Reading; Sunday, 13 September, 2020

I had a nice lie in and a later breakfast before checking out of the hotel and wandering across town to my first stop of the morning, the Museum of English Rural Life.

The museum has gained a bit of a cult following for it’s social media feed which has managed to raise the profile of a small niche agricultural museum in Berkshire up to that of some of the biggest museums on the planet, and its clear that the policy of a tongue in cheek approach to the subject has rubbed off on the rest of the museum team as what could be quite a stale museum is instead lively and interesting with lots to see, and through some ingenious out of the box thinking through the use of cheap cleanable styluses, they’ve managed to keep a lot of their interactive displays working where as a lot of other museums have just switched everything off.

I spent a long time wandering round the museum, including stopping to have a light lunch in the sun trap of their garden.

From the MERL I wandered back towards the centre of Reading, but skirted the very centre and instead headed down to the Thames Path by Reading Bridge and followed the path along some distance to Caversham Bridge and the boarding point for the afternoon cruise that I had booked.

I was about half an hour early so I had a little wander around the park near the pier before heading back just as the boat came in from its previous tour. As is usual, I’d only been stood there for a few minutes before other people started arriving and pretty soon there was a decent sized queue – so I was glad I’d headed back as early as I did.

The cruise was for 90 minutes and involved sailing upstream past some of the most expensive real estate in Berkshire and then along the Berkshire/Oxfordshire border until we reached the lock and weir at Mapledurham. Here the boat turned round and headed back towards Reading.

We landed back at Caversham Bridge and from there I walked the 15 minutes or so directly back to the city centre. As I needed to be making a move relatively soon I stopped at a Sushi bar on the high street and had an early dinner there, before heading back to the hotel to pick up my luggage and then make my way back to the station for, what I though was, the 16:38 train.

Turns out that at short notice (at least for the online journey planners) the Sunday train service had been amended to 22 and 52 minutes past each hour, which meant as I arrived at 16:22 I was just in time to see the train pulling out. Thankfully the 16:52 was already sat on the platform so I was able to go and sit on that and waited for it to depart on its amended journey – normal route to Twickenham and then it revered to go for a wander around South West London through Kingston and Wimbledon before finally making it back to Clapham Junction nearly 90 minutes after leaving Reading.