Visiting mother; haunted Little Chefs; ancestor-hunting

Mum arrived on Thursday to inspect my new place and to pay a first visit to Milton Keynes. Dad’s business partner Steve kindly dropped her at the OU on his way home to Norfolk from my parents’ place, though I think Mum was a bit disappointed at missing her planned tootle on the train up to Birmingham and down again. We went for dinner at The Plough in the evening, where the normally sulky waitress appeared to have undergone a bit of a customer service course as she was positively polite. The following morning I left Mum my house keys and A-Z so that she could have a bit of a mooch around the locale, which she evidently did, arriving on campus around midday to meet me for lunch in The Hub, where she got to meet a few of my colleagues including my line manager Judith who is from Swansea and whose late mother apparently studied geology at the university there, which provided talking points.

After lunch we set off to drive back to my parents’ house for the weekend – I had tried to pick a reasonably direct-looking route, which proved actually quite difficult – getting across the country without either going up to Birmingham or down to the M4 involves taking a series of A roads and proceeding across country in an intriguingly zigzag fashion. We drove down past Bicester intending to join the A40 at Witney, but missed the turn and ended up joining it at Burford, where we stopped at the Little Chef for tea and cake. The Little Chef on the A40 at Burford is housed in a former barn and according to this article from 2008, there have been a number of paranormal events witnessed there, including the sighting of a monk and ‘mild poltergeist phenomena’. The latter must be quite a good get-out for any waiting staff who’ve just dropped three Olympic Breakfasts on the floor. “They just leapt out of my hands ...” Mum does indeed look slightly ghostly in this photo, but it might have been the just-out-of-the-freezer lemon drizzle cake.

On the Saturday Mum, Dad and I drove over to Walterstone where we parked at the pretty Carpenters Arms and walked across some fields to the former Oldcastle church, where Mum was hoping to be able to scour the churchyard for an ancestor. The church itself has been converted into a private house, but we had assumed this might have been separated off from the graveyard, but the entire churchyard now appeared to form part of the garden, so we couldn’t get in. Mum spoke to Vera back at the pub who reckoned that the owners would be amenable to letting people have a poke about, so I think she’s going to go back sometime. In the evening we attempted to have a barbecue, which involved Dad in a lot of manfully fanning the coals until they showed some signs of life; we ended up eating indoors in deference to the quite cool weather. I drove back to MK on the Sunday via the M50-M5-M42-M40 route, which despite looking a lot less direct from the road atlas, was actually quicker.