2005

* Staff worked overtime to make sure postal votes for the General Election were delivered on time – 25,000 were delayed because of printing problems.

* Car workers have reacted angrily to news that Jeremy Clarkson is to receive an honorary degree from Oxford Brookes University, after comments he made about the collapse of MG Rover.

1995

* Transfers of key players and a good FA Cup run helped Oxford United to turn a £1.2m loss in 1993 into a £750,000 profit last year.

* Family values are high on the agenda at Didcot where no fewer than eight married couples are candidates in the council elections.

1985

* Oxford East MP Steve Norris, who drives a Mercedes and makes his living selling Volkswagens and Audis, has condemned Thames Valley Police for testing a Japanese car.

* Pensioner Jim ‘Cod’ Robinson has vowed to hire the town band to play when Chipping Norton gets its first bus shelter – he has raised the issue every year for 10 years without success.

1975

* A book borrowed from Oxford Central Library in 1918, The Time of Roses, by L T Meade, has finally been returned, but the name of the long-term borrower has not been revealed.

* Crowds who gathered in the Corpus Christi College quad for the annual tortoise race were disappointed when the two contenders refused to cross the starting line.

1965

* Doris, Oxford United’s feline mascot, who was run over and killed in London Road, Headington, after seeing the club safely into the Third Division, has been replaced by another cat, Eunice.

* Alex Abel Smith, chairman of Pressed Steel, says that profits for the year at the Cowley car body plant should not fall far short of his £7m forecast.

1955

* A plaque will be unveiled at the former airfield at Harwell, where the first aircraft carrying paratroops left for the D-Day invasion in 1944.

* Ten members of the Oxford bakery and confectionery firm of Oliver & Gurden received presentations at the firm’s annual dinner to mark 25 years’ service.