Bicester Village

Posted on 2011/03/02 20:22:32 (March 2011).

[Sunday 27th February 2011]
I decided this weekend we should do something Chie really wants to do - as we often end up doing what I want to do at the weekend - and knowing Chie likes going for a shopping expedition at the Bicester Village outlet shopping centre we planned to do that today.

It's a bit of a trek from London - probably about two hours once you include the tube, train and shuttle bus the other end - and Chie was keen to make a day of it, so we headed off fairly early, and got the 10:15 train from Marylebone.

We made a bit of an error of judgement weather wise - it had been blue skies in London so we didn't bother thinking about umbrellas and so on, but by the time we got out into the sticks it was grey, miserable and raining. We had an early lunch pretty soon after arrival at Bicester in the hope the rain might abate in the meantime but it didn't really stop altogether. Bicester Village is an outdoor shopping centre so we were then consigned to spending the rest of the afternoon dashing between shops. I did eventually cave in and buy an umbrella but I'd already spent quite a lot of the afternoon getting quite damp by this point.

I ended up buying a lot more than Chie - they have a branch of Charles Tyrwhitt there, a Jermyn Street favourite of mine, wherein I bought a couple of embarassingly cheap shirts (a pitiful £19.95 each) and a pair of smart-ish trousers. I also, on a bit of a whim, bought a rather loud Argyll jumper in the Pringle shop, as well as book on antique maps, and the aforementioned umbrella - of the large stick variety - which had a pleasingly Gentleman-esque feel about it.

Headed back to London some time after 5. Back at home in the evening Chie made a very nice dish of fresh tofu cooked in seaweed stock (a kind of yudofu) with chinese leaf, which we then dipped in a citrusy soy sauce (a kind of home made ponzu). This was simple but rather delicious.

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