Ready! Steady! …………..

Our daily river check this morning brought better news – the yellow (stream decreasing) boards are now out almost everywhere along the Thames from Oxford to Reading and, with a bit of luck, we’ll be able to leave tomorrow morning.
To make good use of today we walked up to Oxford Prison and climbed the “Hangman’s Hill” for the view.

This is Oxford Prison from Hangman’s Hill – now a “Malmaison” Hotel the prison still had 3 men to a cell as late as 1996.  The round tower just right of centre is the Debtors Prison, where those owning money were incarcerated until they paid up.  There were some long terms served in there we understand!

Doug on the top of the hill with the tower of Nuffield College in the background.

We popped into the Malmaison Hotel to have a look around.  The cells are now the bedrooms and it’s been very well converted – if a little dark in places.
Our next port of call was the Museum of Science History which is housed in the original Ashmolean Museum building.  Among other things a stunning collection of  historical scientific instruments are on display.


This blackboard has been preserved from the 2nd of three lectures made by Albert Einstein in Oxford on 16 May1931.  The first three lines establish an equation for the expansion of the universe and the lower four lines provide numerical values for the expansion, radius and age of the universe. (my goodness!)
Returning to the boat, we met up with our neighbour for the last few days - Rob Pointon is a professional artist.

This is his latest piece – the interior of the Divinity School in the Bodleian Library, which we visited ourselves only a few days ago.   Having been shown other pieces of his work we can certainly say he is very talented.
So – with a bit of luck we’ll be getting the anchor out and life jackets on tomorrow morning.  Fingers crossed!