Walk around Burchetts Green and Littlewick Green, 8.5 miles

Saturday 12 January

Weekend walk with Ray, christening the ’50 Walks in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire’ book that I’d bought myself for Christmas (have definitely reached middle age). We ended up combining two walks in the book: the ‘Around Burchetts Green’ walk and the ‘Littlewick Green and Maidenhead Thicket’ walk.

We parked again at the Butterfly Trail car park and joined the walk route at Robin Hood’s Arbour. Maidenhead Thicket was, apparently, notorious for highwaymen in olden times, and at one time outlaws in general were apparently known as ‘Robin Hoods’. Robin Hood’s Arbour is an Iron Age earthwork. Ray reminisced somewhat bitterly about how, as a small boy, he had been sold a longish walk to RHA under the guise of its being a ‘fort’, which had led him to expect battlements, drawbridges etc, rather than underwhelming humps and ditches.

We followed the path to Stubbings House Lodge, crossed the road and followed the footpath across fields to the posh village of Burchetts Green. We crossed the road by The Crown and headed up Hall Place Lane. We stopped briefly by a large white house called the Dower House for Ray to Google what this actually meant – it seems that the term referred to the house on an estate that was gifted to the widow of the estate owner after he had died, presumably to allow her eldest son to move into the big house. Doesn’t seem a bad deal.

House with dovecote, Burchetts Green

At the end of the lane, we crossed a field and headed down the drive towards Hall Place, a red-brick Georgian mansion that forms the centrepiece of the Berkshire College of Agriculture.

Crossing a field

Hall Place

We skirted round to the right of Hall Place and walked along North Drive to the statue of Diana, before turning briefly left and then right across fields towards woodland (High Wood). We continued through the small wood to its end where the book told us to enjoy the views north over the Thames Valley, so we did briefly. Then back through more of the grounds of BCA where we turned right and passed the Dew Drop Inn before entering Ashley Hill Forest.

Walking through High Wood

Ray by a carved wooden thing

In Ashley Hill Forest

There seems to be a single house at the top of Ashley Hill, an isolated property by UK standards. As a lad, Ray used to be friendly with the son of the landlord of the Dew Drop Inn, and he and this boy would then enjoy exploring around what was then apparently some sort of abandoned hunting lodge. It’s clearly been rebuilt since then as a large though architecturally uninteresting private house. I took a picture of its gates.

Gates to 'Clifton'

Aerial view of Ashley Hill, showing 'Clifton'

We came down Ashley Hill by a different path and made our way back to Burchetts Green. From there, we made our way south, crossing the A4, to the village of Littlewick Green. Have driven past signs to this village for over 20 years but never been in to the village before. It’s very attractive. We stopped at The Cricketers for a light lunch.

Littlewick Green

After lunch, we headed south out of the village and turned left along a tarmac track running alongside fields, coming out on Cherry Garden Lane. Turned left and headed north back to the A4 and then through the Thicket back to the car.

Our route shown in red:

My Birthday 2018

Well, still can’t quite believe I’m 50, though I’m slightly more reconciled to it than I was for the few months – OK, few years – beforehand, largely through, I don’t know, having no choice and all. These photos sum up my mental turmoil beforehand.

At the beginning of 2018, Ruth and I had been entertaining thoughts of booking some significant trip to mark my half-century, but unsurprisingly given our collective feet-dragging over holidays, that didn't quite happen. We did have a bit of a peruse of Hurtigruten’s Nordic cruises, but couldn’t quite decide on the best time of year to go. The Snowdonia trip we took in June was vaguely intended to be for my birthday – though the idea of climbing Snowdon was Ruth’s – as was the yet-to-be-blogged canal trek in September.

There was no concealing my age from the office, in part due to my own whingeing about the impending birthday for some while beforehand. So, in the custom of birthdays with a zero at the end, I was duly presented with a card and some presents – a bunch of flowers and a generous Amazon gift card, plus a bottle of bubbly from Jill. Judith gave a speech including quite a number of stats around the percentage of my adult life I’d spent at the OU, etc etc.

Around 10 of us went out for a lovely pizza dinner at Murati’s in Wolverton the evening before my birthday. Although I’d arranged this, it hadn’t been intended as a birthday meal but just as an ex-Information Office get together, but it happened that the 15th was the date most people could make. Very nice evening, enhanced by the staff appearing with a cake and singing Happy Birthday to the accompaniment of tambourines. Turned out Sara had arranged the cake, which was very sweet of her. I don’t think she’d necessarily banked on the tambourines.

I had the day itself to myself in MK, some of it spent having an Autism Diagnostic Assessment, of which more – maybe – in a later post.

For the weekend, Ruth and I booked a relatively last-minute (by my standards) city break in London, staying at the 4-star Dorsett City, a hotel we’d seen featured in The Times Weekend’s 'Cool Hotel Guide'. The hotel, part of a Chinese-owned chain, is on Aldgate High Street between Aldgate tube station and the church of St Botolph without Aldgate. It’s an unassuming-looking building from the outside, quite a contrast with the gaudy interior (faux gold everywhere).

The Dorsett City to the right of the church

The hotel boasts a ‘destination skybar’ on the 14th floor which does indeed have pretty good views of the surrounding cityscape. As we were keen to try it I’d booked us an hour’s slot early on the Friday evening, which worked out well as we ended up with a great table out on the terrace looking directly out at the view. Here I am with my 'City Sky Line'.

Cocktail at the Jin Bo Law skybar

View down onto the tower of St Botolph's

On the first night we had dinner at the hotel’s ‘Shikumen’ restaurant, which was very nice though practically empty, which we were a bit surprised at. I think both of us would have liked a main course of the colourful dim sum and to have scrapped the rest, though it was all nice enough.

Dim sum at Shikumen

One of the things I noticed was that the hotel’s lift panels didn’t give the option of selecting floor 4 – which immediately got me thinking that floor 4 was some secret mysterious floor along the lines of the fifth floor of the Yanggakdo International Hotel in North Korea.

Ruth and I decided to investigate this by going down via the stairs, but there genuinely seemed to be no fourth floor. Googled this and apparently the number 4 is unlucky in Chinese culture and thus it's common for hotels and office blocks to lack a fourth floor. So there you are. There's a note here about the Dorsett City and its absence of a floor 4.

On the Saturday, I went for an early walk to Tower Bridge. We breakfasted both mornings in the VQ restaurant adjoining the hotel, which was OK though nothing special.

Ruth had a yen to visit the Thames Barrier, so we took the DLR all the way to Woolwich. The DLR part was fun but clearly we hadn’t researched the distances accurately, as we then had a dreary walk to the Barrier, relieved slightly by hopping on a bus partway (Ruth commendably takes charge when she senses I am about to lose it). 

We made for the Information Centre café, through a massive throng of cyclists annoyingly taking up the path. I SHOWED THEM by pushing through them irritably. Once in the café, I found a table while Ruth nobly queued behind a line of cyclists. We had a look around the interesting exhibition. The TB Information Centre had been closed for a while beforehand for a refurbishment, though I have to say it wasn’t hugely obvious to me what the money had been spent on.

Ruth then came up with the idea of crossing back over the river via the Emirates Air Line cable car, which I’d never even heard of. We had a bit of difficulty locating where we were supposed to queue to get on, but once on board the ride was enjoyable though and an alternative way to cross the river, though there is something slightly white elephant-y about it and it seems unclear whether it’s actually getting used by commuters as much as was originally planned.

On our second evening we had dinner at Emilia’s Crafted Pasta at St Katharine Docks – lovely food and we managed to bag a table outside, which was lucky as the place is tiny.

Dinner at Emilia's

The Times Weekend's piece on the Dorsett City:

Bedford and the Marston Vale line

Booked yesterday off for no particular reason, other than fancied a long weekend after being in charge of the Returns team for a month while Judith was in Australia visiting her daughter (she’s back on Monday, thankfully).

Decided to take the train to Bedford, for no better reason than I’d never been there. This is the Marston Vale line, a little service (my outward train was only one carriage) between Bletchley and Bedford, a marooned still-open stretch of the former Varsity Line that ran between Oxford and Cambridge. There seems to be a plan to re-open the route, as part of the East West Rail project, but I’m not sure how far it’s progressed. Currently, you can get a train from Oxford to Bicester (this stretch was re-opened in the 1980s and then upgraded a few years ago by Chiltern Railways, with the creation of the new Oxford Parkway station and trains through to London Marylebone) but the stretch between Bicester and Bletchley was closed in 1967 so you’d have to walk that bit. I believe the track is still in place for most of that route, as evidenced by lots of pictures like this one.

Teeny train waiting to leave Bletchley

From Bletchley, you can travel as far as Bedford, stopping at a number of tiny stations, but then that’s it – the stretch from Bedford to Cambridge was also closed in the late 1960s and evidently has been built over in a couple of places, which would presumably hamper its re-opening.

At Bletchley station, there’s a concrete flyover which was apparently built to carry the Varsity Line over the West Coast Main Line. I can't quite make out whether it was ever used for passenger services and I ran out of energy for the internet research. This YouTube clip shows a driver's eye view going over it.

Flyover coming in from the left and crossing the main line further down

Bedford town centre is distinctly underwhelming. Thankfully, after a dispiriting mile’s walk from the station past branches of Poundland and Cash Converters, I arrived at St Paul’s Square, where things improve with some attractive old buildings and access to the riverside walkways and footbridges, which are pleasant.

While walking along the river I passed the Boatslide hydro power facility, which, according to the information board by it, features something called an Archimedean screw turbine. It looks rather as though it would mince anything going through it, but the board assures passers-by that fish are safe.

I walked eastwards along the river for a while and then turned up through some pleasant residential streets just north of the Embankment. Walked past the Panacea Museum, which I went into out of curiosity as it was free entry. I knew nothing about the Panacea Society and equally little about Joanna Southcott's Box - the latter is referred to in a Monty Python sketch (the Epsom Furniture Race) but I'd never bothered to look up what it actually was.

Joanna Southcott lived in the second half of the 18th century and claimed to hear words from God, which she interpreted as prophecies. She wrote these down and stored them in a box. She left instructions that the box only be opened at a time of national crisis and in the presence of all the bishops of the Church of England. Shortly before her death, Southcott seems to have claimed that she was pregnant with the messiah but, disappointingly for her followers, this didn’t come to anything.

Snip from larger picture here

About 100 years later, interest in Joanna Southcott’s Box was reignited by one Mabel Barltrop, who found that the suffragetty atmos in the early 20th century formed a receptive climate for ideas that the coming of the messiah might be heralded by a woman. Barltrop founded the Panacea Society in 1919. The Society apparently funded a national advertising campaign to have the Box opened, involving posters such as the one shown above. The real Box is, apparently, still in a secret location, but the museum contains a replica (pictured below).

The Idler piece from which the billboard photo above is taken is amusing, if mocking. This BBC piece from 2017 tells the story of "a cult of women who thought they could avert Armageddon". At the least, the Panacea Society all sounds rather fun. It seems to have flourished up until the Second World War, when membership tailed off a bit. The museum is free admission, very nicely laid out and well kept, in a large Victorian house, so there's clearly still money somewhere. The exhibits are over two floors and it looked as if you could also go out into the garden, though I didn't as I was mindful of train times by then. It's a diverting enough place to visit.

I walked up the nearby Castle Mound to take a photo and then returned to the station.

Religious bits and bobs

The summer solstice

Have never yet got around to marking the summer solstice in any way, despite being in a prime position for doing so given that Milton Keynes was allegedly set out along a ley line (I am of course sceptical about the actual existence of these, but do find the concept rather fun). Midsummer Boulevard was allegedly constructed to align with the sun on the summer solstice, as mentioned in this Guardian piece published in June: Beyond Stonehenge: the cities built to celebrate the sun.

The historian Tom Holland, whom Ruth came across accidentally on Twitter while trying to locate the actor Tom Hollander, but now follows after discovering she liked his tweets, posted this pic of the sun rising over Midsummer Boulevard on 21 June this year. Far out.

Tweet from @holland_tom

Midsummer Boulevard is the middle of MK’s three central boulevards. Apparently there was a bit of a kick up a few years ago when the ‘Midsummer Place’ shopping centre (it’s now been rebranded ‘intu Milton Keynes’) was plonked in the middle of it, cutting it in two – it’s no longer a through road. There is actually a gap between the newer shopping centre and the older, listed, one.

Whitsun/Whitsuntide

Following earlier comments on this, I asked my parents about it. Both recalled the custom of the Whitsun Treat on Whit Monday, though evidently this wasn't something participated in by Catholics. Mum (raised C of E) remembered going on picnic outings with other children from her Sunday School. Dad (raised Catholic) observed glumly that being a Catholic he never got to go on any Whitsun picnics.

According to the internet, Whitsun is the Anglican term for Pentecost, which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ’s apostles. It falls on the seventh Sunday after Easter (in 2018, Sunday 9 June). ‘Whitsun’ is short for Whitsunday, which in turn is a corruption of White Sunday. The Monday following – Whit Monday – was a public holiday up until 1967; it was replaced by the Spring Bank Holiday on the last Monday in May.

Eucharistic adoration

Not a feast day, but a Roman Catholic practice I only came across relatively recently. It seems to involve prolonged meditative staring at the consecrated host, which has been placed in something called a ‘monstrance’. I assume you’re supposed to spend the time praying, contemplating God’s glory or similar. Some orders of nuns – e.g. those at Tyburn Convent – practise ‘perpetual adoration’, which seems to be a round-the-clock rotation of adorers. Apparently the exposed host can’t be left on its own.

You can, if you are so minded, take part in live online Perpetual Adoration, as with Team Catholify's 'Adorecast', below.

Samhain 2018

As last year, Ray and I celebrated Samhain by lighting candles in memory of deceased family and friends.

Seasonal display

As an extra special touch, I was able to harvest two tiny home-grown pumpkins. I had left 2017’s mini-pumpkin in the garden at the house, thinking it would just naturally break down and return to the earth in time; instead it sprouted quite a sizeable plant that produced two new pumpkins. I thought this was marvellous, though Ruth didn’t quite see it the same way.

Pumpkin actually growing in the garden

I used one of the mini-pumpkins in my table centrepiece and gave the other one to Mum, who displayed it next to a larger pumpkin that Hannah had carved for her for Hallowe’en.

The Christian nativity

Very impressed at my niece Nia playing the role of Mary in her school nativity this year, as I think I was only ever third angel from the left or similar. Hazel published some phone footage of the play to the family WhatsApp group, including some shared by Joseph’s parents, who had got well stuck in up close to the stage, thereby capturing close-up footage of their son adjusting his costume for much of the performance. Nia appeared a model of professionalism, though did seem to turn to the audience and smirk slightly when Joseph fell down in a dead faint on hearing she was with child. As the whole thing was in Welsh I’ve no idea what was said but assume it followed the usual pattern.

Speaking to colleagues this year, I’ve been a bit puzzled by the range of characters who seem to have crept into school nativity plays. I remember these having a pretty stable line-up of Mary, Joseph, shepherds, wise men, the Angel Gabriel and perhaps an innkeeper. However, Judith told me that her great-nephew had been cast as a pickpocket in his nativity play (I did ask whether the teacher doing it had perhaps confused the nativity story with Oliver!) and I’m sure someone else mentioned that her son had been cast as a robot. Are schools just using up whatever costumes come handy?

The winter solstice

Vivianne Crowley, in Principles of Paganism, says:

The Solstice is the nadir of the year, its lowest point in terms of daylight and energy, after which the year begins to turn.

The winter solstice occurs around 21st December and is the shortest day and longest night of the year. As with the summer solstice, I’ve never done a great deal to actually mark it, though have often fleetingly thought that I’d like to.

Crowley quotes a ninth century Irish poem:

In the deadness of winter, the spark of new life.
I have news for you:
the stag bells,
Winter snows,
Summer has gone,
wind high and cold.
Sun low, short its course,
sea running high.
Rust brown bracken, its shape lost,
the wild goose raises her accustomed cry.
Cold seizes the bird's wing;
season of ice:
this is my news.

Some cultural outings

Henley Arts Trail

Saturday 5 May

Bit of a misnomer, as about half the venues were in Twyford. We started by slogging up Remenham Hill (a curious decision; I blame Ruth) to visit Allan Henderson’s studio. Pleasant enough exhibition in the garage and back patio of one of the houses in Remenham Terrace. Slogged all the way back down the hill and decided we were ready for lunch. I actually don’t think we ended up seeing anything else, even though there were things in the town centre we could have visited. We remain officially crap at arts/heritage/open house events.

Re-opening of the Reading Abbey ruins

Saturday 16 June

The Abbey Ruins re-opened in June after being closed for renovations for nine years. Ruth and I hadn’t really planned in advance to go but on the day decided we’d wander down. As it was a good while since I’d been into the ruins, it was tricky to get a sense of exactly where the money had gone – but the stonework certainly looked very clean. I assume it was spent gluing loose bits back on, propping up any wobbly areas etc.

The Abbey was founded in the twelfth century by Henry I. Some time later, in 2009, it was closed because of safety concerns over falling masonry. The renovation was funded jointly by the council and by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. There were plenty of people milling around, plus the usual Morris and clog dancers.

People milling, plus a spot of clog-dancing

Genesis Inc.

Saturday 7 July

Play at the Hampstead Theatre. About the privatization of human reproduction. Entertaining. We went to the matinée performance. The theatre was pretty full, substantially with older people, though the numbers dwindled a bit after the interval – the whole row to my right evidently decided it wasn’t to their taste, and one of the women in front of us piped up to her companions that she hadn’t really liked the giant talking ovaries. Ruth and I quite enjoyed it though. Here's an interview with the writer Jemma Kennedy, who apparently wrote the play following her own experiences of having her eggs frozen. It was my first visit to the Hampstead Theatre – lovely building.

Tom Allen

Friday 27 July

Part of the Milton Keynes International Festival in Campbell Park. Ruth and I had seen and liked Tom Allen when we saw him as part of a group of acts at South Street a few years ago. This set was part of Allen's first solo tour. We had a quick dinner at Revolución de Cuba beforehand. By the time we’d managed to locate the Spiegeltent, it was pretty packed and we had to squeeze onto the end of a row at a rather awkward angle to the stage. But still. It was funny.

Open House London

Saturday 22 September

Well, did we do better than last year’s crap attempt? Kind of. Not really.

We started off by making our way up to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead to visit the UCL Pathology Museum. Very interesting, and gross in equal measure. After a tour of frankly alarming tumours and enormously distended colons I was left feeling slightly queasy. Interesting little exhibition though, tucked away on an upper floor of the hospital. Unlike the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, which Ruth and I visited a few years ago, the UCL Pathology Museum isn’t as a rule open to the general public. We got access on a strictly-timed hour-long slot, but frankly by the end of the hour I’d had enough of contemplating all the awful things that can happen to the body and was eager to escape back into the open air.

Entrance to Acland Burghley School

As a second venue, I decided I wanted to visit Acland Burghley School, apparently an important example of 1960s comprehensive school design in the Brutalist style. Persuaded Ruth to walk, though unfortunately by the time we reached the school it was raining. Acland Burghley was awarded a Grade II listing in 2018, as well as celebrating its 50th birthday. Just like me, except for the listing part. Like many buildings of its ilk, it doesn't look much from the outside but has some lovely spaces inside.

Ruth inside the school hall