A visit to Newbury
Whilst I have been busy not posting, Babel and I have managed to have a couple of very pleasant weekends. Two weeks ago we went into Birmingham city centre, and as retribution for the fact that I had made him watch The Reader some weeks previously, Babel subjected me to a whole two hours of The Wrestler. It was nowhere near as bad as I thought it might have been – in fact I’d go so far as to say that I enjoyed it in parts, but there were bits of it which were far, far too brutal and violent for my liking, and I don’t think that I would want to watch it again!
We had a nice day overall though, sharing a bottle of wine in Walkabout before rather randomly visiting a jewellery shop to get my finger measured in case I should ever manage to hypnotise Babel into proposing to me 
This weekend also seemed to involve quite a lot of wine! On Saturday afternoon we headed down to Newbury in order to celebrate the birthday of one of Babel’s friends. I was a little lukewarm about the whole concept of going to Newbury, it being in such close proximity to my hated Wantage, but actually the two places turned out to be like chalk and cheese. I was very favourably impressed by Newbury indeed, although everything was very expensive because it’s in Berkshire, and it’s actually the sort of place I’d like to live; a town big enough to have it’s own branch of Pizza Express, but not so large that you’d can’t get to the fields within ten minutes 
It didn’t take long to get there at the speed Babel drives ( ) and indeed the journey was beautifully straightforward until we got a little confused in the one-way pedestrianised system around Newbury town centre whilst we were looking for our hotel. Happily, Rolf was able to come to our rescue
For some reason I was so tired when we arrived that I genuinely had a nap before we ventured out. When we finally did, communication problems meant that we struggled to find everybody else, and so Babel and I went to Pizza Express on our own to have some tea, and ended up sharing a bottle of wine in a very civilised manner
After that we managed to find the others and settled down for the evening in a pleasant enough establishment called The Lamb. The plastic models of sheep erected about the place were a little unusual, as was the toothless dog who tried to steal my crisps, but otherwise it was all cool and Babel bought me a very big glass of wine indeed. Had I not drunk so much wine, I’m sure I would have done much better at grasping the rules of the actually-not-very-complicated card game which we subsequently started playing. Drunk, it seemed very difficult, but sober it’s probably not any more taxing than Happy Families!
On Sunday we both seemed to feel a little hungover without actually feeling ill, and so we got off to a slow sort of start with a very delicious cooked breakfast in the hotel. After a stroll around the bookshops of Newbury, we stopped off for a coffee in the local branch of Caffe Nero, before meeting up with some friends of Babel’s for a pub lunch. I have to confess that I wasn’t terribly hungry at this stage, but it was a tasty enough lasagne
All in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable weekend; it’s always nice to be able to spend some time with Babel, and it was especially nice after such a tiring couple of weeks 