County Councils
Of all the county councils I consider the Vale of the White Horse, Oxon, to be the very worse. It does nothing for the people, except build boxes called houses for people to live in, thus making this quite acceptable, one horse town into a dormitory for workers in Oxford. It has ruined the traffic system in the town, there are no amenities, not even a cinema, no shops, except boarded ones, or Italian cafes and restaurants. What a dump.
Today I listened to a programme on the radio in which Claire Baldwin of the BBC accompanied a group of school pupils on their annual walk.
This is one day of the year when all the pupils aged 11to 18 years,and their teachers went on a walk.I once worked in an inner city school which had this same policy.With the change of headship however, this was viewed as rubbish and stopped.This was such a short sighted view of education. I was very pleased to know that there are still some enlightened teachers around.
The man should never have been a teacher, let alone a headteacher.He was just ignorant,bellicose,fatuous and racist. It is just teachers like him who ruin the achievements of very able pupils.
This summer found me visiting Gometra in Scotland, a most beautiful place. It reminded me of where I grew up as a child, free roaming and happy.
My second visit took me to Brussels. What a contrast and a let down. The train did not seem to cater for any help with luggage. The carpets on the floor were dirty and the service was poor, and this was first class. The worst thing was having to pay to use a lavatory in a place such as the train station, but worse in a large department store where food was served.
It seems that the EU is always trying to make things the same everywhere, why dont they start with equalising lavatory facilities?
The April showers never came this year, instead there were lovely hot days during that month.However, it seemed to rain continually through May, June and into July culminating in the floods which started on the 20th of July. Here are some pictures of those floods from this summer.
Ock Street on Sunday morning.
By Tuesday even the geese had enough of the water.
I had only seen a partial eclipse of the moon before last night, so I decided to spend the night watching the full eclipse. I was not dissappointed, the sky was clear during the time, so it was possible to view all the stages without cloud obscuring the view as can be seen from the selection of photographs above.
On the morning of the 8th of February. most of Oxfordshire woke to a blanket of snow. Usually it comes and goes very quickly. We knew this different, being several inches thick in places. It was too good to be viewed from inside. We got out our snow apparel, gloves, hat, goggles etc. and walked to the park. It was a school day so there were only a few children and a scattering of adults about. However, they were busy making igloos, rolling snowballs, like the one to my right and enjoyed playing in the snow. We did the same, it was great fun. Many of the schools had two days off as their schools were closed, which is just as well because it melted the next day.
This is the START OF GLORIA’S BLOG