On Saturday there was a Normandy Market. It was not as large as some of the original French Markets from a couple of years back which used to fill the Market Place.

This is the third year that the Arts Festival has featured a Bigging Up a Famous Painting . Alan Mynall holds up his 1/25th of the total picture.

25 artists each painted a 2ft x 2ft portion of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne in just 6 hours. At 4:00 the canvases were collated to create a giant version of the original.

Then came the moment of truth as the large picture was turned to face the audience.

Here are the artists with their picture.

The event was sponsored by Schlumberger and Price’s Stationers, and the finished canvasses will be on display at the Guildhall over the next two weeks – during the arts festival.

Lots more is going on which can be seen at Abingdon Arts Festival. For example

Kevin Tomlinson has taken his show to Canada, America, Norway, New Zealand, Holland and Hawaii. The show explores all those times in life when we are “on the edge”. On 26th March he will be Bigging it up in his home town, Abingdon.

Interesting comments from the post of two days ago with the launch of Google Street View for the rest of the country – and in Abingdon.

Google haven’t got everything exactly right yet. East St Helen Street has been called West St Helen Street. But even people who live in Abingdon make that mistake.

Comments from 11th March find clues when the cameras came round. This motor show advertised on the bus stop outside the Community Hospital on Marcham Road agrees with their dating of June 2008 – it says Sunday 29th June 2008.

But areas in North Abingdon like this bus shelter near Tilsley Park were captured nearer Christmas. So the google cameras did not do it all in one visit. There are no leaves on the trees in this area.

It is amazing that Google have done it, and that they have been allowed to do it. It is amazing to be able to revisit from my laptop all the houses I have ever lived in, and the schools I went to etc. But it does seem an amazing intrusion of privacy.

Let me know the best reflection of the Street View vehicle you find. It must have got reflected in a shop or car window somewhere.

This is John Gribbin signing copies of his latest book after a talk hosted by Mostly Books at the Guildhall.

Another book by John, ‘Get A Grip On Physics’, was photographed lying in the footwell of Tiger Woods car a few months ago. Photograph: Handout/Getty Images, and cropped by Abingdonblog.co.uk Images.

John had lots of interesting things to say about parallel universes and even the possibility of time travel, but he was at a loss to explain how one of his books came to be found in the footwell of Tiger Woods Car that fateful day. He said the book was out of print, and that after the Tiger Woods incident the book was selling for up to $100 on Ebay, but John had not made a killing because he only had a couple of copies left himself.

Moving on from there I could have turned left but instead went right and called in at the the annual Morris Mens challenge at the Brewery Tap where I found two ex Mayors playing darts.

The Morris Men proved themselves too strong at pub games and pub quizzes and defeated the current Mayor’s team. The Morris Men will now go off from that triumph to do some dancing at one of our twin towns, St Niklaas, over the weekend. It is some sort of mid-lent rest-from-fasting event – just like Mother’s Day.