Walking: the Oxford Canal, Hampton Gay and Hampton Poyle

We were going to go for a walk in Wytham Woods, but the car's battery had gone flat again* so we walked up the canal to Shipton-on-Cherwell and back across the fields via Hampton Gay and Hampton Poyle. This is a walk we do a lot, with slight variations (this time, across the fields from Thrupp to Shipton-on-Cherwell rather than sticking to the canal, then on through Shipton-on-Cherwell to come out a bit further up the canal and double back before heading across the fields, which took it up to 6.25 miles from the normal five and a half).



It was lovely and sunny and warm enough that after a few miles I even took off my jacket and pushed my sleeves up to get some sun on my arms. There were lots of snowdrops and crocuses out, and even a couple of daffodils in sheltered spots, and some lambs in the field next to Hampton Poyle church. The Cherwell was quite high and all the ditches which are normally dry had water in them, but mostly the ground wasn't too muddy underfoot, and it was good to get out and try to ward off the late-February glums with sunshine and flowers and nature.

I was amused by this plaque outside a house in Shipton-on-Cherwell. I can't decide if it's very careful vandalism or just general ineptitude.



*I have booked the AA to come out and fit a new one, and am somewhat mollified by discovering that the old one was actually booked three years ago, and not the two I had thought it had been; three years is probably reasonable for a car that doesn't get a lot of use.

Reading: Rainbow Bouquet

I saw a few posts on social media last week about a forthcoming anthology of queer-themed love stories from Manifold Press, Rainbow Bouquet (ed. Farah Mendelsohn) and, as it included stories by a couple of people I follow and whose work I generally enjoy I thought it seemed worth a punt. It was released on Valentine's Day, and because it had just appeared on my kindle at the point where I'd finished my last book and I wanted something easy to read I dived straight in.

There are ten stories in Rainbow Bouquet, spanning a variety of genres (space opera, fantasy, historical, ghost story) and settings (from the ancient Mediterranean to a distant planet). Only four of them feature f/f relationships, with the other six being m/m; I was really happy to see one of the f/f stories including an asexual character, because Representation Matters. My favourites were Kathleen Jowitt's 'Stronger than Death', a lovely story about a stately home's ghostly residents helping their descendents; Cheryl Morgan's 'The Poet's Daughter', about Calypso and a shipwrecked woman washed up on the beach of Ogygia long years after Odysseus's departure; and M.J. Logue's 'Firebrand', set in the theatres of Restoration Drury Lane, but there was only one I didn't really like at all, partly because it felt very male and very focused on sex but probably quite a lot because of a totally gratuitous diss of handknitted socks on the very first page.