1. Tickled Pink Ben & Jerry’s Love Is Topped, £2.50.
2. Dove Pomegranate, £2.85.
3. PG Tips, £2.
4. ghd gold ink on pink styler, £139.
5. Simple wipes, £3.
6. Pot noodle.
7. Vaseline Rosy Lip Tin, £1.50.
8. Lulu Guinness Breast Cancer Now Natasha in chalk blush, £145 .
9. ELEMIS Breast Cancer Care limited-edition Pro-collagen Marine Cream, 100ml.
Pic credit: National Trust
The National trust village of Coleshill is celebrating its secret Second World War history with a living history event honouring the Auxiliaries.
Coleshill Underground is returning to West Oxfordshire on Sunday, 22nd September with re-enactments, exhibitions, a display of military vehicles, food, drink and dancing as well as children’s activities.
Unknown to villagers, Coleshill was the top secret training headquarters for the British Resistance, also known as the Auxiliary Unit in which brave men volunteered to act as a secret resistance force against invasion by Germany. They were trained in units of six in isolation from other groups and in unusual methods.
The living history area will tell the story of the brave auxiliaries through re-enactors, exhibitions and interactive displays. The Second World War historic sites around Coleshill will be open to explore including the operational bases and guard house.
Trace your own historical connections with the help of the Coleshill Auxiliary research team while younger members of the family have a go at an activity trail around the village – learn about code breaking, the skills needed to be a spy and have a go at crawling under camouflage nets.
Coleshill Underground is celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Auxiliaries being stood down from service.
Tickets can be booked in advance via the website.
‘A murder is the culmination of a lot of different circumstances all converging at a given time, at a given point. It’s Zero Hour.” So says Superintendent Battle in Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero.
The play begins with the shipping forecast, but the weather does not suddenly happen – it is the result of many influences and other events, in the same way murder does not just happen. Towards Zero is the current play at the Mill at Sonning, and the team are pleased that Brian Blessed, is once again directing one of Christie’s plays.
The “Queen of Crime” wrote it in 1944, when Agatha was married to Max Mallowan and living at Winterbrook, near Cholsey. But it was just over a decade later when a young Brian Blessed met Agatha Christie.
He was just starting his first job at Nottingham Playhouse where they ran a fortnightly repertory company under the artistic director Val May (who was later the artistic director of the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre at Guildford) for the princely sum of £4-19-6 per week.
Agatha Christie was putting on Spiders Web at the Theatre Royal and came to the Playhouse for a look around. In those days the Stage Door opened on to the street.
Agatha and Brian often met up during the following three weeks. She helped him source some props he needed and told him some of her wishes about how her plays should be staged. Some of these, all these years later, Brian has remembered and used at The Mill, including the suit of armour that came to life. Towards Zero was Agatha’s favourite play, he recalls, and that of her good friend Robert Graves, the author of I Claudius.
Sometimes, either before or after their meetings, she was not going back to the theatre but to the police station to see if there had been any interesting murders! She described her meetings with him as relaxing which, for a lady who said that sometimes her head felt like a house where a light was on in at least one room 24 hours a day, must have been a blessing. Sadly, for Brian, her one gift to him apart from the advice a small radio covered in red velvet was taken from his bedsit.
As to what the audience can expect at the Mill, period music and the perpetual ticking of many different clocks as we head to the zero hour. Agatha was not Bran’s only source of advice, for Superintendent Battle, he went back to one of his early television roles – PC “Fancy” Smith on Z Cars.
If you’re ever fancied yourself as a bit of a sleuth there’s the perfect opportunity to put your skills to the test at this year’s Agatha Christie weekend.
Discover the real-life world of the Queen of Crime who lived in Wallingford and Cholsey for 42 years until her death in 1976 writing many of the novels for which she is best known.
As part of this year’s weekend, unleash you inner Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple and take part in Science Oxford’s CSI Forensic Challenge at Wallingford Museum. With a fresh crime scene, grab your magnifying glass and dusting powder, unravel alibis and solve clues to find out whodunit. Booking is essential for this with sessions at 6.30pm, 7.15pm and 8pm.
Among other events planned for the weekend from Friday, 6th to Sunday, 8th September are a talk at Cholsey Church where she and husband Max Mallowan are buried – Murder Most Flowery will look at Christie’s use of horticulture in the creation and solving of whodunits given by keen gardener and fan, Ruth Brompton-Charlesworth. The talk will take place at Cholsey’s St Mary’s Church, 7.30pm and includes a glass of wine or soft drink, tickets £12.
Across the weekend Wallingford Museum will hold an enhanced exhibition, At home with the Queen of Crime, and in Cholsey Old School enjoy the A is for Agatha art exhibition which will feature work created by artists who each read one of her murder mysteries and then used their own interpretation to depict it.
Picture this – it’s late summer in the bay of Naples, the city is just waking up. On one side of the mosaic-lined streets are acres of orchards, on the other, the sun-dappled ocean shines. The smell of salt lingers as you settle down to dinner. How does a salad of cheese, fig and balsamic vinegar sound? Focaccia with prosciutto and poached eggs are on the menu, with great wine.
Some residents of Pompeii, AD 79, were living this timeless fantasy the day disaster struck. Last Supper In Pompeii is a humanising account of the society that once thrived in this mysterious city, explored through the culinary artefacts excavated in the south Italian culinary haven. Like us, the Romans partook in savoury escapism, evidence of which has been found in excavations of the town and neighbouring Herculaneum.
Among the items on display at the Ashmolean are utensils, arts, and edible goods that furnish our foodie fantasies, painting a picture of daily life before the eruption of Vesuvius. Thousand-year-old pomegranates and fossilised olives indicate that the sought-after Mediterranean diet has been in vogue far longer than dieticians would have you believe. The ancients did not, however, believe in calorie-counting as we do today. Presented from the homes of wealthy Pompeiians are frescos of mouth-watering afterlives saturated with great feasts and banquets. The exhibition makes it clear how interwoven the celebration of food was with ancient life and death. There are plenty of Etruscan tomb offerings to peruse; terracotta relics moulded in the form of treats and fancies the Lares (household gods) enjoyed most.
Explored also are the less-than-luxurious quarters, showing the complex organisation of the historical food chain. Housemasters took their meals in triclinia, expensive dining rooms influenced by Greek splendour, and rarely visited the kitchens their slaves occupied; these were small, often with latrines in the middle. Although both spaces existed in the same homes, they were worlds apart from each other. This exhibition provides the opportunity to witness an archaic life that bears a striking resemblance to the modern world. Dr Paul Roberts, Head of the Department of Antiquities, says: “Our fascination with the doomed people of Pompeii and their everyday lives has never waned. What better connection can we make with them as ordinary people than through their food and drink?”
It is said we chose our friends, but we are given our relatives, the exception being our spouse. Those ties are highly questionable at so many points once the bloom of new love is gone (sometime between 24 hours and 24 months after the wedding!).
Yet people stay married, and she is the generation fighting on two fronts being responsible for both children and aged parents! Stand by for some home truths on marriage, and the exhausting and complicated life of giving all generations the love you think they deserve. Peter Anderson caught up with Sindhu to find out about her, stand-up and her love for Oxford as she looks forward to an appearance at the North Wall Arts Centre.
Stand-up was not on Sindhu’s radar for a career choice, she worked in investment banking, had three children, a Danish husband, and a giant Labrador. Then it happened, as Sindhu explains “It hadn’t really entered my head. I have never seen stand up and then a friend persuaded me to go and listen to them at an “open-mike” night. I thought to myself, I think I could do that and so I did a course on stand-up comedy, and the rest is history.”
It seems though when it comes to inspirations there was a seed that was sown in her childhood in India “Looking back, when I younger and still living India in the 1970s, I was fixated on Carol Burnett, I loved the way she could be so silly. I checked recently with my mum and said Oh yes you were always watching that stupid lady”.
With her experience studying does Sindhu have a structured approach to writing her act. “There is certainly a structure in that when I get an idea, I will practice it at around five “open-mike” nights continually refining it. I don’t think I could allocate a time and certainly couldn’t work at a table in a café – I would just sit and eat cakes all the time!”
Sindhu is pleased to be appearing at the North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford was the first place in England she lived after she got a scholarship in India to study here. “Oxford has always been dear to my heart, since I first came to England and Oxford to study philosophy in 1992. I always felt it was the wider Oxford that welcomed me as well as my college and the university”
The sumptuous surroundings of Blenheim Palace are playing host to Europe’s first-ever pop-up Shakespearean theatre over the summer.
Four of The Bard’s most well-known plays will be performed in the 13-sided traditional Elizabethan Rose Theatre which features three tiers of covered seating for 560 and an open courtyard for 340 standing ‘groundlings’.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet transport allow audiences to an intimate atmosphere full of breath taking, spine-tingling and heart-stopping moments courtesy of two companies of actors over a nine-week season which runs until 7th September.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s funniest comedies. Four friends, all in love with the wrong person, set out into the woods and come across the fairy king and queen arguing. When the king, Oberon, decides to fix things using the juice of a magic flower, things start to go very wrong for everyone.
In contrast, Macbeth mixes blood, tension, witches, ghosts and a kingdom in crisis in the tale of a toxic marriage, crushing ambition and murder.
Richard III tells of a villain who murders his way to the crown. He woos the woman whose husband and father-in-law he has killed, has his two young nephews murdered in the Tower of London and is finally crowned Richard III, but along the way he makes some serious enemies.
Warring families is also very much the theme of the most famous love story ever told – Romeo and Juliet. The son and daughter of two respective feuding noble families fall in love but know their love is forbidden and must marry in secret with fatal consequences.
The water calls to me, as she laps at the shore. Her soft trickling against the rocks and pebbles, that she has placed at her farthest edge, to give those who venture near, a foothold with a sharp- edged warning.
My feet are baby soft and too cosseted and vulnerable, as they crunch on the powdery sand nudging towards the sparkling waters edge.
The springtime sun is high in the sky but the wind is chilly and biting. I peep into the glittering mirrored shallows, excitedly scanning the lake bed, for nature holds secrets as ancient as the earth and as deep as the lakes reedy beds.
The birds and small creatures that amble on her banks and laze in pools of still sunlight on her dappled surface, feel familiar and safe and as I near the waters edge the sounds of the shore recede, the laughter of the playing children, the excitedly barking dogs and the bustling swimmers as they adjust their sports attire and stretch those toned torsos. The sounds fade into the distance as I stare mesmerised by the watery depths.
As I peer beneath the surface the minnows dart around in innocence and joy as I dip my toe into the ripples of the shore line and the warmth of my human frame meets the icy cold of the lake and our energy connects. I feel her age old body of water as it welcomes me into her vast pool, or at least she humours me as I wade in the shallows, but as I lift my gaze to the horizon where the tree line meets the water a chill enters my heart as I recall the reason for my visit to the lakeside this early morning and the knowledge of how far into her depths I must swim to reach what I seek
I glance back at the swimmers now entering the water yards away, a babble of jolly women are wading knee deep into the wet, their swimsuits and swimming caps thin protection against the waters icy currents one of these women tucking her loose grey hair into her cap smiles at me and for a moment I want to ask her if she seeks what I seek and her deep belly laugh as she natters to her companion is a sign to me that this is a kindly soul – I open my mouth to call to her but too late I open my mouth to speak and she is already gone into the fresh cold waters of the lake and soon she is bobbing her head in the deeper water, front crawling her way to the first yellow bouy and I my first words of friendship are lost on the wind and carried away in the breeze across the treetops and beyond.
I do not wait for the other swimmers,but make my own solitary way into the icy waters as the reeds. Cling to my thighs I take a deep breath, and then I’m under, immediately a survival instinct kicks in, the waters cold and you must move to keep warm, and anyway one does not enter the water to simply paddle on a day like today one enter the waters to swim.
I can only use breast stroke or at least I feel it is fitting that I do and have never resolved to learn front crawl and so I make my way like an elegant legged toad or frog through the wake of the triathlon swimmers that power their way to fitness and beaming good health, I catch a slip stream from them and hitch a ride as it carries me further out, further to the far edge of the lake. As they stream past the swimmers disturb a cloud of mating dragonflies who flit like sparks of flurosecent blue around the surface of the water and then settle when the energy of them has passed onto the now settling waves.
As I glide through the water I sense I am getting further and further away from shore and I am solitary once more. I sense I need to cough and as I do so a little water entered my nostrils and I snort starting to panic, I was an asthmatic child and memories of cross country in Windsor great park and the lack of oxygen in my tight lungs and temper tantrums where I sobbed and gasped for breath as I bit down in anger on words I could not utter. As an adult I suffer from panic attacks and over my41 years have been partial to the odd fag or two. As these memories came and went like passing shadows across the water I remembered my teenage years where as a young girl I dived through the pools of green jade in the south of France as lithe and as an egret and yet now here I am on a cold bright April morning in the Oxfordshire countryside in a cold lake and my 41 year old body creaking and groaning like a old rusty barge.
And yet something takes over the lake starts to silence my struggling and her quiet teaches me more than the clammering noisy lessons of this world ever could.
My breathing becomes more regular as I tred water I look down and see suddenly out the corner of my eye a silver flash I glance around at the other swimmers but I am not alone a kayaker floats past her eyes crinkled with a concerned smile but this annoys rather than soothes it is not the kindness of humans I seek but the cold hard wisdom of the lake and what hides in the water at her far edge.
What I have seen before and haunts my dreams and has called me back from my lap dogs and newspapers and coffee this morning to her shores then my attention falls again to the water that seems to pulse around me lapping at my hair as it escapes from my swimming hat and swirls in the water like tentacles. There it is again that swoosh and a clap And I see a silvery scaled f tail descend as a startled fish jumps out the water and lands again darting away further into the deep.
I let out a frustrated chuckle a fish ! Only a fish – but the realisation that I may have been deceived in my quest makes my heart heavy and as I turn wearily from the far corner of the lake and start the long swim back to shore my shoulders begin to dip and I feel sleepy in the water as if falling into a deep trance my head starts to dip below the water line and for a second I slip under water my eyes are open and I see coming through the reed beds a woman or a fish I am not sure my vision is blurred the water has become suddenly murky and a cold current hits me in the torso but she or it is approaching fast and there is nowhere to go and suddenly she’s upon me her scales are indeed silvery and her webbed hands as she touches me face and whispers in my ear I can hear nothing but I know in my heart she is singing the sound of falling tears.
In that moment I think I tell my dreams my nightmares my fears and failures she looks straight on my eyes her hair swirling like seaweed and her face rosy and round not the face of a monster but a mirror image of my own I gasp and as water rushes into my mouth it startled me and I rise the the surface gasping in pure air as I break the waves I look above me and alone seagull flying high in the skies above cries out and again I am born of the lake.
I make my way towards the shore and do not look behind me as I climb the beach my legs like jelly my nose dripping just simply make my way back to my patient husband sitting waiting on the warm car to take me home.
Many drown in the wild of the water in the truth that is the secret of the lake
That you are what you seek and what you seek was in you all along.
That the wild calls you to discover this and the wild is indeed what you are.
Many take this knowledge to its watery grave many do not venture near again to the mystical depths of her sparkling waters.
But to hear the cry of the birds as they skim across her surface and see the dragonflies dance
And hear the sound of the sirens and the nymphs as they sing their haunting song calling you to come and meet again the secret of the lake.
Normandy 75: Oxfordshire to the Orne will go on display at the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum until 3rd November and will combine a travelling exhibition from the National Army Museum with stories staff at the museum have gathered from around Oxfordshire.
The stories will be told through objects, a map of key locations, quotes from Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire born soldiers who served on D-Day and beyond.
Soldiers from the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry were among the first to set foot in Normandy on 6th June 1944 and were instrumental in the capture of Pegasus Bridge in the early hours, before the beach landings.
Visitors can sit inside a life-size reproduction of a Horsa Gilder’s compartment and listen to recorded interviews with D-Day veterans.
The museum’s collections manager Peggy Ainsworth said: “In addition to our own regimental stories, we wanted to use this exhibition as a way to represent the local soldiers who contributed to the Normandy campaign.
“There have been many fascinating stories coming in from the public, which we will be telling through artefacts from our collection and information gained thorough our Stories of Conflict and County campaign launched last year.”
The exhibition of the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum in the grounds of the Oxfordshire Museum, Park Street, Woodstock, will end with a special collecting day on 2nd November. The We’ll Meet Again collections day will encourage the public to bring objects to the museum and tell their stories of Oxfordshire from the Second World War to the 1970s. Items donated or loaned will be used to form the Second World War and Reminiscence displays.
A sunny, funny tale of a mother, daughter and three possible dads set on an idyllic Greek island, has been celebrating the music of Abba and entertaining audiences the world over since 1999. Now a mum who took time out of her West End career has joined the ensemble cast once more. For about a decade Jodie Nolan has been enjoying married life in Chipping Norton, teaching dance and musical theatre, after herself starting to learn ballet at the age of two and a half at a dance school in Byfleet.
Who are her inspirations? “Both my parents, but especially my mother. I was brought up with the philosophy if you really want something go for it, and they were very supportive. Growing up, it was Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz and ballet wise Mikhail Baryshnikov in White Knight.”
How did you get your first break in the West End? “I did not go straight into a musicals after leaving the Laine Academy in Guildford, I spent time working as part of the entertainment team on one of the Royal Caribbean Cruise ships, very quickly I had to get my head around all types of shows, and I was away from home. Then, I performed in a couple of tours of Chicago, and then the international tour of Mamma Mia. When I saw that there were vacancies in the West End show and so I gave it a shot and managed to get into the cast in 2008.
Was it hard ten years ago to decide to have a break from the West End? “At the time no, it had been a challenging time for me, I had got married to a lovely husband, but I lost my mother and decided it was time to take a step back for a while. Alongside having children – we now have two lovely daughters and live in idyllic Chipping Norton. I also trained as a teacher in ballet and musical theatre and opened the Nolan Academy. I just felt the time was right now for another shot at the West End and was pleased to get back into Mamma Mia – and supervise the teachers who are covering me in the academy.
Jodie is back on stage in Mamma Mia, but are there any other musicals on her wish list? “What a question! As I walk along The Strand to get to the theatre you see so many musicals that are on. But who wouldn’t want to appear in Les Miserables?”
