Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!

A long day yesterday, as I rose at 4.15am and left the house a little more than half-an-hour later to make the drive to Slough. When I think back to the time - not that long gone - when I used to regularly do this twice (and on rare occasions, three times) a week it gives me shivers.

I've been fortunate this year. The last time I made the trek South, back in April and with a different destination (Bracknell), was the only other time I've had to drive anywhere. A welcome change from the financial year 2003/4 when I did 22,000 business miles. If I had to do that now I don't think I'd ever be awake outside of the working day!

Anyway, enough waffle. The point of this post is the number of surprises that pop up when you haven't taken a once-familiar journey for more than six months. For a start, Cherwell Valley services - where I habitually take my breakfast - has disappeared. Well, not disappeared exactly, but when you enter the car park in the darkness of a late autumn morning before 7am, and the building is not where it once was, the first impression is definitely one of it having been spirited away.

Its replacement, on the other side of the car park, has a prefabricated temporary feel to it, which was explained when I returned to the car. Dawn having broken a bit, I could see the beginnings of a new steel skeleton where the old building used to be, along with a couple of cranes, so the owners clearly intend eventually to put it back where it was. Bit of a drastic and expensive solution to a leaking roof (the only problem  I recall being visible with the old place), but it shows there's still lots of money in the motorway services game.

Slough too held some surprises. The company is vacating the building but it's a slow process, made even slower when they realised how hard it was going to be to move the test rigs. Finding space for them in the new building, levering them out of their current position (where they've been for at least ten years to my knowledge), moving them without "dropping" any, discovering there's a percentage of them that won't turn on again when they arrive at their new home (always a risk when moving equipment of any age) and all this at a time when we're in the middle of a critical test phase. It didn't take long for the buttock clenching to kick in and delay the move.

But the building is half decommissioned. So the first thing to greet me was a sign on the door saying reception was no longer manned and I should telephone whoever I was visiting to gain access. Only he was late. Thankfully a passing pedestrian happened to know the door code so I made it inside and headed up to the floor I used to hot desk on. Stepping out of the lift I noticed the door of the gents had been adorned with a sign saying "this facility is no longer in use" and on entering the office I discovered serried ranks of empty desks devoid of phones, power, or LAN.

I headed down the stairs (which weren't lit) towards a friendly, but dim light below. It was coming from the 4th floor. The top half of the building is effectively moth balled, and that includes the restaurant. So no hot food, no decent coffee, no snack bar, half as many toilets as there should be, and desk spaces at an all time low. Betjeman was right all along!