I’ve been up in the Slough area for the last few days as I’m shortly to be employed there. Slough was best summed up by the opening lines to this poem by John Betjeman:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,

Unfortunately, seventy years later this is still largely accurate. Here’s a photo of Slough’s iconic bus station:

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I can’t bear the thought of living in Slough, so I’ve been looking around some of the neighbouring towns. Lots of people at work commute from Ealing (London, yuck!), there’s Windsor (pricey!), leaving Maidenhead as a fairly logical place to look. Maidenhead: it’s… average. If you were to take every town in England and average them together I think you would end up Maidenhead. Not that this is a bad thing necessarily. It is blessed with a number of rather elegant bridges, like this one over the Thames:

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There is also a famous early railway bridge, but no photo today sadly.

Fingers crossed I might have a flat sorted out by the time I have to start work…