I have never been taken by Oxfordshire, an indeterminate county of blank and vast fields, the vaguest suggestion of a rather limp chalk downland scoured by expensively imported red kites and mimsy honey-coloured cottages inhabited, in the main, by affluent and flatulent remainer bores.
One foot tentatively dipped in the Midlands, the other dangling hopefully towards the gaping maw of London. A county of unfulfilled foetal rivers. A county that doesn’t really know where it is. The start of the Cotswolds — countryside for people who hate the countryside — and the end of the Chilterns — hills for people scared by proper hills. County of Midsomer Murders and The Vicar of Dibley; in other words, what media whores first think of when they hear