Away Day; outlying campuses; women in farming

At the risk of sounding nauseatingly spring-like and positive, it was a beautiful morning this morning ... took this picture of the park at the end of my road at around 7.30am.

Week has been enlivened so far by a team Away Day at Reading Town Hall. My equilibrium was slightly unsettled by one of the activities in the morning, but a lunchtime walk through St Laurence's churchyard restored my spirits. Took a photograph of this bush, although I'm not entirely sure why - was possibly led towards it by mystical forces of which I am unaware.

Today's main achievement was to make my way successfully to Oxford Brookes University's Wheatley campus minus a car, something I wasn't initially sure was possible. The Brookesbus service proved me wrong though - although the journey from Oxford railway station takes about half an hour so best if you don't have too many other commitments on the day in question. According to this link, the CPRE have voted the tower on the Wheatley campus one of the ten ugliest buildings in the country. Much of the campus does admittedly have a somewhat grey tinge, but the O'Regan Centre, where my meeting was, is a pleasant, airy modern building. The campus is a typical former college campus that now finds itself part of a university - in the 1960s it was the Lady Spencer Churchill College before merging with Oxford Polytechnic in 1974, which in turn then became a university in the 1992 upgrading.

Attended an interesting lecture at the Museum of English Rural Life this evening on Women in British Farming, held to mark International Women's Day 2009. Some fascinating old photographs. Still not quite clear what was involved in being a bondager, although they seem to have worn bizarre bonnets. Audience, as expected, largely full of Game Old Birds, with a smattering of Game Old Chaps accompanying in some cases. We were served tea and an extremely nice coffee cake with butter icing. All strangely congenial. Perhaps am reaching the time of life when I should join Townswomen's Guild or similar.