A Night At The Randolph

Not one of my usual stopovers due to an extreme shortness of purse - but we were attending a function in Oxford, it was Susan's birthday, and the hotel was just down the road. The Randolph has got location, location and location. It also costs £20 to park your car !

We'd been out in the evening and wandered into the bar at around midnight to find a fair number of dinner-jacketed chaps in expansive mood, champagne and cigars much in evidence (my Guinness wasn't too outrageous, but the price of a glass of house Rioja made me decide to skip the champagne ...).

It turned out said chaps were American members (I tell a lie, some of them were Texan) of the Churchill Centre, on an eight-day pilgrimage to sites associated with the great man. They'd pretty much done the lot, from dinner at Blenheim to visiting the grave of Churchill's nanny, Mrs Everest, "that most excellent woman". So we sat and swapped Churchill quotes, lambasted the Guardian and Washington Post and generally reinforced each others prejudices in a most agreeable manner.

One of them, John David Olsen, was blogging the visit. I liked the story about Colin Powell's direct descent from Edward Longshanks.