Bristol outing; surprise Buddhism; new technology

Went to Bristol for the day last Wednesday in the company of my colleague Hoa for a series of presentations from HEFCE on the upcoming 2011 run of the Higher Education Students Early Statistics Survey (aka HESES), with which I expect to be involved to some extent at the OU. The event was held at the Exhibition and Conference Centre on UWE’s Frenchay campus, in one screened-off end of possibly the largest room I’ve ever been in. Met a few other people doing similar work, and discovered that Hoa chose Reading for his degree because of the Festival – as good a reason as any, I guess. The day’s main distinguishing feature was the inordinate length of time it appears to take to get from MK to Bristol.

In a determined attempt to up the cardio with a view to improving energy levels, went out for a bike ride at 7am on Saturday morning. Took in Walnut Tree, Kents Hill and Monkston, keeping to redways, before returning to the house for a fully-justified bacon roll. Met Ruth from the station at around midday and returned to the house via Homebase for emergency purchase of an extra pillow and a planter for Ruth’s office plant which, for reasons not entirely clear to me, is being boarded out with me for the time being. We went for a late afternoon visit to the Peace Pagoda, in the north-east of the town by North Willen Lake. Milton Keynes’ Peace Pagoda was apparently the first such to be built in Europe, with the original having been built at Hiroshima after World War II as a symbol of peace. It’s maintained by a group of monks and nuns from the Nipponzan Myohoji sect who live in the Japanese temple near the pagoda – I had had no idea this was there but we wandered along to see it and had a look at the garden, which the public are apparently free to visit. Encouraged by the thought that MK might be full of hidden gems. Next stop the National Badminton Museum.

Dave and Hazel stayed with us on the Saturday night on their way back from a 40^th birthday party in Bedford. After a pastry-fest on Sunday morning, they set off to visit my parents while we pondered what to do with the day and discarded various plans as too National Trust-y/dull/involving too much effort. Ruth felt unaccountably knackered so stayed in for a snooze but I felt the need for at least some activity, so went for another exploratory walk over the footbridge (the Geograph picture is looking back towards Old Groveway) and past the new Ashland housing development before heading along a seemingly re-routed Redway south down Saxon Street. Called in at the Bletchley Tesco for a few things before heading back along the shore of Mount Farm Lake - lots of anglers – and back up Marlborough Street to the house. Not an overly scenic walk but counted as a bit of exercise. We roasted a little free-range chicken in the evening with a series of rather random accompaniments.

Amid much fanfare, the entire MK site has been issued with ultra high-tech phones designed for use with Microsoft Lync, a communications/contacts-storing system I haven't quite worked out yet. The week the new phones were installed, IT sent round an email with the somewhat alarming subject line 'LYNC DEPLOYMENT OF STRATEGIC UNITS' (a casual reader might have thought that troops were being deployed around the OU) containing details of deployment dates and locations of the new units. The new phones are pretty and have a lovely ringtone reminiscent of windchimes (in fact makes one want to sit and listen to it, rather than answer the phone), but they are proving a bit of a mystery and are evidently so integrated with your PC that they won't work at all unless a) your PC is switched on and b) there is evidence that you are interacting with your PC. If you don't touch your keyboard or mouse for more than about five minutes, their lights appear to switch from green (indicating you are available) to amber, indicating that you are 'inactive', and promptly sends all your calls to voicemail, even if you were innocently rootling through a filing cabinet on the other side of your office while waiting for a call. Actually managing to listen to voicemail messages seems to be another uphill struggle, made slightly irritating as I have been on Query Week this week. Sara and Jan, our admin support ladies, were evidently trying to sort out the volume problems with voicemail this morning by tweaking their speaker settings, though I (and probably others) were surprised when a few lines from the Abba song Chiquitita blasted out from their office - perhaps a feature of the new phones I haven't discovered yet.

Met this cheeky chap sitting on my car this evening - I had noticed cat footprints on the windscreen so this would explain it. The car park outside seems to serve as one big lounging area for a gang of cats.

Boat trip; assorted London trips; Hoppa Bag Crisis

Set off on Saturday 13^th for our eagerly anticipated boat trip down the Thames (photos here). Ruth and I arrived at the marina laden with food and wine which we piled onto a trolley and then wheeled noisily down the pontoon. Ray extricated us from his berth surprisingly smoothly and then we were off for a lovely meander down the river and, from Shiplake onwards, a nice rubberneck at posh riverside properties, which is always fun. We lunched on the move on pasties and gazpacho – I thought this an acceptable if probably little-known combination, though Ruth spurned the gazpacho, being of the “Eeuww it’s cold” mentality when it comes to soup. We found the river surprisingly quiet on the Saturday, at least as far as Marsh Lock, just upstream of Henley and a popular spot for a stroll, when I looked up with a mouthful of pasty to discover we had an audience of people apparently entranced by the sight of boats going through locks. A big cruiser was beckoned into the lock by the lockkeeper after us and I was interested to see how keen they are to give narrowboats a wide berth (that whole fibreglass vs. several tons of steel thing). The weather stayed OK and we eventually moored up just short of Bourne End, sometime after 5pm. Had a brief token stroll to stretch legs and spent a pleasant evening eating and drinking.

Sunday was a bit busier and more eventful. Enjoyed the meander back towards Marlow, snapping several of the grand houses sited high above the river on the south side, including one whose riverside lawn Ray apparently maintains – as the main part of the garden looked an almost sheer drop from the house I’ve no idea how they get the necessary machinery down there. Things became more eventful at Marlow lock, the deepest lock on our trip at a drop of 7’ 1”; the others ranged from Sonning at 5’ 4” to Hurley at a piddling 3’ 5”. Hardly worth it really. Once we were secured in at Marlow, a barge alongside us and at least one cruiser behind, Ruth was warned to hold tight to the rope as the sluice gates were opened as apparently “things can get a bit rough”. Things did indeed, with a rush of quite impressive white water; as we were preparing to leave the lockkeeper saw fit to tell us that Marlow’s the roughest sluice on the Thames. How exciting.

Not long out of Marlow lock and heading downstream towards the suspension bridge, we noted a couple of rowers ahead of us, one of whom inexplicably decided to row towards us as we drew closer. The inevitable happened and yes, it upset her more than us. She was duly retrieved by the guy in charge of the rowing who dragged her off to the side of the river for, hopefully, a bit of a stern chat.

While waiting at Hurley we were hailed by Ray’s current employer Laurence, who owns a Venetian water taxi moored at Freebody’s cute boatyard. They followed us upstream as far as Henley, where we moored up and Ray went to have a cup of tea with them, while Ruth and I nipped into the River & Rowing Museum to see whether the café was still as nice as it was during those mornings eight years ago when I was supposed to be writing my thesis. We had a pleasant lunch and then set off again, finally arriving back at the marina around 6pm. Very civilised.

Discovered from Judith this week that she and her daughter had apparently taken part in an open water swimming contest at Marlow the weekend following our trip. We did see a few women in wetsuits in the river near Bourne End on the Saturday – my initial conclusion was that they were just mad, but with hindsight perhaps they were practising.

Spent 15-17 August on a SAS course at StayAhead Training, around the corner from Barbican tube. Ruth and I travelled in together on the Monday and had breakfast in the Central Café, just opposite the Shelter Building where her offices are. Returned to the café on Day 3 of the course to meet Hannah for more coffee and pains au chocolat – had ordered two of the latter intending one to be for her, but as she is of the (odd, obviously) breed of people who claim not to be able to consume food before about 11am, I ended up eating most of both, so should probably curb the pastry for a bit. The course itself was a bit too intensive for my liking, though I guess I should take comfort from the fact that it was intended for people with at least six months’ SAS programming experience. People in the office had commiserated with me for not managing to book onto a course at the SAS headquarters near Marlow, as apparently you get a good spread at lunch there. We didn’t get lunch at the London site but we did get issued daily with a quite generous £10 of Luncheon Vouchers (hadn’t known these still existed) – bought Ruth lunch with them on two of the days and used the rest up on grocery shopping in Waitrose.

Ruth and I went for a birthday meal on Tuesday evening at Café Rouge, where we had a surprisingly poor steak. Salad and fries were nice though. Had booked the Thursday and Friday as leave - on the Thursday, met Ray early for a divine-as-ever coffee and bacon sandwich at Julia’s Meadow then went for a quick browse around the shops which, inexplicably, resulted in my arriving back at the house laden with bags. On the Friday, Ruth and I took the train up to London and visited the BP Portrait Award 2011 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. After a brief lunch we wandered over to Covent Garden, where we spent a short while aimlessly mooching before both acknowledging that neither of us likes it much (too crowded and touristy). We wandered on and, completely unplanned, came across the Aram Store on Drury Lane, exclusive sellers of various iconic pieces of furniture including Jacobsen's Swan and Egg chairs. We drooled for a while and Ruth used their toilets. We then walked a way down Holborn to visit the little church of St Etheldreda in Ely Place, the oldest Roman Catholic church in London (it was taken over by the Church of England after the Reformation, but returned to the Old Faith in the nineteenth century). Afterwards, we had an early dinner at Garfunkel's¹ and an expensive drink in the Old Shades on Whitehall before going to see Max Stafford-Clark's production of Caryl Churchill's 'Top Girls' at Trafalgar Studios.

As of today, the Hoppa Bag crisis is continuing. Ruth filled three of these several weekends ago with soil and rubble resulting from digging out a large trench in the garden prior to getting some hard landscaping done. Although they are blocking the entrance to the garage, she imagined that they would be speedily collected before I next wanted to park the car in it, as previously Mr Hoppa has always been round promptly to collect the bags. On this occasion, however, despite assuring Ruth that he would be quite able to collect them from the lane at the back of the property, he has still not been to collect them despite repeated chasing. I fear they are going to have to be collected via other means – though I don’t know at the moment quite what those are going to be.

¹ Hadn't been to one of these in about 20 years. The formerly quite special salad bar didn't look to be what it used to be, so I played it safe with spicy chicken wings and garlic bread.

Visiting mother; haunted Little Chefs; ancestor-hunting

Mum arrived on Thursday to inspect my new place and to pay a first visit to Milton Keynes. Dad’s business partner Steve kindly dropped her at the OU on his way home to Norfolk from my parents’ place, though I think Mum was a bit disappointed at missing her planned tootle on the train up to Birmingham and down again. We went for dinner at The Plough in the evening, where the normally sulky waitress appeared to have undergone a bit of a customer service course as she was positively polite. The following morning I left Mum my house keys and A-Z so that she could have a bit of a mooch around the locale, which she evidently did, arriving on campus around midday to meet me for lunch in The Hub, where she got to meet a few of my colleagues including my line manager Judith who is from Swansea and whose late mother apparently studied geology at the university there, which provided talking points.

After lunch we set off to drive back to my parents’ house for the weekend – I had tried to pick a reasonably direct-looking route, which proved actually quite difficult – getting across the country without either going up to Birmingham or down to the M4 involves taking a series of A roads and proceeding across country in an intriguingly zigzag fashion. We drove down past Bicester intending to join the A40 at Witney, but missed the turn and ended up joining it at Burford, where we stopped at the Little Chef for tea and cake. The Little Chef on the A40 at Burford is housed in a former barn and according to this article from 2008, there have been a number of paranormal events witnessed there, including the sighting of a monk and ‘mild poltergeist phenomena’. The latter must be quite a good get-out for any waiting staff who’ve just dropped three Olympic Breakfasts on the floor. “They just leapt out of my hands ...” Mum does indeed look slightly ghostly in this photo, but it might have been the just-out-of-the-freezer lemon drizzle cake.

On the Saturday Mum, Dad and I drove over to Walterstone where we parked at the pretty Carpenters Arms and walked across some fields to the former Oldcastle church, where Mum was hoping to be able to scour the churchyard for an ancestor. The church itself has been converted into a private house, but we had assumed this might have been separated off from the graveyard, but the entire churchyard now appeared to form part of the garden, so we couldn’t get in. Mum spoke to Vera back at the pub who reckoned that the owners would be amenable to letting people have a poke about, so I think she’s going to go back sometime. In the evening we attempted to have a barbecue, which involved Dad in a lot of manfully fanning the coals until they showed some signs of life; we ended up eating indoors in deference to the quite cool weather. I drove back to MK on the Sunday via the M50-M5-M42-M40 route, which despite looking a lot less direct from the road atlas, was actually quicker.

HEFCW; school; domestics

Got to pay a flying visit to Cardiff last Thursday to attend a data workshop at the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, aka HEFCW (pronounced, cutely, heff-KOOOO, as opposed to heff-KEEEE). Managed to persuade our office manager Sara to book me a train ticket from Reading instead of Milton Keynes so that I could attend the July Book Group meeting in the evening – which she did, though I had to agree to be tied to a specific morning train in order to make it equal-to-or-cheaper than going from Milton Keynes (them being the rules) – a bit of a mystery, as the journey from MK takes considerably longer, but who can fathom the logic of train fares. Met my colleague Emily at Cardiff Central and we had one of those freakish coincidence moments during the taxi journey to HEFCW’s offices in Llanishen when we discovered that not only is Emily originally from Newbury but that we had attended the same secondary school. Not at the same time, as Emily’s the best part of ten years younger, but we remembered some of the same staff especially as Emily had also studied music.

St Bart’s website now has an image of the extravagant new school building erected as part of the 'Ad Lucem' project. Not meaning to speak out of turn, but West Berkshire Council’s decision to award around £32 million of central government money to St Bart’s, via the Building Schools for the Future programme, seems to me a highly dubious decision when the school was already in possession of two attractive and historic school buildings (see pic of the Wormestall building right, taken by me in the late 1980s) and, more importantly, when it was apparently chosen over both Kennet School and the John O’Gaunt School in Hungerford, both of which draw from a less affluent area than St Bart’s and were almost certainly far more in need of an injection of cash to rebuild their premises. Makes you wonder what these decisions are actually based on.

Returning to the HEFCW meeting: this was enlivened by the presence of a video link to a roomful of people in Llandudno that was plagued by dodgy acoustics for the morning session: evidently the Llandudno contingent could hardly hear the speakers in the room in Cardiff, whereas every muttered aside in the Llandudno room was amplified many times into the Cardiff room. As there were a number of muttered asides, mostly along the lines of "I can't bl**dy hear her, can you?", this led to some amusement. When we reconvened after lunch they had all gone, though the video link was still running on an empty meeting room. Surreal.

We met at Claire M’s house in the evening to discuss Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Pastoral, which I had kind of enjoyed but was left with the sense that I hadn’t quite got all the intended meaning – e.g. of the lengthy descriptions of the glove industry and Mr Levov Sr’s dull ramblings about how a woman never used to go out without a pair of gloves. Will perhaps re-read at some later date. We congratulated Lesley on her new job and welcomed new member Alison, a choir friend of Claire M’s. Our next book is Alison’s choice, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, which I had better get started on soon as it’s apparently c.600 pages long.

Had quietly domestic weekend at the house. Ruth and I did a few useful jobs in town on Saturday morning including a trip to West Tailoring on the Oxford Road, a one-room concern above a Polish grocer’s that’s unfeasibly crammed with sewing machines, piles of clothes and men barely visible above piles of clothes. They were recommended to me a few years ago by a woman in Sketchley as being cheaper than them for repair jobs – rather nice of her, I thought, but perhaps she’d just been given a month’s notice that morning. While waiting for West’s to re-hem my trousers, we went for a drink in what used to be the Renaissance Hotel, and before that the Ramada, but is now part of the German chain pentahotels. The main lobby and bar area (see sneaky pic left) have been altered out of all recognition, substantially for the better, and are now dead smart with exposed concrete and modern art dotted around. We did a bit of shopping for work clothes; Ruth did actually buy some skirts but I didn’t find anything I liked, though that was probably due to sulking at recently-gained excess poundage. To help with that, we went for lunch and I bought an expensive non-work top in East. Did a few more useful jobs on Sunday including fitting a replacement fuse in my car's cigarette lighter - dead proud of our car maintenance skills on that one, though I have to say they were mainly Ruth's; my chief input was driving to Halfords and buying the fuse. In the afternoon I did some PC tasks that I'd been putting off during the week because of dodgy mobile broadband at the MK flat, and Ruth dug a big hole in the garden. Domestic blissitude.