Life's about experiences. These are mine.
It’s been a long time since we have visited The Eden Project – 25 years in fact. We last visited the year that it opened and I think that it is fair to say that it has changed enormously in that time. No longer is it obvious that this was once a clay pit, as …
Continue reading “St Austell 2026 – Day Three – The Eden Project”
Globally, the total combined spending on weather forecasting is apparently well over $10 to $15 billion annually. That’s an enormous amount of money and, given that several billion of that comes from public funds, I don’t think it’s offering terribly good value for money. Take today for example – the forecast said overcast but no …
Continue reading “St Austell 2026 – Day Two – The Lost Gardens of Heligan”
When we told friends that we planned to visit St Austell in Cornwall for a break they were very quick to point out that it was known as St Awfull (gleefully highlighted by the Daily Mail, which I refuse to link to). That when they’d visited they had managed to book themselves into a tired …
Continue reading “St Austell 2026 – Day One – Charlestown”
I suspect that the films of Wes Anderson are a bit of an acquired taste— a bit like Marmite. I find them fascinating as much for their visual appeal as their storylines, but I can imagine that others would find that not to their liking. Like other “cult” directors Anderson has been given the Design …
Continue reading “Wes Anderson: The Archives, Design Museum, London”
On the hottest day of the year so far, I made my way up to London to pay a visit behind the scenes at Shakespeare’s Globe on an organised tour. Not One, Not Two but Three This isn’t, in fact, the first Globe (how could it be?), but the third theatre on the banks of …
It’s been a long time since we have done a leg of the Thames Path. Too long in fact. It was eight months ago that we did the last leg ending in Shillingford and made the bold statement that we would aim to be in Oxford by the end of the year. What happened? Life …
Continue reading “Thames Path – Day Fifteen – Shillingford to Abingdon”
I seem to have developed an unnatural fascination with the work of Alfred Waterhouse, famed architect of the Natural History Museum in London and, as it turns out, many fine buildings in Reading too. For my Reading Guide project I’d visited some of the buildings for the Interesting Architecture page and also created a summary …
A while back I decided to walk all of the Inner Distribution Road (IDR), Reading’s least glamorous route. As a follow-up I decided to tackle the iconic number 17 bus route. Running just under seven miles from the water tower in Tilehurst to The Three Tuns, in, er, where is it exactly? (Earley, apparently, on …
I’m on the V&A mailing list. Normally it’s only of passing interest but when I opened one and found that they were running an exhibition featuring the work of Aardman Animations I was there and booked tickets. Hold on a Minute… When I originally booked the tickets, I hadn’t realised that the exhibition was actually …
Continue reading “Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends, Young V&A, London”
The underpass to Katesgrove, specifically the stretch beneath the IDR near County Lock, has had a series of murals installed in it, and I was keen to see it. What apparently used to be a somewhat grim, graffiti-prone passage has been turned into the Time Travel Tunnel, unveiled earlier this month (February 1, 2026). A …
Continue reading “Time Travel Tunnel (Katesgrove Murals), Reading”