farewell from jtns

Enjoyed walking the Oxford canal from Wolvercote Green to Hythe Bridge Street this morning - along the newly resurfaced towpath! Fantastic that it is now all-weather!

The other photo shows larch roses on the tree that featured in the first pic I posted on jtns. When we lived in Oxford, Jess and I used to love the first sightings of larch roses on this same tree.

And so farewell from jtns. As mentioned a while back, it's been my intention for some time to stop posting to this blog on its tenth birthday - today! - so that it becomes a self-contained work of life-writing covering ten years of my life.

I hope readers have enjoyed the posts and pics.

I loved writing the blog - even during the periods when it was therapy.

I'm always surprised when people tell me they read my blog - surprised and really delighted.

Thanks for reading. And although jtns is coming to its close, there might just be morethoughtsnstuff...

more gales and downpours, bright green grass, downton the movie, thames towpath from osney bridge to port meadow, overlays of memory

More gales and downpours. Got drenched cycling this morning and came across scatterings of debris every so often - even a branch across the start of Calcroft Lane (aka the Gated Road) at Clanfield. The ditches and steams were full and when we drove to Burford this afternoon, there was flooding in the fields.

What a winter!

On the plus side, the grass is bright green and the plants in the garden are thriving.

Have started to watch Downton the movie. Amazed to see a post van driving along the lane beside the church for what seemed an age, whereas in reality it would have taken seconds. Fascinating manipulation of time and space.

The cinematography and lighting - beautiful naturally lit interiors - are superb and, presumably, are what you get for your money when you're making a feature film, as opposed to a television series.

The top photo, above, looks rather menacing - the result of the jagged shape of the fencing in the foreground. Though the view was gentler than that in reality - and in the colour original. I changed it to black and white because I was wanted to intensify the patterns in the composition.

I remember discovering this towpath shortly before moving to our flat on Osney Island in the late eighties. I was so thrilled and imagined walking along it from Osney Bridge to Port Meadow and the Perch at Binsey at the weekend. In those days it was more of a rough track and had yet to be surfaced. The experience of walking it was in any case much more bucolic because none of the development between it and the railway line had begun and the waste land was densely overgrown.

Much has changed but the overlays of memories remain!

flooded water meadows near north hinksey, canal towpath improvements completed last friday!

Pics of a walk I did a couple of weeks ago when the Thames flooded the meadows east of North Hinksey, Oxford. Stunning views that morning, though I remember worse floods in the 1990s - at least this time I could walk along the causeway between the innundated fields.

Meantime, I learnt from the Council website that the Oxford canal towpath improvements from Wolvercote Green to Aristotle Lane should have been completed last Friday. Yey!