By the riverside, you made up my mind

[millionreasons]

I’m disappointed by the lack of a celebrity angle on Thursday’s events. Where is Geri Halliwell, gushing that she thought her hairdresser was in the blast at Edgware Road on her way to touch up Ginger’s roots, but then found out she was OK? Where is Kerry Katona-McFadden-Katona bleating that she was supposed to be on a train from Kings Cross to do an interview for Peterborough FM, but she overslept? Why hasn’t Pete Doherty said he wants to re-join the Libertines to show those terrorists that they can’t take away our freedoms? Will Bob Geldoff organise a Live Aldg8 concert? Maybe I need to wait for the new issue of Heat to come out. I just hope a new charity wristband is made.

 

We escape Terrorised London^TM for the provincial climes of Reading (tubes and trains running fine) to meet Jeff and hop onto another train to Twyford and then a third to Henley, where we begin a Thames trek back to Reading. Henley is full of pleasure-crafts, curving bridges, twee cottages, pretty locks and the sort of posh English rural life that looks eternal, from this angle at least. We pass gigantic estates with their own (miniature) railway stations and villages where not naming your house (Arboreal, Glebe Cottage) is tantamount to having a skoda parked in your very long driveway. Over the railway line and further out into the Countryside Proper where all is cow-parsley and brambles and thistles and dragonflies and river birds and a gang of kestrels circling us and tractors threshing hay. The Thames gleams in the hot July sun; geese are swimming and the pollen is high. We get to Sonning where we stop in an upper-crust pub (sarnie=£6.50) and follow the glimmery river back to Reading - where it becomes dirty and litter-infested.

 

 

 

After cups of tea, PSP2 games and rhubarb picking (there’s nothing to make you feel so foolish as carrying two bags of rhubarb), we go out to the Rising Sun to see the Fog Band. We’ve fortunately missed the first group, local scenesters The Palestinians. I’m quite glad. Bobby is dressed in a Henley Regatta Blazer and shampoo-ad shiny hair, his cheekbones a-glinting with perspiration and fairy-lights. His long note in The Outdoor Life is worthy of Lorne from Angel and they sound good once they’ve turned the vox up and the guitars down; less garage, more soul. The headliners are called New Rhodes and unfortunately don’t have anything to do with the Duran Duran keyboard player of the same name. The singer looks like a cross between Eric Idle and Robin Gibb and the band play uninspired homog-rock and so we leave and catch a train back to our city.