HEFCW; school; domestics

Got to pay a flying visit to Cardiff last Thursday to attend a data workshop at the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, aka HEFCW (pronounced, cutely, heff-KOOOO, as opposed to heff-KEEEE). Managed to persuade our office manager Sara to book me a train ticket from Reading instead of Milton Keynes so that I could attend the July Book Group meeting in the evening – which she did, though I had to agree to be tied to a specific morning train in order to make it equal-to-or-cheaper than going from Milton Keynes (them being the rules) – a bit of a mystery, as the journey from MK takes considerably longer, but who can fathom the logic of train fares. Met my colleague Emily at Cardiff Central and we had one of those freakish coincidence moments during the taxi journey to HEFCW’s offices in Llanishen when we discovered that not only is Emily originally from Newbury but that we had attended the same secondary school. Not at the same time, as Emily’s the best part of ten years younger, but we remembered some of the same staff especially as Emily had also studied music.

St Bart’s website now has an image of the extravagant new school building erected as part of the 'Ad Lucem' project. Not meaning to speak out of turn, but West Berkshire Council’s decision to award around £32 million of central government money to St Bart’s, via the Building Schools for the Future programme, seems to me a highly dubious decision when the school was already in possession of two attractive and historic school buildings (see pic of the Wormestall building right, taken by me in the late 1980s) and, more importantly, when it was apparently chosen over both Kennet School and the John O’Gaunt School in Hungerford, both of which draw from a less affluent area than St Bart’s and were almost certainly far more in need of an injection of cash to rebuild their premises. Makes you wonder what these decisions are actually based on.

Returning to the HEFCW meeting: this was enlivened by the presence of a video link to a roomful of people in Llandudno that was plagued by dodgy acoustics for the morning session: evidently the Llandudno contingent could hardly hear the speakers in the room in Cardiff, whereas every muttered aside in the Llandudno room was amplified many times into the Cardiff room. As there were a number of muttered asides, mostly along the lines of "I can't bl**dy hear her, can you?", this led to some amusement. When we reconvened after lunch they had all gone, though the video link was still running on an empty meeting room. Surreal.

We met at Claire M’s house in the evening to discuss Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Pastoral, which I had kind of enjoyed but was left with the sense that I hadn’t quite got all the intended meaning – e.g. of the lengthy descriptions of the glove industry and Mr Levov Sr’s dull ramblings about how a woman never used to go out without a pair of gloves. Will perhaps re-read at some later date. We congratulated Lesley on her new job and welcomed new member Alison, a choir friend of Claire M’s. Our next book is Alison’s choice, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, which I had better get started on soon as it’s apparently c.600 pages long.

Had quietly domestic weekend at the house. Ruth and I did a few useful jobs in town on Saturday morning including a trip to West Tailoring on the Oxford Road, a one-room concern above a Polish grocer’s that’s unfeasibly crammed with sewing machines, piles of clothes and men barely visible above piles of clothes. They were recommended to me a few years ago by a woman in Sketchley as being cheaper than them for repair jobs – rather nice of her, I thought, but perhaps she’d just been given a month’s notice that morning. While waiting for West’s to re-hem my trousers, we went for a drink in what used to be the Renaissance Hotel, and before that the Ramada, but is now part of the German chain pentahotels. The main lobby and bar area (see sneaky pic left) have been altered out of all recognition, substantially for the better, and are now dead smart with exposed concrete and modern art dotted around. We did a bit of shopping for work clothes; Ruth did actually buy some skirts but I didn’t find anything I liked, though that was probably due to sulking at recently-gained excess poundage. To help with that, we went for lunch and I bought an expensive non-work top in East. Did a few more useful jobs on Sunday including fitting a replacement fuse in my car's cigarette lighter - dead proud of our car maintenance skills on that one, though I have to say they were mainly Ruth's; my chief input was driving to Halfords and buying the fuse. In the afternoon I did some PC tasks that I'd been putting off during the week because of dodgy mobile broadband at the MK flat, and Ruth dug a big hole in the garden. Domestic blissitude.