Routine

It's been a bit difficult to settle into a routine. Our current state of camping in a flat has something to do with it. Having the company of visitors has also injected excitement that defies routine. However, Anna and I have managed to meet a few of the locals and have been trying out coffee shops around the high street. The coffee shops vary greatly in quality and atmosphere, but not hugely in price.

The Caversham Café is the odd duck of the choices on offer. It has a lovely patio area that sits in the courtyard just off the street. There's lots of bustle and often many people sitting out, especially when the sun is out. But, despite its promise, it places third in the Ben & Anna morning coffee charts. It's grimy, which could be overlooked, except that the coffee also isn't very good. Despite having a full espresso machine sitting there, you order a latté and they press a button on a coffee machine that you'd expect to find in the seldom-used eating area of an insurance company based out of a 1960s low rise office building. There's a slightly sour taste to the coffee, hinting that maybe the machine needed a good clean from weeks or months of milk foam build up. In the courtyard, the Parisian style metal tables and chairs sit askew beneath a chesnut tree which sounds quite lovely. But it is actually marginally dangerous at this time of years with huge great chesnuts, with their charp husks, plummeting to the ground all around you.

There's a bakery across the street which serves coffee. The baked goods are super. The baguettes are amazing. The coffee, though also out of a machine, is in a different league. Probably more like the coffee one might expect for those in the employ of Encana. However, inside is a bit institutional. The seating is more like a Dairy Queen than a café. There are two little tables outside that sit annoyingly close to the road. Pedustrians waiting for a break in traffic essentially stand with you while you drink your coffee. In fact, we met Ian the other day in this manner. Ian lives in Caversham and is bound to a wheelchair. A very odd bloke, but genuinely nice. "Cheeky chops," he calls Anna. This must come from some television show in Britain in the 1970s or something because it seems to be what a certain generation of people call babies here. Digression aside, the bakery is best for take-away coffee and a cake.

Kaldi & Co. is where it is at. Comfy leather chairs, good coffee prepared at a proper machine. A little patio area out back that is entirely pleasant. Claire owns it. Actually, I suspect, her mum and dad own it and she runs it. It's 30p more expensive for the same thing. That might just be the cost of sitting down for a cup of genuinely good coffee in a nice environment and it is certainly worth it for unsoured milk. The other upside is that there are always lots of buggies (strollers), babies, mums, grandmums, the occassional dad (besides me), or child minders.

So, with Kaldi & Co. as our coffee stop, Anna gets to chew on a coffee coaster and get very excited about other people remotely her size while I get the morning started with some caffeine. We then walk down to the strangest little store that sells the oddest assortment of things I have ever seen. The store is tiny and seems to have a bit of a hardware store theme to it. Mind you, it also has an excellent selection of batteries and gardening items. I believe it also sells newspapers. The walls are so completely packed, that you're compelled to just ask the shop owner if they have what you're after since it would be an absurd game of "Where's Waldo" to try and find it yourself. The items then spill onto the sidewalk (pavement, they call it over here) on these little shelves that would normally be used by fruit and veg vendors. It's a Haskayne School of Business branding nightmare. Nevertheless, they sell the most outrageously large bags of wild bird seed for only a pound! You get about a kilogram of bird seed.

So, Anna and I pick up a bag and head to the park along the Thames. It is, after all, been newly marketed by us as Caversham-on-Thames. We walk right past the geese and the swans. There are so many swans. And they have to be the most arrogant bird I've ever witnessed. We saw a cyclest nearly ride his bike into the river as he came up on bunch of swans who simply refused to alter their course to avoid him. I also fear they might take a nip at Anna. So we continue on to a little bend in the path where a small group of pigeons live with their friends the ducks. I prefer the ducks, but Anna speaks pigeon and gets quite excited by their exuberance over wild bird seed. It's as symbiotic a relationship as one could hope for. Also, if you time it right, the bird man comes. He the nicest old gentleman who comes everyday to feed the pigeons. They see him sit down and fly right over to him, landing all over his shoulders and lap. He pulls out his peanuts (which, incidently, he gets from the same store that we get our wild bird seed from, and where you could get a hammer and a new cover for your mobile phone while you were at it) and he slowly feeds the pigeons as they hang about all over him. Anna is bewildered by it all. I can't say that I'm not slightly too.

The photos are from a couple of day trips in country which we've used to break up the routine a little. The first is of Anna confirming that yes, in fact, it is raining quite hard. The next is of her contemplating how miserable it must have been for the Royalists who held out inside Donnington castle for 20 months with Cromwell's nasty army sitting outside. The last is of Anna in awe of St. Albans Cathedral. Yes, I explained, they were 2000 year old Roman bricks that made up much of the masonary.