Sujit: at 22:34:39
Welcome to Vodafone, what brings you to our web site today?

Backstreeter: at 22:35:10
I want to find out more about the new Vodafone shop that is opening in Abingdon.

Sujit: at 22:35:23
http://www.vodafone.co.uk/find-a-store/index.htm

Backstreeter: at 22:37:10
Thanks but that did not help much. It took me to Oxford Clarendon Centre. I wanted to find out about the Abingdon store…

While at the Fairacres Trading Estate I saw a couple of helicopters on low training flights over Argos and Beales. They seem to come down low at this point before heading back to RAF Benson or wherever they come from.

Beales have been advertising a Closing Out Sale for some weeks. I am fairly sure that Closing Out is something quite different from a Closing Down sale. I gather it means the end of some product lines rather than the end of the store.

In Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, Greene King have a brewery that produces beers that include a number that were once produced by Morland in Abingdon, including Old Speckled Hen.

In the brewery visitor centre there is a model of the Old Speckled Hen car that once drove MG workers to work in Abingdon. The original MG car could well be in America, and the one in the museum is made with the help of bottle tops.

Over the last decade or so Greene King have acquired a number of other breweries, and shut them down to centralise production in their brewery in Bury St Edmunds.

In 2006 they opened a state of the art bottling plant called Old Speckled Hen Hall.

Old Speckled Hen was a beer specially produced for the 50th anniversary of MG car production in Abingdon. It keeps on rolling along, having become the beer that won prizes, and created demand beyond Morland, and Greene King hostelries.