What have I been doing during my blogging absence? Working! While not working last weekend I walked from my home to Windsor. I thought this would be exciting, but it turned out to be incredibly dull. Highlight must have been walking over the M4 flyover (no, really).

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I really like this photo for some reason. Clouds could be better as usual. I’m not sure if the M4 will replace the A64 in my road-affections: the A64 was like a warm comfort blanket enveloping York; whereas the M4 is like a sword slicing through the heart of Slough; and, annoyingly, limiting the places I can go running south of Maidenhead (flyovers are limited compared to the A64).

Windsor itself is quite nice, bit out of my price range house-wise though.

This is the Queen’s house. She’s now officially my neighbour, living the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. Well posh. No one seems to have noticed that both Windsor and Maidenhead are closer to Slough than they are to each other. For the sake of property prices, this is probably for the best.

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Went back home via Slough where I took these pictures of local landmarks:

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Slough has very advanced high-tech public toilets. Toilet seems to be broken at the moment judging by the status indicator. Note the “20 mins maximum” sign. I read somewhere that Slough was the most productive town in the UK: if it takes you that long to use the loo there’s no place for you here. [Update: whoever wrote that was wrong: Slough is only the third most productive town outside London.]

Tesco in Slough is the largest supermarket in Europe. It’s opposite Slough’s other major landmark: the Brunel bus station. On the outside it’s a huge shiny box: they’ve made no attempt at all to beautify it, and it fits in very well with its surroundings. It’s pretty impressive on the inside too; although they’re not using all that vertical space for sales area: the inside is cavernous like a cathedral. Didn’t see many other supermarket spotters there.

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