afternoon. That's causing a lot of difficulties for those of us in the northern part of Oxfordshire who use it to commute into Oxford for work, appointments, shopping, etc. Thanks to our friends Cindy and Andre, who know small local area roads, I got in without any problems this morning. I wouldn't have had a clue what some of the alternatives might have been, without spending loads of time pouring over local maps. I really appreciated the lift they gave me into Kidlington, where Cindy and I then caught one of the Oxford buses.

My other "road" story has a much lighter tone.

This morning, a film crew were in Oxford filming a re-creation of Lady Godiva's famous ride! Here's the BBC website's story. I wasn't in Oxford early enough to see the activity. But can't you just imagine the bleary-eyed commuters that were in the area of Magdalen Bridge here in Oxford, early on a Monday morning?

Janet