On Monday a dozen members of Abingdon Peace Group gathered at the War Memorial in Abingdon to mark the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan on August 6th 1945.
This vigil has been held in Abingdon every August for the last thirty years, and reminds us of the tens of thousands of people who died immediately, and the many more who died subsequently of the after-effects of radiation, both in Hiroshima and in Nagasaki which was bombed 3 days later on August 9th 1945.
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.
In the Spring 2009 Town Crier there was a picture of the official opening of the Mousehole Cafe in 1959 with a very early Italian coffee machine.
After the Mousehole closed, the cellar lost some of its sense of fun.
On 8th July 2012, the cellar re-opened as a cafe again, run by Throwing Buns, and called Basement Buns. It seems to have again found that Joie de vivre.
If anybody has any pictures of the days of the Mousehole in days gone by, please let Phil and Kate, from Throwing buns, know. They would like to display some pictures of their heritage.
Bath Street is the one shopping street in the town centre that has not yet been repaved, although the flower beds at one end, and the war memorial at the other have seen improvements.
At the further end of the street shops like Marie and Masons have many followers, but some of the businesses in the middle of the street do not seem to have fared so well.
The florist has closed, and last week, to add insult to injury, somebody went on the rampage and broke their shop window, and those of some other Bath Street shops.
Next door, was once a well known letting agency, which has not been re-let. Now, there is a planning application to create more accommodation at the rear of this shop and above. Flats do work and bring in money.
But it is to be hoped, once the nearby precinct work has been completed, that increased customer footfall will benefit Bath Street.