Time Machine

Eventually, you have to give up and go shopping. We graced Chipping Norton supermarkets with our presence for as short a time as possible - in truth, they are amiable, good-humoured places, and familiarity has bred a laser-focussed efficiency and team effort. Plenty of time left for MrsM to raid the charity shops for baby stuff and me to visit the hardware-store-that-you-would-never-find-if-you-didn't-know-it-was-there 

Somehow, the jitty that leads to it incorporates a time-transport gate. The shop still has staffing levels that would have looked wasteful in the 1960s - and it sells everything. Of course, I thought a USB-C to USB-C connection cable might be a stretch, given the time-dilation, but how naïve of me - there were the two I needed, just above the left sholdour of the miraculously unoccupied assistant who greeted me the instant I crossed the threshold

As I returned to the present, the town clock struck noon - a slight sense of the surreal: am I actually in a movie? The town hall was completed in 1842, including the bellcote (lovely word) but not the clock; that was installed in the tympanum (even better word) in 1849, thanks to local clockmaker, Samuel Simms. In 1855 the town hall hosted a celebratory dinner to mark the opening of the railway. The railways made it essential that everywhere it went was using the same time - the clock would have been important. The weather vane and foxhound were not added until 100 years later, a gift of the local hunt; now I know that, it looks odd and incongruous. I'm glad I caught the clapper - I presume it was added with the clock, replacing a bell-rope

Taking good-cheer where I can find it, there was Punch and Judy in Washington, a bull in Birmingham (though, regretfully, not in the Bullring) and some art photography in the paper that, for once, I found interesting and compelling (the accompanying text, not so much)