Folks at work have referred to my travels as a tour of Dying British Seaside Towns, and they maybe have a point. Bournemouth clearly has had better days, and Blackpool is less ‘faded glory’ and more ‘decaying remnants’, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that Aberdeen isn’t the crumbling industrial wasteland it was described as.
It’s rather nice. It’s like Edinburgh if those awful tourist shops selling plastic tartan crap had never existed, so instead you have the sort of shops & cafes that people in a city centre are more likely to use, and you need to pay a little bit of attention to find anywhere that’ll sell you some postcards.
I’m told that I got the small season of good weather, and that it’s miserable there the rest of it. Given that the person in question got snowed on in Aberdeen in May, it may be that they’re biased. Or in possession of accurate information.
When we last spoke, I was leaving Bath & heading back towards Aylesbury on an unevenly-packed train, in what turned out to be a wildly uneventful journey.
Most of the reason for a return to Aylesbury is to see friends, though the specific timing is because of a work Company Update in Oxford. ( They’re trying the idea of smaller regional events, instead of enormous one, for these updates. I guess putting people in the same room as the speaker(s) increases the chances that they’ll pay attention, unlike a Teams call )
This time I’m staying in the Guest Suite at Chateau Guineapig¹.
There’s not a whole lot to say about spending a week in Aylesbury. Not that it wasn’t enjoyable, because it was, but there’s nothing I did that I’ve not done a thousand times, so the events are not exactly newsworthy.
I got my old desk back. Hadn’t booked it or anything, but it didn’t look like anyone was using it. Turns out that it’s not actually bookable on the system, presumably because nobody added it to the list of available desks; Given that this was the last week in that office for anyone for a while, it makes some sense.
Quite a few pub trips.
A semi-cheeky Nandos trip.
Swapping a few things in & out of storage.
The company update is covered in a different post, but as a summary; Not my best day ever.
¹ otherwise known as the spare room at A+Ks place.
The trip here was uneventful, but mostly because I boarded the train as soon as I could & got a seat. Not everyone did, because it was full of folks going to Penzance whose train was supposed to be leaving from Paddington, but was instead leaving from Reading. I don’t know why.
Anyway, I had a window seat, so I read and dozed my way to Bath. The train staff gave up on the idea of moving through the train, so no ticket checks, and the tea/coffee/snack cart parked itself in one place and made “I’m in this carriage, but only come to get stuff if it’s safe to do so” announcements.
Finding this week’s place was surprisingly easy, and … It’s very nice.
I put a chair in front of the creepy fireplace to block the ghosts
Monday was a holiday, and I spent most of it just sort of wandering around Bath. I found the Royal Crescent by following an arty map from the wall of the place I’m staying, and The Circus by accident in the process.
A very niche operation, and we’re wondering about those flag colours I’m not sure who Quiet Saint Coffee is, but I plan to visit their shrine at some point
Tuesday, … How to cover Tuesday?
Tuesday wasn’t great. I’m not entirely sure why, but work was frustrating & annoying, and that kind of spilled over into the rest of the day.
Let’s just skip over Tuesday, shall we?
Wednesday?
Better than Tuesday, but still annoying.
On the plus side, I did go for a walk ‘upriver’ to find a pub formerly owned/run by the folks who now own/run our not really local pub in Aylesbury. Didn’t go in, because a pub is absolutely the last place I want to be after two annoying days in a row, but it was beside a bridge with the now standard picturesque view of the Avon, so that was worth the trip.
I think I should stop doing the day by day report; On any given working week, unless it’s an odd week or I’m doing a bunch of coworking space trips, it’s going to be something in the Good Day/Bad Day spectrum, and even I’m getting bored reporting on that.
So, Thursday was a better day, though I’m not sure why. I was feeling a bit unwell in the lungs the last few days, so maybe that had something to do with it? Anyway, tried Quiet Street Coffee for a morning beverage, and they were pretty good. And I went for a stroll down the canal to see what was there. (A couple of really sunk boats at one place)
Friday, sadly, started well but descended into shit as the day went on. My planned “get these things done” turned into “how in the hell is that system which has been specifically disabled so that it can’t access the outside world doing the very thing that it is specifically not supposed to be doing?”, which ate the rest of the day.
I did try another coffee place for the morning; The Bath Coffee Company, which is a little place in one of the many squares around here. Got to sit at a little outside table & enjoy the morning before going to work, which was quite pleasant.
I really do wish I was enjoying Bath more; It’s nice, and there’s pretty architecture and some nice parks, but the week of work bullshit really is affecting my view of the place. Doing the Roman Baths tour thing tomorrow, so hopefully that, plus the weekend, will improve things.
Back to the Geovation hub to work today, even though I (correctly) expected it to be deader than yesterday. I stopped off at the coffee place from yesterday ( Goswell Road Coffee ) and hung around in there for a bit.
They may be winning the “weird decorating” prize.
Pretty sure that’s a Sinclair C5 (not my picture; from where I was sitting there was no non-creepy way to take a photo)
The hub was, as predicted, dead. Other folks have commented that it’s cliquey & techy, and I’d have to agree. I know they do networking events, and I’m guessing that’s the only time that people from different groups interact. Still, got some work done, which was the point, and left in the early afternoon, which was the consequence of some late-ass finishes earlier in the week.
Commuting through London when the footpaths & underground aren’t rammed? Pretty nice.
Moving through London when you get to a tourist bit? Not great. Kind of annoying, because people move really slowly and spread out to fill the space.
Still, I had a nice time, learned some things about actually working in this city, and now hold a firm opinion on a specific underground route, which feels like a win to me.
Someone seems to have moored a small building off Greenwich
The plan for Saturday was to get an early start & go to the British Museum before it got crowded. This didn’t happen.
What did happen is that I got there later than planned, got through some of the Mesopotamian & adjacent bits, and left earlier than planned because it was too crowded to move through & the airflow … wasn’t? Should have expected that for a Saturday.
Still, I saw some stuff, and marveled at the tiny tiny cuneiform writing, and learned about sealing up contracts in clay envelopes with a summary and rolled-on pictures on them as an anti tampering technique, so that was pretty cool.
Canary Wharf continues it’s impressive streak of confusing me, so well done there; Didn’t know there were ‘underground’ bits below the various plazas and parks. Also didn’t know there were parks.
Found some artwork though, which was nice
Greenwich on the weekend is a madhouse. People in all directions, and pity anyone trying to drive anywhere. I spotted someone who’d probably gone the wrong way, thought they’d found a route out that didn’t require reversing, and were then blocked by a taxi doing something weird.From that point, they were probably better off parking the car and recovering it after sundown, because the odds of them manoeuvring back out in that crowd were not good; Could be done, but you’d need a spotter and a lot of yelling at pedestrians.
I kind of want this to be a detective agency, or at least a pair of amateur but surprisingly effective investigators. Maybe they’re involved in the production or sale of their respective substance, or maybe they’re just importers who keep finding bodies/evidence of crime.
( OK, this does maybe link nicely to one of my Gen Con games – CHEW )
I could also see it as a wacky superhero cartoon, with a sentient bottle of champagne & wheel of cheese fighting superpowered food crime. Whatever that is. Kind of the opposite of Milk & Cheese: Dairy Products Gone Bad, for those who remember that.
It turns out that I’ve evolved a check-out routine without realising it.
Everything that can be packed the night before gets packed. Clothes for the next day get set aside.
On the day, everything is either on my person or on the bed, so that the rest of the space can be checked. As soon as something can be packed, it gets packed.
Google maps gave me all sorts of interesting options for getting between Greenwich & Paddington, including walking from Lancaster Gate because the stop is a lot closer than it looks on the standard map, but in the end I went with a three-line hop; DLR to Bank, Central to Oxford Circus, Bakerloo to Paddington.
Made it with an hour or so to kill, so I found a relatively sane bit of the station to hang out in, and checked the departure boards online. Got a window seat during the early phase when the platform was announced, which was lucky, as the train filled up with folks heading for Penzance whose train was for some reason starting in Reading, not Paddington. (People were standing in the vestibules in some carriages)
I’m trying to combine a round-up of all of the other bits of Canterbury, plus some sort of round-up of how the working process went. Let’s see how this goes, shall we?
The Roman Museum Did this on on the Sunday, partially by accident because while I’d planned to go to it, I was just out for a wander and happened to spot the sign down a sidestreet. It is, I think, aimed at a younger audience; The audio tour certainly was. Lots of reconstructions of ‘Roman Stuff’ with models & life-size displays, but also actual historical information & artifacts scattered in there. Mention of the existence of slaves, but not dwelling on what that actually means. It was a bit difficult to figure out what they were trying to say in some places; The layout of pictures and descriptions of Roman Canterbury through history meant that it took me a bit of cross-checking to get “the city grew, and then people just stopped being there anymore, and we don’t really know why” as the high-level summary.
That said, it was interesting and fun, and they have a thumping great section of mosaic floor preserved where they found it, which is kind of cool.
Generally Wandering Around I did a lot of this on the first few days, partially to get a feel for the place, and partially to get out of the hotel room for a while. The side of the main street which hasn’t been developed into a giant roofless mall, still has some of the ‘narrow streets and slumping buildings’ feel of old cities; A lot of cafes & restaurants & places selling tourist stuff, and also an art gallery and a Harry Potter shop.
There’s a chunk of the main street which is being paved, or re-paved, or something, but it means that a wide pedestrian zone is reduced to two narrow walkways which get clogged with people almost immediately, and can be brought to a screeching halt by an uncooperative toddler or a few confused tourists. Was glad to have a rough idea of the twisty somewhat parallel streets when that happened.
There wan’t much to photograph which hasn’t been captured a thousand times already by better photographers than me, so I mostly went with things which amused me.
A fraction of a second later the young woman in the headscarf did a grinning double metal-horns gesture at my camera; I’m sorry I missed it.
The Westgate; Not perhaps their best attempt at naming, though it is at least in the North-West of the city. Canterbury West railway station, on the other hand, is almost due North of Canterbury East railway station.
Also a nice park which eventually wraps around towards the other railway station, following the path of the remains of the city wall. I did take a few walks along the wall, and up the Dane John mound, but didn’t take any photos. Nice place to walk along though.
On To The Overview I enjoyed Canterbury. It didn’t go perfectly, but it was fun, and I learned a few things about remote working & travel in the ‘what to do differently next time’ department.
Having a working location right in the heart of things isn’t all that useful if you’re working a standard job; Most tourist things are closed by the time you’re free.
Big Red, as a pack, is great for moving stuff around, but it doesn’t have much in the way of internal structure, which means a whole lot of unpacking every time you look for … Well, anything.
An improvised workspace is OK for a day or so, then it gets annoying.
I did not need all of those connector cables.
Getting sink-laundry dry is much easier in hotel rooms with air conditioning & in places with warmer weather; I can dry a shirt in a few hours by hanging it in front of the air-conditioning vent in a humid city, but that doesn’t work nearly as well with a wall-mounted electric radiator.
It is possible, if you time it right, to cycle through 50-100 channels of television and hit nothing but advertising.
Hotel breakfasts will turn on you; Do not trust them. This may be a smidge unkind. I had a few days of feeling unwell, which may have been the standard “you’ve relaxed, time to get sick” immune system response, but also might have been one too many poor choces from the breakfast buffet options. Or both. Erring on the side of caution, I made better choices & dipped into the traveling medical kit. One of them worked.
English hotels continue to fit bedding designed for arctic expeditions. In this case they also fitted a heater I could get at the controls of, and a window I could leave open, so that was easily solved.
Leaving On A Big Train Something I’d not figured out soon enough is that hotel check-outs happen during the working day, leaving you with nowhere to work if, hypothetically, you’d decided to take the afternoon train back to Aylesbury. I was able to do some shuffling around of hours to give myself a nice long ‘lunch’ break on the last day, so that I could pack up, check out, post a postcard at the world’s slowest post office (the machines were offline, so I joined a short queue which took forever, partially because the guy behind the counter was a very slow typist, and partially because those few people ahead of me wanted to post very complicated things – by the time I got to the head of the line the machines were open again, but also had a scrum of people around them and a lot of red lights, so I stayed in line), and wander down to the train station to get back to Aylesbury via London so that I could work the afternoon from the office. Even got my old desk back.
The hopefully none of you who’ve been paying attention to the dates of these posts may have noticed that I’ve worked from Canterbury for five days & haven’t said a damn thing about how it went. This is for deep & compelling reasons; I wasn’t sure how to make it interesting.
Having given up on interesting, I’m instead going to go with potentially informative, and give a bit of a rundown of what worked and what didn’t.
The room was huge, and had a single trundle bed in it as well as the actual bed, so I had something to sit Big Red on. What it didn’t have was a desk, or more than one chair; That last one’s a shame because there was plenty of room.
There was a sort of workspace, where the kettle lived & 2 of the 3 power outlets were, and it was deep enough to make a pretty good impromptu desk. On the downside, it faced away from the windows. ( I’d had plans to try one of the local co-working spaces, but then things went hilariously wrong on a project in a way that made me suspect I’d be making a lot of calls, which seems kind of obnoxious for a shared space )
( dramatic action shot of workspace )
It was a functional workspace, if not scenic, and the hotel WiFi was fine; Took a while to connect, and it did crap out for a bit on the second day, but that can happen anywhere. No issues with remote machines, and the giant download I had to do would have taken a while in any circumstances.
Didn’t pass the Enjoyment test though. In theory, staying in town means that the tourist/sightseeing stuff is right there. In practice, it’s mostly closed after working hours, and after a day of work my energy levels can be pretty low, so there’s not a whole lot of advantage to being in the midst of it all unless the accommodation itself is in some way worth it.
And with all due respect to the Travelodge Canterbury Chaucer Central, … , It’s just not. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s a good hotel option, but nobody is going to recommend it as the focus of a holiday.
On to the tech stuff. I tried to keep track of how much of what I brought I actually used, and it’s a pretty short list; Going to have to go back through that bag of connectors & ‘might need it’ items to see what on earth is in there.
( the ‘how do I fit all of that crap back in there’ shot )
Overall, working from the hotel was a success, in that I got work done, but I’m not thinking it’s the way forward for me. That’s fine, that was part of the point of this trip.
I’m expecting to go through a few iterations of the packing scheme before I get it right. Today’s version had the everyday clothing in the low compartment, the stuff I thought I’d need as soon into a hotel room in the very top compartment, and everything else in the middle, as a sort of protection layer around the laptops.
waiting on a train at Aylesbury
It sort of worked. I’d thought the top compartment was too full, but it seems like the issue is that there wasn’t enough in the middle one to support it, so it droops over the rest of the pack. So some fine tuning to be done there.
Work happened. I checked out of the hotel & dragged the bag in, and had a mostly standard working day. There was a team lunch, a farewell for someone who’s moving to a new job in another company, and that was fun. ( Also kinda fancy – It was a very nice restaurant )
There were after-work drinks for the person who’s leaving, and I did go for one, while trying not to make her leaving do all about me & the Big Red Backpack.
waiting on a train at St. Pancras
The trip to Canterbury was pretty uneventful. Train to London Marylebone, tube to St. Pancras, train to Canterbury, and I got to the hotel at around 23:00.
Had pre-work breakfast with many of the crowd from last night. The enthusiasm for a pre-work pint had faded, which is, I think, no bad thing.
Does it make me a bad person if I want to see what an actual American would think of the Spoons ‘American Breakfast ‘?
Pretty sure it does.
Maybe I’ll take some pictures and see whether I can start an international incident over pancakes & maple flavoured syrup.
For the very start of the day I worked from the hotel room, just to be sure that it’d work like I expected, then wandered into the office for the rest of the day.
My lunchtime excursion was to find a coin exchange machine, to deal with a giant cup of shrapnel I’d accumulated over the years.
No, I don’t really mind that they take their cut; The alternative was that I count all of those coins by hand. Worth the price.
After work tomorrow I’m off to Canterbury, to stay in a different Travelodge. And to do some touristy things. And to work.
I’m still figuring out how to arrange things in the bag, but that’s an ongoing process. Everything fits without an issue, but I don’t have a system nailed down yet for what goes where.
I’m leaning towards the idea that the top section, which can be accessed without undoing the straps on the rest of the bag but not if the bag is lying open, should be for the stuff I’ll immediately unpack at the hotel and/or for the wet/cold weather gear
