Driven

In my salad days, there was a pub on Gloucester Green, central Oxford, called The Welsh Pony, esteemed among us for its gut-rot, scrumpy cider - the toxic effects of which I have tried and failed to excise from my memory. (Actually, it also did a decent salad, but I digress.) In an act of cultural vandalism, it became the "Eurobar", but the old name was still visible as ghost writing on the high part of the side wall. The establishment is now the "OXO Bar", and the ghost writing has been over-painted with a ghastly combination of ox-blood and black

The old name - and, who knows, maybe the cider - was a testament to Oxford's location on the drovers' routes, taking cattle, sheep and other livestock on foot from Wales to the London markets and the ports of the South coast. We learned a bit about the drovers from a talk by Tim (not Ian! - corrected) Healy - son of the more famous Denis, but possessed of the same eyebrows. The drovers planted - or encouraged the planting - of Scots pine on hilltops as a marker for their routes. This week I noticed that the ailing one on the hilltop above us perished in the winter storms. I've enjoyed that tree every time I've passed it on the Oxford road. As sad a loss The Welsh Pony

We walked up the lane to give more insurance sugar the bees in our nearby apiary. Normally we have so much equipment that we drive, but this was a minimalist task. The distance between the field boundaries on either side of the road is prodigious - 20 or 30 metres - though most of it is now overgrown with shrubs and trees grown out from the field hedges, creating a linear woodland, 5 metres wide, each side of the road - a neglected enclave for flora and fauna

This is creeping comfrey - perfectly happy in the shade, so thriving in this little haven. The Internet tells me it is native to the Caucasus, but found widely here due to garden escapees. This is some distance from any garden, but we do have a local guerilla gardener - perhaps it's their work

Wide verges, even if now colonised, are suggestive of a drovers' road, we were told - grazing for the stock as they passed through. On the other hand, the drovers' routes tended to skirt towns and villages. Drovers were not always welcomed, partly because of the usual mistrust of strangers, but partly due to fear of infection of either humans or livestock - harsh, but possibly understandable in an age when so many in both categories died from infectious diseases. The village then, though, was much smaller than it is now. Did this route bypass the outskirts - is that why we have (unnecessarily) two routes approaching the village from the north?

While I was over-indulging in the Welsh Pony, some of my contemporaries were honing their rhetorical skills in the Oxford Union - four minutes away on foot and several light-years distant in the English class system - preparing for their future in Westminster. I wonder if any of them are there this week, when they will help to decide if a man can brazenly lie to parliament - in the shadow of 200,000 dead - and retain a role in public life. If they come up with the wrong answer, I think I will be driven to drink