02 Feb Downton Abbey, Christmas & floods in Oxfordshire
Following my resolution to blog more personal posts, who saw the Downton Abbey Christmas Special? In case any readers haven’t and are still intending to, I will try not to spoil the plot, but simply say – wow, that made me angry! Hope the writers realise they may be responsible for an unusually high number of cases of SAD this winter. My sister realised what was coming many scenes ahead of the rest of our family so I was able to brace myself, at least. (She’s quite a smart one, I think she told us at two scenes in, what was going to happen.)
We were spending the Christmas week in Oxfordshire, in a beautiful house with so many beautiful period features, it was quite the location to get into a proper Downton mood. (In fact, we were only just down the road from the village where they do a lot of the filming!)
I got a bit snap happy with the interior and features:
Floods at Christmas is becoming a bit of theme for me.
Last year I was in Tanzania when floods hit Dar es Salaam claiming 20 lives and many hundreds of people’s homes. This year in Oxfordshire had a very different ending, thankfully. Perhaps to an extent because of flood control systems, diverting it away from the towns and villages? Or just because we had less water? I’m not sure, but happy to say that homes were kept dry, despite all the surrounding fields being filled to breaking point, like this:
Our attempts at walking through any of this failed, so we amused ourselves with food, fires and Miranda’s new book instead. Which has a great moral behind the silliness by the way! No, I’m not going to tell you – go read it yourself.
