This X marks the spot where the Protestant clerics Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer were burned at the stake by Mary 1.

Saturday, 30th August LIVERPOOL

The Ashmolean Museum. Lex and Glen reading the information out front as we wait for it to open.

Oxford may be a university town but many of the students are clearly unable to read and comprehend instructions. Or they have a healthy dose of contempt for rules and regulations?!

If you're s Morse fan, you may recognise this as the site where Morse had his fatal heart attack in "The Remorseful Day", the final episode   :(

Alister, our guide, was a wonderful source of information on Oxford and Morse

Lex with his Italian beer in "Ask Italian". Well, he did ask for a large....

Lots of the pubs around Oxford have Morse connections. He did spend a good deal of time in them!

Robyn writes: Have had a wonderful day - a day among the dreaming spires of Oxford, and two of my all-time favourite detectives! We set the alarm to go off at 7.30 so we could get up and going nice and early - neither of us were impressed when it went off, but we eventually crawled out and started getting organised for the day. First, of course, we headed downstairs for a lovely hotel breakfast, which is included in our hotel room. We had been planning and hoping to be in town in Oxford nice and early, say, 9am, but it was actually around 9.30 before we even pulled up at the Pear Tree Park & Ride carpark just near our hotel. Amazingly, we pulled up right next to Carol and Glen getting out of their car, having just driven up from Leighton Buzzard to meet up with us in the city! So, after a happy reunion, we all paid our car parking (2 pounds for the day) and hopped onto the bus which was waiting to take us into Oxford (just under 5 pounds return). We were all doing this as parking in the CBD there is hideously expensive (4 pounds an hour) IF you can find one! This was by far the cheaper and easier option, and in less than 10 minutes, our bus had us right in the middle of town. We checked to see where we would get our return bus, and times, then set out to explore.


Carol has been to Oxford quite a lot, so she set off to wander around while the rest of us went into the Ashmolean (Art & Archaeology Museum) as soon as it opened at 10. We arranged to meet for the 11am guided tour, then all went off to our favourite galleries for the first hour. I had a lovely time with the European paintings, Glen was rapt in the coin collections and Lex had a general wander around to see what was on offer (many, many galleries of collections). We met for the tour and our guide took us right around, showing us some of the highlights of their collection such as (my favourite) the Alfred Jewel, a beautiful Anglo-Saxon piece of jewellery they think was used as a pointer while reading manuscripts. Lots of beautiful and rare things, so we enjoyed the tour.
When it ended at 12, we headed down into the cafe there to have some lunch - museum food is always a bit pricey but it's generally a nice meal and at least you're supporting them by eating there. After lunch we went back to explore the galleries then I headed off to the Information Centre to meet the tour guide there for the Inspector Morse tour which started at 1.30.


The tour was fantastic - it went for two and a half hours and Alistair, our tour guide, was a font of information on the Morse books and TV series. He knows Colin Dexter, the author, and told us lots of stories about the filming of the Morse, Lewis and now Endeavour series in Oxford. We saw lots of places where they were filmed plus learned a lot of general history and information about Oxford as well. I now think Oxford has the most beautiful city centre I've seen, and that's a big call! Alistair also gave us the thrilling news that recently they've been filming new series of both Lewis and Endeavour in the city, so we were all very happy to hear that.


After the tour ended, I headed back to the Ashmolean to meet up with the others at 4. We went to a little coffee shop around the corner for a cuppa before Glen and Carol headed home. Glen told us that he had seen the Agatha Christie play, 'Black Coffee', advertised at the Oxford Playhouse, so we said our fond farewells to them as they went to line up for the bus back to the Park & Ride, and popped around the corner to check it out. They still had tickets available for tonight's performance at 7.30, so we paid 27 pounds each for tickets in the middle of Row 3. By now it was 4.30 and we had three hours to wait, so we decided we had plenty of time to catch the next bus back, shower and change, and come back into the CBD for tea before the play started.


We went back around the corner to the bus stop where a double-decker bus was waiting and a huge line of people were queuing to get into it - we thought that for sure it would be full and we'd miss out, but amazingly we made it onto the bus and even got a seat! Lex very kindly gave up his to a lady who came on after us, and she turned out to be from the Morse tour, so she and I chatted all the way back to our terminal. We were back at our car in just over 10 minutes and were amazed to see that Carol's car was still parked there...so we waited for the five minutes or so until the huge crowd on the bus finally cleared and Glen and Carol appeared from the top deck. It was worth it to see the looks on their faces when we greeted them with a "Well, what kept you?!" So we bid them farewell again, and headed home to shower and change before going back in around 6pm.


We were lucky again that a bus was there, and this time we were the only passengers on board for most of the trip! When we got back to the city we decided we felt like Italian, so we went to "Ask Italian", where we had a lovely meal - Lex had a vegetable fettucine and I had a lovely pasta carbonara with a side salad. These were accompanied by my Sav Blanc (from NZ - always a safe option) and Lex had a large beer - slightly more than he'd imagined; it was a 660ml bottle of Nastro Azuro which was nice Italian beer but he manfully got through it all! Dessert was lovely - I had the nicest tiramisu I've had in ages and Lex had an apple, plum and pistachio tart. Yum!


After all of this indulgence, it was time for the theatre, so we headed around the corner in plenty of time to find our seats before the play began. Black Coffee is one of the plays written by Agatha Christie for the stage, not adapted from a novel, so I'd never seen it and had no idea 'whodunnit'. It was a great cast with excellent stage setting (beautifully 1930s Art Deco set) and very well acted (though it always seems very strange to see someone other than David Suchet acting Poirot!). Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed it and Lex even picked the murderer. It was a lovely evening out and really nice to get dressed up for a night on the town - we haven't been able to afford much of that on this holiday, but it was a great change! Then off course we headed back around to the bus stop and a bit of a wait for our bus, and we were home by 10.30. A long day, but full of wonderful things :)