Visit to Essex; land-based Open Day

Spent a lovely weekend in Brightlingsea visiting my friend Shiho, who was a fellow postgraduate student at the University of Essex in the late nineties/early noughties. In addition to having two children in the last three years, Shiho has also written a book so has been having an impressively constructive time of it. Shiho’s husband Roderick is currently Director of Essex’ Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies. We had a wander around the university campus on Friday afternoon; it looked much as I remembered it with the addition of a couple of extra buildings. Essex’ brutalist campus is interesting although of my two alma maters’ campuses, I have more of an affection for Whiteknights. To quote feminist writer Sheila Rowbotham on the subject of Wivenhoe Park:

“the isolated campus of Essex University had the air of a besieged space station in some bizarre science fiction other-world”

Rowbotham, Sheila. (2000) Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties.

To return to the weekend: on Saturday we had a lovely time nosing around other people’s gardens courtesy of Brightlingsea Open Gardens 2009. On Sunday, we all went for a walk down to the beach, with stop-offs at the boating lake to look at some ducklings and at the Bateman’s Tower Café for ice creams. The tower itself is a late-nineteenth century folly – there’s an article here about the folly and the reinstatement of the roof which was apparently removed during the war. The café is a charmingly/alarmingly (depending on your viewpoint) traditional establishment that certainly seems to do good business. In addition to ice creams, it offers a variety of traditional breakfast foods including something called a ‘Fried Slice’- there were quite a number of people sitting eating full fried breakfasts in the blazing heat. According to Roderick, there was an attempt a few years ago to replace the café with something more up-to-date and sophisticated, but the notion was cried down on the grounds that it wouldn’t be in keeping with the area (unlike, presumably, the current shack-type affair complete with corrugated iron roof). My countrymen are completely bizarre sometimes.


On Tuesday I represented our Lifelong Learning Network at an Open Day for FE staff teaching land-based subjects. These are a major speciality of the University of Reading and we were sponsoring the day, although the actual work was done by staff in the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development. The day proved a great chance to get a tour of parts of the University I wouldn't normally see, including the spanking new Hopkins Building with its stunning lab space (made me wish I'd studied something scientific and ergo well-funded), the Harris Garden and the Centre for Dairy Research at the Shinfield farm (interesting but smelly). We finished up with tea and cakes at MERL which was very civilised.