Reading

That is so.

Well, some little time ago, I bought this place of mine not far from Redding's, and I found the deposit of Fuller's Earth in one of my fields.

Really? Not only that.

I have since discovered that this quite small deposit happens to be just a link between two very much larger ones.

Not much.

You know, Reading Football Club.

Just love for Reading Football Club.

You know, that's what goes through my head.

Listen, we're going to talk about Reading Football Club, whatever the hell Ross is talking about.

Maybe.

Before we do that, massive, massive thank you to the Amazons for their smash hit, My Blood.

And I think, like, maybe, maybe, maybe there's a level in there of sort of, like, convincing yourself at the same time, you know, when the game finishes and everything.

That is so.

Well, some little time ago, I bought this place of mine not far from Redding's, and I found the deposit of Fuller's Earth in one of my fields.

Really? Not only that.

I have since discovered that this quite small deposit happens to be just a link between two very much larger ones.

Most of them are going to stick with their programming, and there are going to be a fair few that are forced to wake up.

As I often do, I had a conversation with this man on the train who was drinking on his way to Reading.

He was a construction worker.

And he was telling me about how much Reading had changed.

He didn't quite have the words for it.

I mean, substitute Reading for Bothellford in this conversation.

Reading's gone.

Reading's gone.

Guy of Pontu, yeah.

Which I know from the Reading Museum copy, which we'll definitely come on to.

But just, I think throughout this episode, something we're going to establish really is that The Bayeux Tapestry is kind of like a museum in and of itself in how much it shows us about the history of the era.

And throughout this episode in particular, we're going to look at some of the rural significance and the rural symbolism that you can see throughout the tapestry and what it teaches us about farming and landscape and things like that.

There must have been a lot of flax growing and a sufficient production capacity for that to happen.

Then, of course, you've got the wool, and the wool is clearly derived from sheep and so we have to imagine there would have been a lot of sheep around and enough wool capacity for that to be generated and of course there was also the colorization so i think there's four different um natural dyes that we think we used to color the wool so there were there would have to be that in place as well so you've got those uh material aspects which were required and then you need people to do it and we don't know how many people made it so We don't know whether it was done very quickly or whether it was done over a long period of time.

But we do know that, for instance, when the ladies of the Leek Embroidery Society made the replica, which is now in Reading Museum, there was, I think, 35 of those ladies, and it took them a year to make what is an exact replica of the original.

So we kind of get a sense about the time scan involved.

WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE, EVER YOURS, OSCAR.

this lebrevox recording is in the public domain the case of warder martin some cruelties of prison life the editor of the daily chronicle sir i learn with great regret through the columns of your paper that the warder martin of reading prison has been dismissed by the prison commissioners for having given some sweet biscuits to a little hungry child i saw the three children myself on the monday preceding my release they had just been convicted and were standing in a row in the central hall in their prison dress carrying their sheets under their arms previous to their being sent to the cells allotted to them i happened to be passing along one of the galleries on my way to the reception room where i was to have an interview with a friend they were quite small children the youngest the one to whom the warder gave the biscuits being a tiny little chap for whom they had evidently been unable to find clothes small enough to fit i had of course seen many children in prison during the two years during which i was myself confined wandsworth prison especially contained always a large number of children But the little child I saw on the afternoon of Monday the 17th, at Reading, was tinier than any one of them.

I need not say how utterly distressed I was to see these children at Reading, for I knew the treatment in store for them.

The cruelty that is practised by day and night on children in English prisons is incredible, except to those that have witnessed it and are aware of the brutality of the system.

people nowadays do not understand what cruelty is they regard it as a sort of terrible mediaeval passion and connect it with the race of men like ecoline de romano and others to whom the deliberate infliction of pain gave a real madness of pleasure but men of the stamp of echelon are merely abnormal types of perverted individualism ordinary cruelty is simply stupidity it is the entire want of imagination it is the result in our days of stereotyped systems of hard and fast rules and of stupidity wherever there is centralization there is stupidity what is inhuman in modern life is officialism authority is as destructive to those who exercise it as it is to those on whom it is exercised it is the prison-board and the system that carries it out that is the primary source of the cruelty that is exercised on a child in prison the people who uphold the system have excellent intentions those who carry it out are humane in intention also responsibility is shifted on to the disciplinary regulations it is supposed that because a thing is the rule it is right the present treatment of children is terrible primarily from people not understanding the peculiar psychology of a child's nature a child can understand a punishment inflicted by an individual such as a parent or guardian and bear it with a certain amount of acquiescence what it cannot understand is a punishment inflicted by society it cannot realize what society is With grown people it is, of course, the reverse.

He always does harm.

the case is a special instance of the cruelty inseparable from a stupid system for the present governor of reading is a man of gentle and humane character greatly liked and respected by all the prisoners he was appointed in july last and though he cannot alter the rules of the prison system he has altered the spirit in which they used to be carried out under his predecessor he is very popular with the prisoners and with the warders indeed he has quite altered the whole tone of the prison life upon the other hand the system is of course beyond his reach as far as altering its rules is concerned i have no doubt that he sees daily much of what he knows to be unjust stupid and cruel but his hands are tied Of course I have no knowledge of his real views of the case of A.211, nor, indeed, of his views on our present system.

I merely judge him by the complete change he brought about in Reading Prison.

But the commute was just too difficult.

We lived in Reading and the commute to London was too hard and long hours.

So I did stop and I really struggled with that.

Actually, I felt I lost my identity for quite some time.