We finally made that trip to the new Ikea this afternoon and I have to say that I'm pretty impressed with the place.

The first good thing is that it took 28 mins to get from my door to theirs, we normally go to the one on the North Circular and it takes a whole lot longer than that.

The shop was quite busy but everyone seemed to be able to move around OK and there wasn't any of the pushing and shoving and bad attitude that you sometimes get in the market place of the London stores.

We didn't do a whole lot of shopping, but we did come away with everything we wanted. We also spied some huge palletts of mugs for sale at 10p each so we did the decent thing and bought a quids worth of 'em.

They had some "live entertainment" by the tills which was surprisingly good. The singer was Irie J and he was excellent.

The other thing of interest in the area is a huge ASDA/Walmart store next door, it's massive but had shut at 4pm (when we got there) so we didn't have a chance to look around.

On the way home we came across a couple of cars stopped in the road with hazard lights on, I thought it was an accident so we stopped to help, it turns out that it was a big ol' dog on the loose. The dog was and Old English Sheepdog like the Dulux Dog, he was pretty lucky because he was walking all over the A421 which is a very fast, dark twisty road between Bicester and Buckingham. One chap was holding on to him to stop him walking off, so I walked to the nearest house (it was quite remote) to see if he belonged to them, he didn't but they knew where he lived and took him in for us. I felt pleased that I was able to be of some help.