Sitting at the very centre of Woodstock is this remarkable and absolutely essential building: our Post Office. It serves our local community with loyalty and devotion throughout the year. Long may it flourish and survive.
Valerie Mendes first came to live in Woodstock in 1976. When she took her small son to see Blenheim’s lake he said, ‘If I’d been born here, I’d be Churchill too.’ He is now Sir Sam Mendes CBE, a world-class director of stage and screen.
Valerie will be 87 in October 2026. After a long and distinguished career in publishing in many different roles, she decided to create her own publishing company, VMBooks, together with a few brilliant hand-picked colleagues. Her new website, www.valeriemendes.com describes all the details.
Valerie is now delighted to announce a brand new title which she is planning to publish on Christmas Day 2026. Stand by for fireworks.
STAIRWAY TO HELL is the story of how a delightfully charming English town called Woodstock in Oxfordshire is step by lethal step being transformed into an ugly, rubbish-bin and rat-invested dump without a Bank or Post Office to its once glorious name.
It is a how to do it guide for all those who wish to follow the same obscene footsteps.
These are:
ONE Make sure all old cottages with elderly inhabitants are left on their own without help to moulder and smoulder until they catch fire and burn to death, along with their dog.
TWO Do not sweep the streets of litter or thick snow. Allow fallen leaves to slither underfoot until they are trodden to death and stink of slime.
THREE Provide no facilities whatsoever for anybody to have their windows cleaned, their roofs retiled, or their rotting window and door frames repaired.
FOUR Make sure the lethal cobbles directly outside people’s tiny cottages are left filthy and dangerous in the hope that most of the elderly inhabitants will break their necks trying to cross the road.
FIVE Pretend minor damage is terminal and close the Woodstock Library. Nobody needs to read things called proper books.
SIX Put up the rents for shops of every description so that none of their hard-working creators can afford to survive.
SEVEN Replace the really useful shops with another public house or charity shop selling stale shoes and smelly old garments.
EIGHT Make sure that on every street corner stand at least three enormous rubbish bins spilling over with gut-blowing waste disposal.
NINE Install huge black containers for dog shit and other bags of stinking litter wherever it continues to be difficult to cross the road.
TEN Close essential shops like the bakery, the fishmonger, the greengrocer, the haberdashery and the ballet school provider and install yet another space selling alcohol.
ELEVEN Invent a system for parking every kind of vehicle which is so complicated and difficult that people either go round in circles or decide to get the hell out of the place and never to visit Woodstock again.
AND FINALLY
TWELVE Close the Post Office as well as all the Banks so that nobody is able to post a letter, bank a cheque, send a parcel, apply for a driving license, or wrap a Christmas parcel unless they walk to the nearest village. Keep the Post Office premises empty so they become a regular reminder of how wonderful Woodstock used to be.
STAIRWAY TO HELL by VALERIE MENDES
reviews
‘An outstanding title from the pen of our local novelist, poet and journalist. Do add it to your must-have gift list at Christmas.’
The Mayor of Whopping-Under-Mine‘
‘I have never read anything like it.’
Sir Barnaby Trotter, Bladon Grange
‘It made my day. I simply couldn’t put it down. I shall buy three more copies for Daddy and all my darling chums.’
Muriel Spokesbody, Know it All Cottage