Sunday in Oxford

[louiselux]

We went to Oxford yesterday, partly to mooch about the bookshops, partly to go to the botanical gardens. It's 20 minutes on the train from Reading, which seemed the perfect travelling distance.

So we mooched a lot and found a new second hand bookshop, where I scored heavily in quality if not in quantity: one copy of Dracula, Prince of Many Faces by my old friends Radu Florescu and Raymond T McNally. It's their follow up, many years later, to In Search of Dracula




An art installation in the grounds of what was the old gaol and is now a branch of the up market hotel Malmaison (Bad House, fittingly). The junk furniture is apparently arrayed to imitate the layout of the old cells.



Nice book shop near Oxford Castle, stuffed full of genre fiction, run by a very nice man who told me it was his dream to run such a shop. He was a part time heating engineer too and had blueprints spread out on his desk - multitasking to make ends meet. He was great.



My book yay!



Dramatic iris is dramatic at the botanical gardens



There was a patch of bobble-headed alliums surrounding huge silvery artichokes



A huge crumpled leaf



My decision-making story die, 50p each from Borders. I haven't had any decision making crises yet, but am looking forward to having one soon.



Lemon muffin, omg. It was delicious with a latte.



Portrait in a bin - Matt is next to me, reading Patrick O'Brian, and I am reading my new book and taking photos.



My feets, randomly. I'm chucking these plimsolls soon, because it is now impossible to stop them smelling bad.



Cherry beer on the way home and more healthy water. The wee bag is an incredibly useful present from i_am_zan - a tiny insulated cool bag, with a tag that says 'lube sheep' on it. I use it fortaking my milk and probiotic yoghurt drinks to work

Comments

[devikun.livejournal.com]

Oh hey I had that book once!

Looks like a pleasant day rambling about. Your beer is quite strange to me. Are you sure it's alcoholic?? ;) And does it *really* say Bacchus on the bottle??

Plimsolls, Chucks, Dunlops. Three words, but they are they same thing! I find this very cool. I have a red pair of Cons actually (as in Converse All Stars) and I love them to death. Well I haven't yet, but I probably will. They replaced a pair of black and white Pony's which I *did* love to death. Why do we get so attached to our sneakers that we will wear them even when they are torn and stink???

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

It is cherry beer, and it is alcoholic, I promise - 5.8% abv. :D It does indeed say Bacchus on the bottle - it's the brand, and they do raspberry beer too, although cherry is my fave.

Apparently, it's brewed in Belgium, which I never knew.

Dunlops! I never heard that one before. There's nothing like a pair of battered old converse. It's so hard to throw them away.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Ah, that looks like a fruit lambic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambic#Fruit)! They come in a variety of flavors, although cherry and raspberry seem to be the ones that turn up on the store shelves most often in the states.

(I've been fed several varieties of the stuff, in a quest by beer-geek friends to find a brew that didn't make me gag...no go. I could still taste beer under the fruit. Looks like I have to stick to cider!)

[devikun.livejournal.com]

I love them so much I've got no less than about 5 or 6 pairs! Well they're not all Cons, most are Dunlops. Also called Volleys, full name being Dunlop Volleys (http://www.volleys.com.au/flash/street.html) (beware, embedded music!). They are nice and cheap (like Converse used to be), pretty trendy and with a great deal of sentimental cred for Aussies - an iconic domestic brand worn since about the 1940's by our tennis players (and we love our tennis players here almost more than our cricketers).

Oops! Sorry about the bung tag!