Oxfordshire

Recently we went to a very quiet corner of Oxfordshire. Well, it will be quiet in the future, if the government does not get its way and put the high speed train linking London and Birmingham through the countryside. Placards everywhere, lots of village meetings concerned about the disruption and the noise...it really isn't that long to travel between the cities on a 'slower' train - so many of us just can't see the point. We drove around a bit, visiting lots of little villages (eg Cuddington, Brill, Dinton, Little Marlow, Penn, Penn Street and Little Missenden) that have featured in tv programmes like Midsomer Murders and Agatha Christies Poirot and films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Who Killed Cockrobin. It was fun even in the rain and the cold, but we soon realised it was quite hard to find the 'right buildings' in the little villages because they have only been used sporadically in one programme and most of them we can't remember.  However, we did find the Roald Dahl Museum in Aylesbury where he lived for a number of years. We visited the museum as we didn't really know much about him except that he wrote 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'. The museum was quite small and if we had wanted to paste pictures to create our own story book, or sit on the floor and listen to a story we could have spent a couple of hours there - needless to say we didn't - it really didn't have that much info in it for the inquisitive kiwi. Roald Dahl was born in 1916 in Wales and was a pilot and intelligence agent in WWII. In the 1940's he began to write and is now know as "one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century". Given we haven't read any of his books I can hardly judge if that is true or not. But I did like one quote from his book the Minpins "Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."