Out and about

Work is a little slack with so many colleagues on holiday at the moment, so yesterday I decided to take the day off and go shopping.

It’s been a while since I last visited Henley-on-Thames, so that was my main destination, but as it turned out this was just one of many places that I visited.

My outfit for the day would be a cute dress by “It’s At London” that I recently bought from a charity shop, paired with my trusty black boots by DUO which are sadly starting to show their age which is hardly surprising considering how often I wear them.

After getting my makeup on, and getting myself ready, I got in the car, set the satnav for Henley-on-Thames, and set off.

The route took me through Wokingham and I realised I was very close to The Trading Post, so detoured there (the first of several detours for the day).

There wasn’t anything there that caught my eye, although I couldn’t resist the temptation to try on a hat.

Back on the road, I resumed my journey to Henley-on-Thames, and parked up at a Pay & Display car park with a very reasonable charge of £1 for 2 hours, although finding a space was a bit of a nightmare. It was “dead man’s shoes” but I eventually found someone leaving and was able to get into their space the moment they had vacated it.

First stop was Tudor House Antiques, which is a shop I have visited before (although I don’t think I blogged about it).

I sneakily set up a small tripod for my camera phone and a small Bluetooth remote shutter release, with limited success.

Although the place was crammed with interesting stuff, nothing caught my eye enough to make a purchase.

Next up were, in short order, The Vintage Look, The Ferret, Chiltern Antiques, and Vintage Vogue.

In one of those was a film prop of a Chinese sword, which I found myself telling the seller about as I have some knowledge of Japanese and Chinese swords, and was explaining the difference between them, and what attributes of it definitely made it Chinese. Just after that, a man came in and started saying it was Japanese. The seller and I just looked at each other, and I said no more. Always best not to get into a discussion with a man who knows he’s right, even when he’s wrong. 🙂

I also popped into several charity shops, but the prices were enormously higher than round my way. Plus I have been buying way too many clothes lately, and there was also nothing I really wanted in them.

My 2 hours parking was almost up, so I returned to the car and headed out.

On the way back towards home, I decided to detour via Reading, and popped into Fanny’s Antiques. I find it’s always nice to get a bit of Fanny when you can. 😉

Whilst in there I found an interesting picture. It was of the silhouette of a nude lady, and was in 3D relief, making use of gravel as the medium. Or, at least, modelled to look like that.

The ticket price was £44, which was too much for me. But I asked the seller for the best price and after a little haggling, £37 was the lowest he could go to. Even at that price I was undecided, and almost left it, but in the end decided to buy it.

It was lunchtime now, so I decided to head into Reading itself for a visit to Yo Sushi. I parked in Holy Brook car park, although when I saw the parking tariff I thought it should have been called “Holy F*ck” instead. When you consider that I had paid £1 for 2 hours in Henley-on-Thames, four times as much for the same amount seemed rather a rip off to me.

I had a nice lunch in Yo Sushi, including tuna maki and tuna sashimi, which are no longer on the menu but they were happy to make for me anyway.

I’d forgotten quite how expensive sushi can get, though, and the bill was rather eye-watering. Less said about that the better.

After lunch, I decided that I didn’t feel like traipsing round Reading, so decided to head out even though my 2 hours wasn’t up (mainly because I had erroneously thought I only had an hour, and that was almost elapsed).

I headed out in the direction of home, but on the way I realised I wasn’t too far from Eversley Barn Antiques.

Hilary has now retired, and a lovely couple called Judy and Steve have taken over. I have already met them on a previous visit, and instantly hit it off with them and find them very easy to chat to. When I went in, they greeted me by name and invited me to sit down for a natter, which was lovely. We ended up talking for ages, and then I had a wander round to look at the stock.

There was a cabinet from a new seller there, which mainly had glassware. I don’t usually buy glass, but I was drawn to a Studio Glass vase. The style was very much Scandinavian (in my opinion), but it was actually English by a designer called Stuart Akroyd, which is a name I’m not familiar with. It’s signed on the bottom, but was being sold “as found” which means there was damage to it. I found some chipping on the base, which can’t be easily seen, and also some imperfections in the glass. But it had a certain something that drew me to it. The ticket price was £28, but I asked if there was any movement there and Judy phoned the seller, and we managed to get it down to £23 and at that price it was worth taking a punt.

After chatting for a little longer, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome and made my goodbyes and left.

It was now very late afternoon, and usually that would have been enough for me. But there was a meet of my local car club that evening, starting in around 90 mins, and I thought that maybe it would be nice to go to that, so I fixed up my makeup, checked the fluids on my weekend car (which is the marque that the car club is for), and made my way up there.

I stayed for around 2 hours and I don’t think I stopped talking once. In fact, what with talking to Judy and Steve, and the car meet, I probably did more talking than I have in the whole month preceding, due to the fact that I work from home and interact with colleagues predominantly by email and IM.

Then it really was time to call it a day, so I returned home arriving just before 9pm. It had been a very long day.

Throughout the whole day, I wasn’t mis-gendered once and was in fact correctly gendered several times, usually by mums saying “watch out for the lady!” to their kids who weren’t looking where they were going. I also got complemented on my outfit by a lady in a charity shop. So that was all very nice.

This morning my feet, hips, and lower back are a little sore. But that’s not entirely unexpected.