Ride a White Horse.

To Banbury for a shopping trip as it goes, and actually it was Soo's car that got me there and not a horse which is a good job really I'm not really a fan of the horse.

It's been many, many years since I was last in Banbury. They now have a new shopping centre called Castle Quays which is built in a sort of star shape so it gets very confusing, especially for a couple of old ducks like us, somehow you seem to leave a shop, walk forward for a bit, only to see the same shop again in front of you.
This level of confusion continues in the town centre too.Banbury is very old and still keeps it's medieval layout, with lots of alleyways off the streets, so you can find yourself distracted by an interesting shop or building down an alleyway head back to where you thought came from but actually suddenly find yourself on another street completely.
Or maybe you step into a charity shop, which unbeknownst to you actually has 2 doors, so you browse round, maybe buy something, then step out into a completely different street to the one you stepped in from! In the end we gave up trying to figure it out and just embraced it.

There are some absolutely gorgeous buildings in Banbury and I loved all the suns around the city. It turns out the 'sun in splendour' is the coat of arms for the council so they are to been seen everywhere from buildings to, wrought iron to even the bins.

The main plan of the shopping trip was to buy presents for various upcoming birthdays but I seemed to keep finding things for either myself or my Mother, and neither of us have birthdays for months yet!
Eventually after a delicious lunch in The Bay Tree tea shop we found the Banbury Museum Shop (as recommended by Soo's Mum) and I hit my present buying stride. I'm not going to show you any of those but I will share with you my other purchases.
From one of these stalls at the mini flea market I bought the appropriately giant sunburst-like brooch.

The green scarf and bunny came from one of the 2 door charity shops and were £1.49 and £1.99 respectively.

From the St Katherine's Hospice shop. I bought this blue dress for £5

Look at the amazing deco building the shop is housed in....

but dear lord was it carnage inside! A jumbled mess of stuff in no particular order laid out in a way that seemed to detract from, rather than make a sensible use of, the layout of the rooms. Sadly no vintage I'm guessing that must get sorted and sent elsewhere.

I also bought this mini coffee/chocolate pot for 95p

and this lovely green blouse for £4

There were a couple of scary parts of town, but then what town doesn't have it's dodgier areas? On the whole though it was a fun and successful day out.

* Yes, yes I changed the first line of the poem but I want to avoid the kind of traffic the C word would bring to my blog!