Bulmershe; Islington; Salman Rushdie

Dived into my quite generous leave entitlement to take Thursday and Friday off last week. On Thursday morning, took the bus up to the university’s Bulmershe campus with the intention of spending some time in the library perusing education journals and having a bit of a brainstorm generally. Did this for an hour or so. Bulmershe library is considerably quieter and, arguably, pleasanter than the main library at Whiteknights, and also houses a goodly number of both education and linguistics resources.

The Library at Bulmershe

The Bulmershe campus was built in the 1960s as a teacher training college, later became Bulmershe College of Higher Education and finally became part of the University in 1989. It has been earmarked for sale and redevelopment, meaning that the current buildings will be knocked down and a gazillion houses will be built to further enlarge the sprawling housing estate that is Woodley. I would just like to put it on record (not that anyone cares) that I LIKE Bulmershe and its ilk. 1960s-built campuses somehow smack of REAL PUBLIC SECTOR – none of your old-buildings-covered-in-creeper or the current rash of spanking-new-all-ensuite-wifi-enabled-studenty-hub type buildings (why is ‘hub’ the latest buzzword in new student developments?). To preserve the memory, in case the whole campus has been razed to the ground the next time I go up there, I took a few sneaky photos with my phone.

My mother arrived to stay on Thursday evening and we spent a pleasant couple of days - went up to London on Friday and did a lovely walk around Islington, one of a number of walks out of Andrew Duncan’s Secret London. The ‘Islington spur walk’ took us on a pleasant tour of elegant streets and squares including a stop-off for a lovely lunch at The Albion on Thornhill Road.

Lunch at The Albion

After lunch we took the tube from Angel to London Bridge and paid a brief visit to Tate Modern, which included taking in Miroslaw Balka's How It Is. The installation itself is impressively huge, but the experience of going inside was somewhat underwhelming. According to The Guardian: Miroslaw Balka's black hole at Tate Modern is terrifying, awe-inspiring and thought-provoking. It embraces you with a velvet chill. I suppose knowing a bit about the intended historical allusion helps a bit, but in itself the experience simply involved walking a few feet into a not-actually-pitch-black space. Even when we reached the end we could still see reasonably well, helped by the number of people in white tops, which unfortunately for the artist had something of a luminous quality in the darkness.

'How It Is' by Miroslaw Balka

On Saturday we went over to Hungerford, where Mum and Dad lived for a few years in the early-mid 1990s, and spent a few hours mooching about, including noting that the formerly extremely bijou end-of-terrace where they lived has been significantly extended and is now on the market for £285,000. Blimey. Had lunch in the improved Plume of Feathers before taking a short walk out past St Lawrence's Church to Freeman's Marsh, beloved of the somewhat annoying Johnny Morris.

14a Park Street, Hungerford

Canal at Hungerford

At last night's Book Group meeting was forced to report that I had only made it halfway through The Satanic Verses - luckily turned out to be in good company. I usually like to finish a book once I've started it but Rushdie's writing style is too irritating for words.

Hungerford; Somerfield nee Gateway; long weekend

Half way through a four-day week, which, unaccountably, never seem any shorter than five-day weeks.

Continued birthday celebrations throughout the rest of last week. On Wednesday, while on my way to spend a lovely evening with my friends Julie and Dave, I stopped off for a few hours at Hungerford, where my parents lived for a few years in the early 1990s. I hadn't visited it much since then and there have been a few changes, including a couple of rather helpful mini-roundabouts, particularly the one on the junction of the High Street and Park Street. Somerfield (formerly Gateway), where my sister and I used to frequently trot for that emergency bottle of wine, is now housed in a new building set back from the road. The former pub on Charnham Street that I last remember as a Tex-Mex restaurant called The Damn Yankee is now a garish shade of yellow and called Casanova.

Despite not being particularly interested in antiques, I went for a wander around Hungerford Arcade to kill some time. If memory serves, in the coffee lounge on the upper floor there used to be a crocodile skin hanging over a side rail which I always found somewhat alarming, but as the coffee shop was closed at the time of my visit I was unable to check out whether it was still there.

The following day, I and my hire car (great notion, these - you just show your driving licence and get given a new(ish) car! How cool is that?) proceeded westwards to spend a few days with my parents, which included a nice meal at their local bistro. Ruth joined me on Friday night and we spent a relaxing Saturday including a stroll to check out the views of the Black Mountains.

We proceeded back to Berkshire on Sunday to spend an extra day rurally-retreating, this time near the Ridgeway being fed delicious food and, in my case at least, sitting around idly - though I did label some jam pots. Driving home on Monday, I was reminded of how it's best to stay off the roads in Reading on the August Bank Holiday while the Reading Festival traffic disperses.