A visit to Tesco for our pre-holiday supplies shopping today – and I was greeted as I walked in to the shop with this sight! As usual Tesco have stocked up ready for the Reading Festival crowds this weekend, though I can’t help thinking they might confuse a few festival-goers with this display. Knowing the sort of people that are usually roaming the supermarkets of Reading by the third day of the festival, I suspect a few over-baked revellers will try to get inside these tents – if you stand on the giant piles of beer you could probably make a good go of it, too!

This is my brother-in-law Neil, doodling on the children’s activity sheet that they gave us at the pub, to keep the kids happy. It seems to be keeping him suitably amused!

Today was a day of firsts for Robert – his first trip on a train and his first visit to the cinema! And it all came about because we were a bit bored at home, when Sara decided we should all head to Basingstoke – the ultimate in spur-of-the-moment planning, not like us at all!

Toy Story 3 was excellent, Robert managed to sit through the entire thing quite happily – well, aside from a few trips around the mostly-empty cinema. Bloody hell it was expensive though! I know I’m probably a bit out-of-touch with cinema ticket prices, but three of us plus snacks cost over £30!?! It wasn’t like that back in my day…

Today’s photo, by the way, shows Robert enjoying the film from the comfort of the row behind us, where he spent the last 15 minutes of the movie. It was nice to be able to see how much he was enjoying it though!

This afternoon we once again visited that staple in child-entertainment (at least here in Reading!) – Beale Park. However, this time we visited with some friends – Ros and Keith, and their children. We hadn’t seen them for absolutely ages, so it was nice to have a day out with them and all the kids. Highlight of the day for at least one child was seeing these baby… birds. I don’t know what type of bird they are, but their chicks were very cute, waddling about all over the place! They even managed to top the park train, which is an impressive feat considering!

After my criticism of Sainsburys yesterday (which actually seems a bit harsh – quite a few people commented that there were probably reasons for this) I spotted a great use of cheeky marketing today, in the form of Lego. This Lego truck, which I spotted in ‘The Entertainer’ in Reading, is delivering tiny Lego boxes. Better still, they are all real Lego models you can buy – including the truck itself! Now THAT is clever marketing…

I’ve got the next 6 days off (a warm-up to our holiday in France in a week-and-a-half’s time!) so Robert and I headed out to Sainsburys this morning, to do the weekly shop. It was there that I spotted this sort-of marketing #fail…

As you can see, Sainsburys are trumpeting the insane value of these DVDs – “From £3 each” it says on the sign. But as you can clearly see (or at least you can if you click on the image), a lot of the DVDs are even cheaper than that, some at just £1. So why would you not put THAT on the sign?! Seemed a bit crazy to me…

I snapped today’s photo as I walked out of our office this evening – this light-switch-box has always amazed me. I’ve worked at Tamar for over 5 years now, but I still have no idea what any of these switches to. I don’t *think* they can be the lights for our office, since we have a whole other set of switches for those about 2 metres away – so that would be silly. I would give some of them a try to see, but I’m a bit worried they might be like that switch in that episode of Friends, and I’d spend the rest of the day wandering round trying to find out what was happening…!

The title of today’s photo was chosen by my lovely wife, who couldn’t understand why I’d taken a photo of a traffic island bollardy thing (what ARE they called?) on a path. She’s got a good point I guess, though I thought it was quite interesting seeing as how it shouldn’t really BE there.

I guess this is what people refer to as a slow news day…

Today we went to celebrate my nephew’s 3rd birthday with a garden party. I think this would have been my sixth toddler birthday party in as many weeks, so I’m getting to be quite a pro now. Though it didn’t stop me from getting the name of the Chuggington character immortalised in this cake though – Wilson, in case you’re wondering.

Today we headed over to Wokingham to attend the wedding party of some friends of ours, where this chocolate fountain was one of the central attractions. Well, aside from the happy couple, obviously.

I’m slightly ashamed to say I got quite, quite drunk – though even more disappointed to reveal that this photo is the closest I got to the chocolate fountain in question. For some reason I opted to stand on the veranda drinking beer all night. Total #FAIL on my part.