THE Boundary Commission for England recently announced its revised proposals for boundaries of Parliamentary constituencies.

It is due to submit its final recommendations in September 2018.

A formula known as the Sainte-Laguë method is used to allocate electors to constituencies.

With its layers of mapping and ability to drop a virtual pin on a map to comment about a particular locality, their web site is a good use of modern technology.

Some boundary proposals, like those for the proposed new constituency of East Oxfordshire, stretching from south of Henley to within sight of Brackley and Buckingham in the north, are a dog's breakfast.

But locally, it is proposed to move the villages of Drayton, Marcham and Milton from the Wantage constituency into a new Abingdon and Oxford

North constituency.

It makes sense for villages like Marcham and Drayton, with their close proximity to Abingdon, to be represented by

the same member of Parliament.

In a fabulously parochial front-page editorial of May 2017, the village newsletter the Drayton Chronicle pointed out that Drayton now comes

under the county council's electoral division labelled ‘Sutton Courtenay & Marcham.'

Recently I picked up a passenger who was travelling to a business located on Milton Park.

He had been sent to Radley station by someone else within his company, as it is the closest rail station to Abingdon

and Milton Park has an Abingdon post code.

But it is closer to Didcot rail station and because taxi fares are calculated primarily by

distance, therefore cheaper.

So many new properties are being built in fields surrounding the villages to the south of Abingdon, in Drayton, Steventon and Sutton

Courtenay especially, that it is not unusual these days to get a taxi job there, to what shows up on the map and satellite photographs as a

field in the middle of nowhere.

In the taxi, we are not permitted to pick up from a street hail outside the area.

On one side of Abingdon Bridge it would be legal and on the side where two of the car parks are located which serve the town centre it is not.

For this reason, a licensed Hackney Carriage driver is supposed to have a knowledge of district council boundaries.

It is an obscure subject and

a niche interest, but our sense of identity and how we relate to a place are important.