A friend cited a blog post on Jacksons that I hadn’t yet written. I suspect this is because my conversation and blog posts become indistinguishable over time as they ferment. I’m fermenting a whole series of posts on the outstanding store that is Jacksons, that rightfully has a whole corner in Reading named after it.
We’ll start outside with the outstanding window displays. These are reminiscent of the 1960’s. The paper backdrop of large flowers could have been made, lovingly, by my mother, or yours. Thoughtful, personal, tailored rather than mass produced, I find the displays enticing.
Even the Mannequin’s look like they’ve escaped from the 1960’s. With humour. The Ladies nightware is cleverly marketted as ‘Slenderella’ and ‘Damella. But the names don’t quite make up for non-topical goods. You have to prize non-topical good to buy this nightware.
The store cares, next to the sign indicating that they have the ubiquitous CCTV is one pointing out that their floors MAY be slippery when wet. another sign lets you know that for our own safety we should not lean against their windows. Is there an ominous side to this? Are they teasing us? Which floors are wet and which are dry? What will happen if we lean against their windows?
This slightly sinnister side is compounded by some of the mannequins. A child mannequin in a tutu appears to wathc your with evil eyes… …she scared me… …intrigued me…
Other Mannequins display a slightly non-sober jaunty angle with their wigs and hats. Explore my flickr photographs of Jacksons for the full effect.
Rarely can I resisit going into Jacksons. The inside of the store is another set of stories altogether. Worth waiting for.
The sign over a Reading downtown establishment says ‘Vodka and Food’, not ‘Spirits and Sandwiches’ nor ‘Alcohol and Chicken tikka Masala’ not ‘Food and Vodka’, nor ‘Lunch and Liquor’. I wonder who their audience is? I’ve heard about ‘Chav’s’ since returning to Britian, do Chav’s favour Vodka?
What does he CCTV camera directed at the entrance tell me? Probably not much since CCTV cameras are almost ubiquitous in UK town centres, apparantly in 2006 there was one camera for every 14 people, but maybe it says something that I can’t hear…
Alan D Hayward IS Licensed to deal in game. That’s like 007 is licensed to kill, only this is licensed to deal. Merriam-Webster’s 3rd option (a and b) of the verb ‘deal’ defines it as:
a: to engage in bargaining : trade b: to sell or distribute something as a business <deal in insurance>
licenced to make a living from trading dead birds….
According to Wikipedia Reading (HM Prison) is the county gaol of Berkshire and formerly the site of executions. It was built in a cruciform shape in 1844, Victorian. It’s about the same age as the new old wendy house and built in the back-yard of the Abbey on the site of an old leper colony. Now its a ‘Young offender Institution and remand centre’ (1999 HM Govt report - includes interviews with prisoners)
Famous people incarcerated there include:
home made cakes rather than those that have been delivered from further afield are proffered by the wonderful little ‘picnic’ shop on the Butter Market.
This is in stark contrast to its new neighbour, Starbucks. I choose picnic with local home made cakes and delicious salads every time. But then directly across the Butter Market there are more choices, Munchees or big chain of Costa Coffee?
I felt impelled to excape cafe corner on the Butter Market, go home and make myself a sandwich after this imposing decision dilemma.
A new, imitiation, old phone arrived to replace the genuine 1930’s BT compliant phone that somehow disappeared during my relocation. When plugged into my phone socket, no dial tone, it didn’t work. The BT support operative was extremely helpful as she talked me through various in-house tests then finally succumbed to a request to send an engineer around. The engineer was scheduled to arrive sometime between 8am and 1pm. at 12.58 I recieved a phonecall from him to say he was only streets away. He turned up and then disappeared again for 2hrs.
Apparantly he’d tracked my problem to a green box outside Palmers park.
He explained this was human error
its always human error
the technology works fine
people are stupid.
Can you see any problems in this reasoning?
viewer of my desktop background (vomdb): are they yours?
Wendy: (?????) I took the picture
vomdb: yes, but are they yours?
Wendy: I don’t own the flats, but they looked pretty in the sunset so I took a photograph of them
womdb: are they your children playing football?
Wendy: no, but that’s my shadow behind the shadow of that tree
Words of wisdom from my outrageously expensive and handsome young product-dispensing hairdresser:
If you’re looking for a good winebar the best place in Reading is the Forbury Hotel restaurant bar
As usual, I’ll be taking Alan’s tip very seriously and following up on this gem of wisdom
According to Wikipedia Forbury = ‘borough in front’.
In Reading this was a gathering, market area in front of the now defunct Reading Abbey.
In the small cafes of Earley on Wokingham Road you can find mugs of tea, English breakfasts and free wireless internet access. You can also find many second-hand shops (US = Consignment, thrift) raising money for good causes: Sue Ryder, Barnados, Amnesty International to name 3 in but a mere 100 yard amble from Palmers park.
The Wendy House still doesn’t have its own internet access so public hotspots have become an essential part of my weekend routine… ..and jolly good fun it all is too.
they are just pretending, and they have allotments too, so they can’t be real beggars because they can grow their own food and stuff
Singing and high spirits in the streets near cemetery junction, Balloons tied to fire engines, lamp-posts, leaple and shops. Police directing traffic and cycling aound, smiling. A yound boy offered me bottled water and a leaflet. I took the leaflet and read… …Nagar Kirtan is a Punjabi term that literally means “neighbourhood hymn singing“. The seek new year is April 14th, the day that Sikhism was born in 1699. It is the holiest day of their calendar.
Wikipedia described Vaisakhi
Such singing and laughter and happiness, it was a joy to mingle with the crowds
A discussion amongst a group of people on when they could coordinate going to the Reading CAMRA festival included one American. The American seemed a little suprised that the default assumption was that if there are lots of different beers to be tasted then the result would most likely be a certain level of annebriation, this astute observation about beer consumption was summarised as:
You Brits have no sense of moderation
Young dude: …and it wasn’t the people that you would expect who knew the most, it was the young blonde scruffy girls not the older men in suits…
Wendy: Young dude, your prejudices are showing
wendy: which one was he?
colleague: the one sat to my left at lunch time
wendy: with glasses?
colleague: the guy who sat in the front passenger seat in the car
wendy: cute older man?
colleague: (sharp intake of breath while smiling and moving hand to cover mouth, meanwhile several colleagues nearby swing their chairs round and look at me while smirking)
wendy: damn, that was both sexist and age-ist in one fell swoop. sorry.
(giggling colleagues)
An exciting evening was spent studying pussycat-paw-preferences. If you are already yawning, stop reading now, this is the excitment climax sentence for this blog post. This is the sound made by the fluffballs decending the staircase of danger in WendyHouse:
Matrix: bur-bump, bur-bump, ber-pump
Sampo: bump—bump–bump-bumpbumbbump
Watching the bumpy affair indicates that Matrix always first puts her left-paw onto the next step while Sampo uses the not-insubstantial momentum of her stomach to launch herself down planting her left paw on every other step. The cunning corner two steps before the bottom of the staircase has occassionally taken advantage of Sampo’s momentum to literally bump her. Sampo, not the brightest of kitties.
Matrix = left-pawed
Sampo = Ambidextrous
The free Thames Valley Park bus service is outstanding. It not only provides free wireless internet access, it also provides signs to let you know where the internet access might be a bit buggy.
On a Saturday I like to get out and about and meet the public.
Real people. Look, here they are, all standing in a line in NatWest.
Perhaps they haven’t yet received their lovely blue shiny thingys yet? Or maybe they enjoy talking to people and standing in queues, how strange…
Loooooook what I’ve got!
A new technical gadgetty hand-held pocket-sized, shiney, toy sent to me without solicitation.
This little thingy is going to keep my already seemingly rather complex online banking sign-in that requests out-of-sequence entry of 2 different pin codes, even more complex.
Admire It’s all new no-cat-hairs-or-greasy finger-prints casing, straight out of the box-smells-like-plasitc. My personal favourite bit is the powder-blue button labelled ‘identity‘. This button is for my life as a secret agent, I can click this and change identity. For example from Ms to Mrs in the flash of a stereotype.
Copied and pasted from an email circulated by AFH:
i.m. Humphrey Lyttleton (23/5/21-25/4/08)
So, Humph,
it’s time to hang up your horn,
both the one you used
as composer of Bad Penny Blues
and the one you used
to stop Barry Cryer
from starting
yet another endless anecdote
or joke.
Farewell,
old man.
England and the BBC
will miss you,
probably more than we can tell,
but, at least,
old Humph,
you’ll never again
have to listen to the piano
of Colin Sell.
A.F. Thribb.
www.humphreylyttelton.com
“As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from dessication.”
Recently I walked into this shop where a handsome young assistant asked if I needed any help.
No help needed.
I can ‘do’ decisions about knobs without any assistance. Instead, I feighend the need for decision support to keep the lad entertained. He learned about the dark oak beams, the matt-black metal latches on the doors and fianlly about my hammer-action masonary Black and Decker power drill.
He looked somewhat amused and orded 10 matt-black metal knobs for me. Success!
BT Support Engineer: Mrs. House…
Wendy: …my mother isn’t here
BT Support Engineer: can I talk to her?
Wendy: I don’t see why, its my phone, my home, my internet connection and I’m 44, why do you need to talk to my mother?
BT Support Engineer: Ms. House?
Wendy: Yes?
Not really a dichotomy or a catchy title.
Hoorah for Aliza Shvarts is probably more appropriate. Aliza has created a work of art as a physical object constructed from her body and a discourse where the ‘truth’ of the discourse impacts whether the physical art will be displayed or not. The Dean of Yale University says:
[W]e will not permit her to install the project unless she submits a clear and unambiguous written statement that her installation is a work of fiction: that she did not try to inseminate herself and induce miscarriages, and that no human blood will be physically displayed in her installation.
It’s like that other ultimatum directed at women in medieval times: confess to being a witch and we might not kill you, don’t confess and we’ll burn you alive.
Rephrased as
Deny that you have rights over your body (to choose insemination, to choose miscarriage) and we’ll let people see the outcomes, admit to having rights over your body and we’ll make sure no-one can see the outcomes.
Outstanding artwork Alizia. Whether her story about the construction process is a hoax or not is less important than the clear themes embedded in the reactions to her construction process.
The local corner shop is a large old co-op, opened in 1901. I’m thrilled, customer owned stores are worth supporting with custom.
Official Co-op website: http://www.co-operative.coop/
There are strange, repeating, symbols built into the buildings and public places all around Reading. There are 4 scallops and 2 crossed pilgrim staff’s on the gate posts of Palmers park. The Scallops turn up again in the Univerity of Reading’s coat of arms. 
Evidently the shells are thought to be an emblem of pilgramage because pilgrims to Europe would bring back the scallop shells from beaches. The association with Reading is probably because the old Abbey claimed to hold the hand of St James as a holy relic that shell-carrying pilgrims would come to visit. I wonder how St. James hand got to Reading Abbey….
Scallop or i-pod? visit your nana or some dead saints embalmed hand? Such choices open to the modern traveller.
Four miserable looking people surrounding a chap in a crown on a bridge over the river kennet. This same symbol also appears on one of the gate-posts of Palmer’s park, though in not as much full delightful pale-skinned, blonde and blue colouring. Aparantly this is Reading Town’s coat of Arms and the 4 people are probably burgesses… ..and the miserable looking person is Queen Elizabeth (1 or 2 depending on how you feel).
A version of this cluster of people turns up on the symbol for ‘Reading School’ the people have an almost ominous range of sly through snide to surreal expressions. Girl power gone wonkey?
A Wendy is rarely happier than when she’s using her hammer-action masonary drill to make nice neat round holes for her collection of brightly coloured raw plugs. Luckily I still had my drill bits, screws and raw-plugs left-over from my previous life as a brick-built home owner. With the wooden houses in the US proper power-drilling is a luxury I’ve had to forego… …until now…
Ask AskOxford.com describes the origins of the English term ‘POSH’ in a way that aligns with the folk myth I somehow acquired:
The story goes that the more well-to-do passengers travelling to and from India used to have POSH written against their bookings, standing for ‘Port Out, Starboard Home’ (indicating the more desirable cabins, on the shady side of the ship).
A website that explains English phrases considers the above explanation as being popular over accurate and lists other, less well known, plausible alternatives such as:
Posh is also the Romany word for money and this was current throughout the 19th century.
The Romany word for halfpenny is a popularly web-cited explanation, the true origin may now be lost with old buffers
facilitator: we’ve split the groups up to ensure that each group includes a woman
why do you think this is?
Perhaps to balance any biases on group achiviements based on the differential skill. No group is systematically (dis)advantaged due to a disproportionate representation of women. Is this reasonable?
For me, the bottom-line is that I am treated differently based on my gender in a situation where skills are more important than gender. It’s reinforced gender differentiation. I’d rather they just dropped it from the discourse and enabled us to focus on things that actually can and should make a difference.
Eventually I protested by taking my nail-varnish kit and cookery-books out of the pool resource and minced in my stilletos to the spar for a massage and gossip with a dose of well deserved shampoo.
Or did I?
Named after Mr. George Palmer of Biscuit fame who donated the land for use as a Park, next to the South Park conservation area of Reading. Palmer park currently includes a:
1) lot of trees and grass that are occassionally covered in snow or sunlight and are always beautiful.
2) sports stadium. Featuring a velodrome with lots of people wearing colourful lycra and providing exercise classes called ‘legs bums & tums’ for people who have not yet earned the right to wear lycra.
3) library that is really rather cute.
presenter: a success story and she’s a woman!
possible implications of mentioning gender in this context include, but are not limited to,
- being a member of the minority group, female, is not easy to identify
- being a member of this minority group, female, shoupld be promoted as deserving of special treatment, recognition, etc
- citing female gender as exceptional is a presenter-declarant of psuedo-feminisim.
- The presenter gets twisted pleasure out of winding-wendy-up.
- women demonstrating successful behaviour in this context is an expception and therefore noteworthy because:
society works to prevent skilled women from succeeding
women are less skilled
After over 40 years of listening to this sort of crap on a daily basis I’m amazed that I manage to get irritated by its commonality….
while visiting Seattle this April I met with many local friends, indulged in lots of purring, stroking, creaky-meowing, general faffing and furring-up-nosing. All in the best possible taste.
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