The Return of the Blogroll, Plus a Trip to Reading

Thanks so much for all your blog recommendations the other day - it's been great to have some new blogs to check out on my tea breaks.

I used to subscribe to a lot of different blogs via Google Reader, then I found the list of unread posts got really overwhelming so I started unsubscribing to a lot of them... until when Google Reader went away earlier this year I only had a few blogs left on my list. I was following a lot of the bloggers on Twitter or Facebook anyway so I thought, why bother finding a new Reader?

But actually although I don't miss the feeling that I need to "catch up" with all the unread posts that build up when I'm busy doing other things, I do miss having a big list of stuff to read when I'm in the mood for a bit of craft / design / pretty picture inspiration. So I'm going old school and have added a blogroll to the sidebar of my blog (down on the bottom left). It's very much a work in progress - I keep remembering blogs I love that I've not included in the list, and I'm bound to discover lots of new-to-me blogs I want to add to the list. It'll be great for me to have a list I can dip into when the mood takes me, and I hope it'll help you guys discover some new favourites too.

In other news... for last week's Nice Day Out I spent the day in Reading. I pretty much grew up in Reading (I went to school there for 8 years) so this wasn't the most adventurous of days out, but it was nice to visit with a tourist-y eye instead of just working my way round the shops which is the usual reason I visit these days... well, that or to get the train to somewhere else! (When we had to describe where we lived for our French & German GCSEs we all learned how to say "Reading is a town near London in the South of England. It has excellent transport links").

The weather was lovely so I went for a walk round town...

 

 ... then had lunch at Picnic and popped into Jacksons, an independent (and delightfully old fashioned) department store that's sadly closing at the end of this year.
 

 

Then I went to Reading Museum and visited a couple of my favourite exhibits - the Victorian replica of the Bayeux Tapestry and the Huntley & Palmers gallery which is all about the (now closed) local biscuit factory. I love looking at all the different tins, and the little films about biscuit production throughout the 20th Century are really interesting (you can see a couple of them here and here). The only "problem" is that you come away with a strong desire to eat (or bake and then eat) some tasty biscuits!