Oxford Folk Music Festival and visit to Oxford Transport Museum 2023

  We flew to Heathrow by El Al on 13/4/23 and took the coach to Oxford. Astrid made the booking some time ago. The purpose was to visit Brenda but she passed away, so it left a vacuum in our visit.  

The folk music festival was very good and took us to many venues in Oxford where  the concerts were, at the Quaker Society which is a building in the middle of the city but when you go through to the hall there is a large colourful garden in between. The Old Fire Station has been turned into a theater with a restaurant. The third venue where  you had to book the concert was The Wall in Summertown which includes an art gallery.

Other places you could arrive at causally and enter free  were at the covered market but it was very drafty and poor escustics where we sat. The library at the Westgate Shopping Centre also had a concerts but the most interesting place was the Blackwell Book Shop where you have to walk through the whole store and up old wooden steps to finally get there on the top floor auditorium.

The music was generally good with a large variety of singers, some male voices goups,some singing well known songs others old songs that the found in archives or regional music. Every group had a variety of musical instruments. 

The most interesting thing we saw on this Oxford trip was the Oxford Bus Museum and Morris Motors exhibition in Long Hanborough, not far from Blenheim Palace.. This is only open 2 days a week but also on Saturday during July and August. It is run by only volunteers and there is a whole program restoring the old vehicles they were given. It shows travel around Oxfordship in the last 130 years. The most fascinating collection of bicycles can be seen starting from  wooden hobby horse   and the progress to the penny farthing style with wooden tyres  till the modern safety bike. There was an interesting tanden where the back rider also can control the steering and a companion bicycle which is weird as 2 riders sit next to each other, this cannot be ridden alone and must be quite a challenge to balance.

You learn about public transport from 1880. You see a collection of the old busses some going back to the  1920s and  type of bus I travelled to school on in Johannesburg with a driver and conductor behind. There are both the single and double decker busses. The Morris Motor exhibition has cars build in the Oxford factory before WW2 and then sample of the Morris Minor which my Mom drove in the 1950s. Later on they made the original Mini here. Picture and movies also show the War Effort where the factory manufactured Armoured vehicles, aeroplane parts and torpedoes. Pictures of the women that worked in production while the men were at war and at the end of the work day crowds of workers went home on bicycles.

We took the Oxford Tube a coach into London where we visited Minne Fry and had Chinese dinner with Evan and his friend Dominic . Evan told us to wait for him at the Savoy Hotel and we found their lounge very comfortable. Evan who worked on the Hacking Scandal which resulted in Rupert Murdock closing the newspaper "News of the World" He and the actor Hugh Grant are working on hacking against Elton John, other actors and Prince Harry.  Interesting to see that Rupert Murdock  was forced to pay out for his false reporting on Fox News.

The UKs economy appears to be very badly hit with over 10% inflation and 19% increase in the cost of food. Their worst problems are as a result of Brexit.

 

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