I have a deep-rooted fondness for Radio 4, and some of my favourite Radio 4 things are gentle first-person documentaries, where people are just talking. Second City Sitting, people talking about their favourite places to sit in Birmingham. It's lovely.
Walking to the station, by the riverside. The sky is a beautiful winter blue, with only a few (very pretty) clouds. The river is angry though: the level is high and the current is fast. Just by Reading Bridge (one of the two bridges across the Thames in Reading) there's an Environment Agency monitoring station, with a very big LCD read out of the amount of water flowing past. The display has been obscured by graffiti recently, so I haven't been able to tell what the flow rate actually was. It wasn't even graffiti really, just some kid colouring in the display so it looked like the first digit was an '8', which seemed unlikely, because in the summer the rate is 9 or 10-point-something, and an eight at the front would make the flow eighty-something. Someone had cleaned the display this morning. The flow was 86-point-something. Like I said, the river is angry.
At Reading railway station, in common with many other stations, there are three ways of telling the time: The old mechanical 7-segment digital clocks (good clicking noise), the newer CRT information displays, and the newest LED platform-specific information displays.
Since my Mac got irredeemably cranky a month ago I've been unable to alter the junk mail status of messages (when I try, Mail.app crashes. When I restart Mail, the status is unchanged...) and it had begun registering a lot of false positives, so I had to switch spam filtering off.
