One, Two, Three, Four

This strange warm autumn continues. Outdoor tables, with optional parasol, in late October UK! We are in Chipping Norton and the tables belong to The Crown and Cushion, a hotel once owned by Keith Moon, drummer in The Who. Before its more recent notoriety, the town was associated with music recording in the high days of vinyl. Gerry Rafferty, Status Quo, Kajagoogoo, and the Bay City Rollers all recorded tracks there

Its association with "The Set" was a newspaper creation, flimsily based upon its proximity to the country houses of a number of the purported members, though none of them actually lived in the town. More recently, Jeremy Clarkson - also not a town resident - has kept the media gaze on the area

In reality, Chippy (its universal epithet) is an atypical Cotswold town: less affluent, less bucolic, lacking chocolate-box beauty or architectural glamour, no duck ponds, village greens with maypole or spreading chestnuts. Its history incorporates industrial strife, riots, protest and resistance to an overbearing state. Even today it is no pushover for the forces of reaction

The road on the picture is a major through route and 16-wheeler camels must thread their way through needle-eyes formed by close-pressed buildings. The ragged roof line is evidence of the make-do-and-mend, utilitarian spirit of the place.

If you look very closely, there is a man with a tripod hidden behind the furthest parasol. He is setting up a film camera and sound recording, focused on the hotel entrance. I nurture the hope that he was preparing to ambush an emerging David Cameron and ask him how he felt, that his choices a decade ago had set in train a chain of events that led us to the current debacle