New Years Day and there are a choice of walks. This one is the 6.5 mile Christian Aid walk.

The route this year started and ended at St Helen’s Church in Abingdon, and went via footpaths around Drayton – with a break for refreshments at Drayton Parish Church, then near Milton, Sutton Courtney and returned by Peep-a-Day lane .

A picture of the sun rising on year 2010 seen from the Abbey Meadows in Abingdon at about 8:25 AM.

The strange lights seen by many drifting across the sky at 12:30 AM, after the New Year’s Party, were not an invasion of Triffids, as first supposed, but instead were little candle-lit hot air balloons.

The Vale of the White Horse is the valley of the Ock, a stream which joins the Thames from the west at Abingdon. The pictures were taken today. Four rivers including the Ock were put on flood watch yesterday but no problems yet …

Here is the first stanza of a poem written in 1951 by Phyllis Dawson Clark celebrating the Ock, and called: The Mill Stream

Down from the chalky range of Berkshire hills
Stamped with the cave-man’s god, a lean white horse;
Through rustling cornfields, by a dozen mills
Whose wheels are long since rusty, and across
A thistle wast where winter storms have laid
To rest the hollow trunks, where brittle rot
Harbours the comfrey seedlings that have strayed;
Where centuries of blue forget-me-not
Have sighed away their days unseen, alone,
And sprays of blushing dog-rose bend to kiss
Their own reflection in a pool that’s known
A thousand summers just as sweet as this, —
By the wild rhubarb leaves and giant dock,
Under the willow arches flows the winding Ock.

The wet flakes of snow that fell yesterday have not settled. There has been too much rain. I went to have a look round the display about the County Hall in the museum and saw the curtains of light from the inside – and they looked almost snow-like.

Back in January a new book about Abingdon, More of Abingdon – Past and Present, was published. On November 25th a second book, Abingdon Through Time, has also been published. It is written by Pamela Horn, who having retired from lecturing and writing books about Social History, particularly the Victorian Era, at Oxford Brookes University, has now written a book, illustrated with many colour photographs, telling the stories of the streets and faces of her home town Abingdon since Victorian times.