Tapas; evening route marches; seaside

Had a lovely dinner with Kate at the Alto Lounge on Friday 3^rd. This was positively reviewed on eatmytown in April – am more or less in agreement with the comments including re the default 175ml wine glasses. Kate and I had the tapas, which was lovely although their tapas menu does contain some dishes that are unusual and possibly not 100% typically Spanish (honey-glazed shredded 5 spice pork belly?). My main complaint is that when they first opened their egg & bacon stack off the breakfast menu was served with maple syrup and was delicious; some time afterwards they sneakily changed this to golden syrup. No, it’s not the same thing. Golden syrup is used to make flapjacks. You don’t eat it on your breakfast.

Walked up to the marina on the Sunday morning to have breakfast with Ray. He had managed to turn the boat round to enable painting of the unpainted side, though I gather not without a certain amount of difficulty and photographing by fellow boat owners. Unfortunately it started raining shortly after we started our breakfast on the rear deck, but we erected the umbrella and carried on.

Went out with Ruth for what I thought was going to be a brief early evening stroll on Wednesday 8^th and ended up, rather surprisingly at her suggestion, walking along the Thames to Sonning. It was a lovely evening and a very pleasant walk (pictures here) though the scenery improves once one passes the gas towers and Thames Valley Business Park. I managed to throw off my slight concern at not having had time to research buses home from Sonning, as I am often told I should be more spontaneous. We walked along a lovely stretch of the river past a number of narrowboats moored up. At Sonning Bridge we left the Thames Path and turned off up into the village – Sonning is a wealthy, immaculate, chocolate-box village that is pleasant for a stroll through but looks a bit sterile to live in (I say this, obviously, in the full knowledge that I am unlikely ever to be rich enough to do so anyway). We made our way to The Bull and had a drink outside and then dinner, to make the walk fully worthwhile. We left at 8pm and did the roughly hour-long walk back to Caversham, in semi-darkness for the last stretch. Quite a lot of exercise for one evening.

Possibly brought on by cabin fever after having had a week off work at home, Ruth booked us a last minute weekend in Bournemouth last weekend (pictures here). We took a lovely direct train on the Friday morning and checked in to the Bournemouth Westcliffe Premier Inn, a monster of a new hotel situated on Poole Road on the western side of the town. After lunch we went to visit the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, an incredible emporium of OTT Victoriana that Sir Merton and Lady Russell-Cotes had built around 1900 to house their private collection of paintings, furniture, miscellaneous curios and things nicked from foreign folk abroad. The interior is so gaudily decorated and so stuffed with things that one feels mildly queasy after a while. Even the house itself, originally called East Cliff Hall, would have done well for a moderating hand – Mr Russell-Cotes had apparently not been able to resist tweaking his architect’s design, evidently deciding that it contained insufficient turrets and other random twiddly bits, and the resulting house is a mad incoherent fantasy, though according to Sir Merton it was supposed to be a fusion of Scottish Baronial and Italian Renaissance. The Russell-Cotes had travelled extensively abroad and had brought back souvenirs a-plenty; the guide to the Mikado’s Room quotes Merton as saying that they were so taken with Japan they filled around a dozen trunks with assorted antique artefacts to ship back to England. In some cases one does wonder how legitimately they came by some of the stuff – the blurb in one of the rooms relates the particularly amusing story of the Empress Eugenie of France visiting Russell-Cotes Towers and spotting an elaborate dresser that, the last she knew, had been in one of her houses. Whether Sir Merton and Lady blushed and gave it back to her isn’t recorded.

After a late-afternoon film (Tamara Drewe) and a brief stop-off to look at the light show in the square, we had dinner at Ristorante La Piazza, where I had vitello pizzaiola and we shared a bottle of Sauvignon Friuli. On the way back to the hotel we stopped off at a couple of gay bars in the Triangle area, apparently part of my education: The Branksome , populated by some variously craggy and desperate-looking trannies, and the glossier DYMK with a younger clientele. Basically though I just don’t like noisy bars, gay or otherwise, so gritted my teeth throughout much of the time we were there.

On Saturday morning we had breakfast at the lovely and very convenient Olive Bistro and then, after a quick whiz into WHSmith to satisfy my urge for an A-Z, took the bus to Poole and had a (slightly longer than planned) walk down Canford Cliffs Road and the surrounding very well-heeled streets down to the cliffs, where we briefly admired the view before walking through Pinecliff Gardens down to the sea. Stopped for tea in the Terrace Bar of the Branksome Beach restaurant before walking back along the beach towards Bournemouth, via a quick stroll around Alum Chine. Took the West Cliff Lift back up to town level and popped into the Bournemouth Highcliff Marriott Hotel where Ruth gamely tried to book us a table for dinner in the Highcliff Grill, but we were told they were full. Damn them and their nice-sounding seafood. As Ruth talks dead posh we assumed it wasn't simply because we were wearing jeans and waterproofs. Anyway, walking back inland we found the lovely Westpoint and stopped off for whitebait (me), a pint of prawns (R) and two Budweisers.

We returned to our hotel room to chill for a few hours – had the novelty of a nice bubble bath in a bath that doesn’t leak – before trying out the Ciao Restaurant – nice pizza but noisy and a bit of a trek. The cabbie who drove us back to the hotel deflated our spirits temporarily by telling us that it was mainly younger people who hung out in that part of town and suggested a club in a different part of town that apparently we might enjoy (presumably equipped with comfy sofas, Zimmer frame access etc). On the Sunday I left Ruth in bed and went for an early-morning walk as, ironically, it was a beautiful morning and the nicest weather of the weekend. Took a number of blue-sky beach pics before joining Ruth for breakfast and then the train back to Reading.

My first visit to Bournemouth was for a week’s holiday in the company of my primary school friend Celia and her family in 1980 (a few pics here). Celia’s family owned a (detached, with driveway) holiday home in Sandbanks, additional to the sizeable property they owned back in Newbury. I remember having a pleasant enough holiday despite Celia’s somewhat stuffy mother and her father’s obsession with his SodaStream¹. Since then, I’ve only visited for a couple of days, one in the company of my family, as I remember Mum and I having a row in one of the town centre parks, and the second with Ray sometime in the mid-1990s, when I got badly sunburnt shoulders after a sunny walk along the beach.


¹ What is with the recent revival of these? They were a white elephant in the first place along the lines of the Sinclair C5. This MSN 'Most embarrassing gadgets' link has it about right. Of all the complicated ways to get a fizzy drink. You have to buy a bottle of (say) cola-flavoured concentrate which you then fire through the machine and it comes out as a fizzy and vaguely cola-flavoured drink. As opposed to just going to a shop and buying a can of Coke. Bizarre.