Welcome to justthoughtsnstuff

I started posting to jtns on 20 February 2010 with just one word, 'Mosaic'. This seemed an appropriate introduction to a blog that would juxtapose fragments of memoir and life-writing. Since 1996, I'd been coming to terms with the consequences of emotional and economic abuse that had begun in childhood, and which, amongst other things, had sought to stifle self-expression. While I'd explored some aspects of my life through fiction and, to a lesser extent, journalism, it was only in 2010 that I felt confident enough to write openly about myself. I believed this was an important part of the healing process. Yet within weeks, the final scenes of my family's fifty-year nightmare started to play themselves out and the purpose of the blog became one of survival through writing. Although some posts are about my family's suffering - most explicitly, Life-Writing Talk, with Reference to Trust: A family story - the majority are about happier subjects (including, Bampton in rural west Oxfordshire, where I live, Oxford, where I work, the seasons and the countryside, walking and cycling) and I hope that these, together with their accompanying photos, are enjoyable and positive. Note: In February 2020, on jtns' tenth birthday, I stopped posting to this blog. It is now a contained work of life-writing about ten years of my life. Frank, 21 February 2020.

New blog: morethoughtsnstuff.com.

Tuesday, 30 August 2011

chimney, shifford, duxford, tenfoot bridge
















Had a lovely walk today along the Thames from Tadpole Bridge, via Chimney Meadows, to Shifford Lock. The first part was familiar but instead of turning back at the lock we crossed the river and continued on and round to the beautiful hamlet of Duxford and back along the other bank to Tenfoot Bridge (above) and the last mile or so of the usual walk.

Duxford was a surprise--an idyllic Berkshire stone farmhouse with red brick surrounds to the windows (the hamlet would have been in Berkshire before the boundary changes in the 1970s) and a handful of cottages, three of them the tall narrow Thames Valley thatched kind that are similar to those that appear in a junk-shop watercolour we have of cottages in North Hinksey by J Allen Shuffrey. (Shuffrey was part of a Witney blanket-making family named in one of the Witney Museum exhibits we saw last week. He specialised in Oxfordshire landscapes and architectural paintings.)

The walk was an antidote to the impending visit to claim my one or two childhood pieces from the mass of furniture that has to be sold. More on this, I dare say, over the coming week or so.
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1 comment:

  1. Rupert Neil Bumfrey31 August 2011 at 07:28

    A good segue into Autumn.
    https://plus.google.com/100146646232137568790/posts/NSRuMhi9swT

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