The key to Queen Adelaide’s Girdle

Our second day at the Oxford museums was good.  This time the Natural History and the Pitt Rivers. Although physically linked together by a single doorway, they could hardly be more different.  First the Natural History, like a glass cathedral.  I wonder if it was influenced by the Crystal Palace?  Whatever, it’s a joy to behold with its wonderful capitals at the head of the slender steel columns.


Lovely light for taking pictures of the geological samples like this lump of Iron Pyrites

or this piece of quartz over a thousand million years old.

Passing through to the Pitt Rivers comes as a bit of a wow moment.  A bit like entering a gloomy Alladin’s cave.

Don’t ask me what is in there.  Something of everything, all grouped into little collections based on themes like  devices for making fire, or ways of treating dead enemies. We loved the eccentricity of it and the lovely little handwritten labels on the exhibits.  How about this?:

Now we’re back in the sticks, having spent a pleasant if somewhat bacchanalian evening with Maffi at Thrupp, (in the sense that we got through rather too much wine) and then yesterday up to Aynho, threading the boat through the tiny little lock bridges you get in these parts.


Moored right behind us this morning is the newly repaired Bones. The boat, not the person, although she is around too and we all plan to have a meal in the pub tonight.  We’re hanging around in Aynho so as to time our arrival in Banbury tomorrow for the Canal Day at the weekend.