A handful of dedicated people are keeping the Village Hall running well. 

Phil Saugman, as property manager, has had the hall spring cleaned more than once; the floor has been cleaned and retreated, the door wood oiled, repairs to rotten window frames arranged, to name but a few. Phil is currently arranging for essential repairs to the porch. Much of this work has been done by Phil himself, and much by associates for which the normal charge has been waived. We’re very grateful for all he’s doing

Kevin Duma does sterling work as caretaker, cleaning the hall, putting out, and away, tables and chairs, and opening and closing the hall.

Meanwhile, Treasurer Ann Allsworth holds the purse strings. She keeps the hall accounts in apple-pie order and makes sure we don’t spend money we haven’t got. She’s adept at tucking away money for a rainy day; invaluable when we had a big bill for sorting out the sewer last year. Ann is now building up the reserve again.

Anne Markham has been doing a great job looking after the plants outside since last summer, and will be back in action when the frosts are past.

Linda Slater is our efficient Secretary.

The hall is taking many more bookings since we managed to get it high on the Google hit list. People like the hall and our rates are competitive. We are getting more bookings from outside organisations, ranging from the National Childbirth Trust to natural health treatments, a Thanksgiving party and a school reunion - all in the last 6 months. We have to strike a balance between these outside bookings, which keep the hall viable, and having the hall sufficiently available for parishioners. To repeat the recent advice: book as early as you can or, unfortunately, you might not get the day you want, particularly at weekends.

Thank you to those villagers who came to Oxford Flood Alliance’s public meeting in November. I thought it might be of interest to give a summary here of things done, and things still awaited, which will help the village, i.e. downstream.

• Towle’s Mill - much larger by-pass channel and weir (Environment Agency (EA), 2007)

• Very large new flood culverts at the bottom of the village ditch (EA, 2009)

• Clearance of vegetation and de-silting of Hinksey Drain and Stream (EA, various dates)

• Removal of redundant level crossing bridge which was obstructing Hinksey Drain at Kennington (Network Rail, early 2010)

• Clearance by Nick Frearson under the Devil’s Backbone path, including pollarding of willows, and of the village ditch (2010)

• New, higher, bridge over the Hinksey Stream (Oxon County Council, July 2010)

• Bigger culverts for Hinksey Drain under the railway access road, and a wider weir (Network Rail,2011)

• New culverts under the causeway leading to the electric substation beside the village (Vale of White Horse DC, 2011)

• We believe the severe pinch point at Munday’s bridge, under the railway in Kennington, will finally be sorted out properly, by Thames Water, in the spring. This would be a major improvement.

• The Parish Council has recently met with a County Council officer to ask the County to clear out beneath the bridge at the village end of the Devil’s Backbone.

• The Parish Council also continue to pursue the (labyrinthine) ownership of the ditch at the top of Manor Road, so further restoration can be done.

• Stroud’s bridge and the channel beyond it to the Thames.

• Clearing the junction of Hinksey Stream and Drain, which is very badly silted and overgrown.

• Maintenance throughout: to help, we have just begun monitoring the waterways on a regular basis, reporting problems to the authorities and featuring them on a maintenance page on our website. If anyone sees a problem, let me know, so we can try to get it sorted.

Oxford has just £5000 in toto in the central flood risk reduction capital budget for the 5 years from 2012 onwards. In fairness, there is £123,000 for maintenance for this year

Under new government funding arrangements the Environment Agency’s ‘big scheme’ for Oxford (and us) would be only 7% funded, leaving a shortfall of c. £120 million. In other words it’s a dead duck. Thus there is no official, realistic, strategy for Oxford.

Faced with this, we have submitted various measures for consideration for funding, mostly based on our medium-term strategy proposals published in March 2010.

We thought we would remind everyone of our (ex-)local’s history by reproducing the poem written about it by First World War poet Robert Graves when he lived nearby on Boars Hill during his time at Oxford. Michael Schmidt, the founder of the publishing house that now looks after Graves’ works lived at Pin Farm, South Hinksey when he founded The Carcanet Press during his time at Oxford, and he remembers reading the poem – then displayed in a glass fame at the bar - during his visits to the pub. Does anyone else remember this?

By Kind permission of Carcanet Press for the Robert Graves Estate.

Due to the sad and sudden death of Clive Briffett, the Nature’s Niche feature will no longer be appearing in the Echo. We are replacing it in the spring with a series of articles contributed by a member of staff at the Oxford Botanical Garden. Until then here are some words from a more unconventional gardener…

The Sloppy Gardener

We love our garden. We really do. We spend a lot of time in it and we even do quite a lot of work there, but it’s disorganised, organic, random. Let me explain.

It’s a small garden at the top of Manor Road and we’ve lived here for ten years. Before that we had a much larger garden in the unforgiving clay of West Sussex. (It was there that I learned to grow most of my bulbs in pots to avoid having to bore planting-holes in the slippery mud of October, and I’ve kept up the habit ever since.)

Our garden is for enjoyment and we do the jobs that we enjoy. Others get done at the stage where not having done them would be more unpleasant than actually doing them; if you don’t mow the lawn at all it’s an eyesore, but mow it when it is just a bit too long and it makes such a difference that everyone thinks you have really worked hard.

At first we had very few flowerbeds, but there were three apple trees occupying about a third of the total space. After living with them for a year we hoiked two of them out. Now we have just one, which we are forbidden to cut down as the grandchildren look on it as their climbing tree. It provides more than enough dual purpose cookers/eaters for two of us and plenty to give away. The garden is lighter and we have a third as many leaves to rake in the autumn: sloppy gardening.

We don’t grow vegetables - too much work and worry - though we do run to a triangle of runner beans some years, for the sheer enjoyment of their flowers and the wonderful fresh taste. One year we did have tomatoes, but that was a random seedling that had got into my compost mix and forced its way up among the other flowers: sloppy gardening again.

The overriding aim of the garden is to provide colour. To this end Jo grows giant dahlias from seed on the upstairs window ledge. It’s a bit like cooking profiteroles, maximum impact for minimum effort. Last year’s dahlias are cut down after the first frost and simply left in the ground; a surprising number of them survive, even in a winter as harsh as last year’s, and there is the added enjoyment of scrutinising the earth in April and May to see what is coming up. Then, spaces in the beds can be filled with fast-growing, self-seeding, annuals such as Californian poppies.

Even in winter the garden provides interest and enjoyment, though it is largely admired through the double glazing of our cottage windows. Compare these winter pictures with the view in summer and you will see the contrast that one year of sloppy gardening can provide.
Linda Slater