It was my birthday about four weeks ago – 45 again, please don’t ask me for any documentary evidence – and I had everything mapped out. A couple of days off that week, and then the best part of the following week off into the bargain. We had an Airbnb booked in Bristol for the second week, just up the road from Wilsons and Little Hollows, and a packed itinerary of restaurants to visit, some of them for the blog and some of them just because.

I was all geared up for a week of waking up with nothing to do, of eating well and drinking well, a week of that feeling of being carefree and elsewhere, and I was so looking forward to it. I even had one day planned where we’d stay in our neighbourhood – a bacon sandwich at Wilsons Bread Shop for brunch, good coffee, a spot of mooching and lazing in the afternoon, dinner nearby and then drinks at the Good Measure, my favourite Bristol pub. It was going to be a glorious 24 hours where, just briefly, we could pretend we lived there.

It would have happened, too, but for one thing: my wife fractured a bone in her foot again, and was under strict medical advice to keep her steps to an absolute minimum. I had been running on fumes in the run-up to that mini break – we both had, really – and we were both devastated. We contemplated taking the train to Bristol, as originally planned, and taking taxis everywhere, seeing it as convalescing somewhere else, and my wishful thinking let me believe, for something like half an hour, that such a revised plan would work, would be a sensible use of time and money.

Deep down I knew we were just fooling ourselves. So the Airbnb booking was pushed out until later in the year, and I went in and individually cancelled every single restaurant booking, feeling my holiday dreams die a little more with every email confirmation. I knew it couldn’t be helped, and I knew it wasn’t Zoë’s fault, but I was in a funk. I should explain that this is a “having your birthday in March” thing: I lost two successive birthdays to Covid, the world locked down days before my birthday five years ago, so I felt like fate had already fucked with enough of my plans.

Anyway, after enough sulking Zoë and I hatched a plan: we would have a staycation instead. Not what people like to refer to as a staycation, where you go on holiday somewhere else in the country where you live, but a proper staycation where you sleep every night in your house but experience being on holiday in your home, for a change. We would do some of the things in and around Reading that we loved and others we never got round to, the week of my birthday and the week after, the only proviso being that they had to be places we could reach by bus or taxi.

So this week, instead of the usual review, you get a guide to my Reading staycation, a little What I Did On My Holidays piece. You get that for a couple of reasons. One is that so many people liked the idea that I just had to write it up. Plenty of you wanted to read this one, and someone commented on the Edible Reading Facebook page that she’d said something similar on a local group elsewhere. “I often think we should pretend we’re visiting, and spend the weekend enjoying fab coffee shops, the river and so on” she wrote, adding “We are lucky!”. 

We are lucky, indeed. And the second reason why I’m writing this piece this week is that Reading, around the time that I had my staycation, had a bit of a moment where it featured in the national press more than once. First, the Sunday Times listed it as one of the Best Places To Live 2025. The writeup had a little bit of the obvious in it: the MERL got a mention, no doubt because of past glories, and the references to Paddington felt a tad clichéd. And I don’t know what Polaroids Thames Lido’s PR must be in possession of to ensure that they’re always mentioned in a piece of this kind, but mentioned they inevitably were.

Yet beyond that the Sunday Times actually managed to capture something of what makes our town special, even if they think the tap room in the town centre is run by a brewery called Silent Craft. I was especially pleased to see mentions of Blue Collar, the Harris Garden, Madoo and Mama’s Way. Someone had obviously done their research, and I speak as a source they might well have used for it. And I was thrilled to see Dough Bros, barely eight months after I reviewed them, being talked about in the national press. This felt like a writeup of Reading as it actually is, rather than the bland homogenised version Reading UK (or Reading CIC, or REDA, or whoever they are) is always droning on about.

A couple of weeks ago Reading appeared in the national papers again. The article in the The i Paper might have described it as an “average commuter town”, and spent a lot of time talking about Reading’s failed city centre bids and how easy it is to reach or leave, but even it managed to squeeze in mentions of Reading Museum, Phantom – which it said was “by the river”, for some reason – and Caversham Court Gardens. Okay, the QI klaxon still went off when the contractually obligated references to Thames Lido and the MERL popped up, as they always do, but as Reading’s most famous inmate once said, it’s still better to be talked about than not.

So, with all that said, here’s how I spent my staycation – spread across a couple of weeks – in Reading and its environs, only travelling by bus and taxi and still managing to fit in some of the very best things the town and the surrounding countryside have to offer. I hope it helps, and maybe it will tempt you to spend one of your next holidays in Reading, too. You could do an awful lot worse.

* * * * *

So where did we start, on my birthday? At the Nag’s Head, of course.

The first drink of a holiday, for me at least, is always a wondrous moment. I eschew the airport Wetherspoons, although I’ve been known to have a pre-flight Nando’s or Wagamama, and nowadays I pass on drinking on the plane, too, because British Airways is no longer what it was. But there’s something about that very first drink when you reach your destination that’s special, that first ultra-cold lager or fortifying glass of vermut, glass of Brugse Zot or industrial strength Spanish gin and tonic. By that point all your cares have dissipated, and all that remains is relaxation and indulgence.

I didn’t see any reason why it should be any different on a staycation, so our first taxi dropped us on Russell Street. And because the sun was out, albeit briefly, we started our first beer in the garden out back before coming to terms with reality and moving back inside. I’ve talked at great length before – nearly everyone has – about how brilliant the Nag’s is: how it covers all bases, how it’s a perfect summer and winter pub, great on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, the best Reading Half Marathan and Bank Holiday Monday pub.

And that’s all true, but it wasn’t until I went there as part of my staycation that I realised another wonderful side of the pub I’d never experienced: boozing there with reckless abandon, on a school night, knowing you didn’t have to work the next day. You know, like people do when they’re on holiday.

It was at its very best that night – just busy enough, but not rammed with people watching the football, tables sufficiently occupied that it had a pleasing buzz but with no frustrating queue at the bar. Sometimes I forget, too, just how good the Nag’s Head’s beer list is, but lately it has had one of two brilliant session IPAs on keg most of the time – Sonoma by Manchester’s Track and Santiago by far more local Two Flints, from Windsor. Both are great, and both give you the nursery slopes to start on before it all goes downhill and you’re on the dank, stronger stuff you know you’ll regret the next day.

Perhaps best of all, we nabbed my favourite spot in the whole place – the little table for two, right up at the bar, next to the coat hooks. Perfect for sitting side by side and looking out on that room, seeing if you’ve spotted anybody you know – to greet or to blank, both are possible – and, of course, ideally suited for just standing up, getting someone’s attention and picking your next beer.

It was blissful, and on a night like that you can easily think that Reading could do without any other pubs, as long as it still had this one. And I could have stayed all night but, like the first few drinks of a holiday, the session was inevitably curtailed by dinner plans. We had a reservation for the first night of our holiday, my birthday, all the way across town.

* * * * *

I don’t get to eat at Clay’s anywhere near as often as I would like to, for a number of reasons. One is writing this blog – having to eat somewhere new most weeks means that, unlike many people, I can’t just go there because I feel like it (and no, I’m not asking for sympathy). Another is their location. I’m sure that the residents of Caversham are delighted to have them nearby, almost as delighted as they are merely to live in Caversham, but the truth is that when they were in the centre, and I was in the centre, they were a more frequent pit stop for me.

Even so, when it’s a special occasion they are the pre-eminent choice, for me and I suspect many others. When Zoë got a promotion last year, it was Clay’s we turned up at on the spur of the moment to celebrate, and for my birthday it was hard to imagine eating anywhere else in Reading. Going through those deep ochre doors to find it warm and bustling I felt excitement, as I always do, about the prospect of eating there. Because the menu at Clay’s, even excluding their regional specials, has so many good dishes on it that you could eat a different combination every time and never get bored, especially if you go there as infrequently as I do.

I’ve never reviewed Clay’s, for reasons I explained years ago when it opened, and to my surprise I still get people approaching me via social media occasionally, even now, explaining that they’re going there for the first time and asking what they should consider ordering. Very rarely has there been a restaurant where you could so easily get away with a non-committal “oh, it’s all good”, but even so I always feel like I have to respond, all the time painfully aware that you could ask a dozen people and get a dozen slightly different answers, none of which would be wrong.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s my answer: for starters I think it’s hard to look beyond five of their small plates. The bhooni kaleji, the chicken livers that have been on the menu since the very beginning, are outstanding – if you don’t like chicken livers they’ll convert you, and if you do like them they will ruin all others. The gobi Manchurian is the elevation of a dish which is quite good all across Reading, very good at Chilis but exquisite at Clay’s. They simply will not be outdone, you see, not by anyone.

Nandana and Sharat are fried chicken fans, as am I, and their Payyoli chicken fry is as good a rendition as you will get anywhere in Reading, including Gurt Wings. It comes dusted in a rich coconut crumb and served with tomato chutney, and although I always end up sharing it I also grumble silently that it’s too good to share: it helps that of all the small plates at Clay’s it must be the least small. I also resent sharing Clay’s pork belly, which is sweetened with jaggery, sharpened with ginger and cooked until it is sticky, rendered heaven, but I do it.

And finally, I would always tell you to try the cut mirchi chat. I have a real soft spot for this dish because I think I tried a prototype before it went on the menu, and it’s always for me been the most sharable, most snackable of all Clay’s starters: those slices of chilli and gram flour, crunchy and golden, moreish almost beyond belief. If you ask someone else, they’ll tell you to have the prawns, or the paneer majestic, or the lamb chops. And they’re right too, by the way, just differently right to me.

On this visit I decided to forego the pork belly – there were only two of us, after all – and although I regretted it I knew I was storing up a treat for next time. And if you asked me what I recommended from the main courses, I’d wax lyrical about Clay’s yakhni pulao, rice cooked in lamb bone broth, crowned with slow-cooked curried lamb. Or I’d tell you to go fancy and have the beef shin, cooked osso buco style and adorned with wild mushrooms.

If I was feeling old-school I’d recommend Nandana’s monkfish curry, sharper and more tart than her other dishes, made the way her mum does (although slightly less punchy than her mum’s version). And I would point out that the ghee roast chicken, the finest dish Clay’s ever made available to its home delivery customers, is on the menu in the restaurant, for now at least. I’d say that if you’ve never tried it you’re missing out.

But it was my birthday, and I was reminded that I ate at Clay’s before it was even born, so I had the bhuna venison, a dish I have been eating and loving now for nearly seven years. A couple of years ago I declared it Reading’s best dish, and eighteen intervening months have not changed my mind. But, because you can teach an old dog new tricks, on this visit I used a life hack I’d picked up from my friend Graeme, when we visited Clay’s earlier in the year for no other reason than because it was Friday.

“Have the keema biryani on the side, instead of the usual baghara rice”, he said. “Life changing.”

I did, and it was, and now I can’t imagine ever doing otherwise.

I have never been one of those people who goes to restaurants and takes home leftovers. I’ve always envied those people their limited appetites, or their restraint, while also wondering if they’re maybe a tad parsimonious. But on this occasion we quit while we were ahead, making room for Clay’s amazing peanut butter ice cream and a glass of dessert wine. We rolled into a taxi clutching a little plastic tub full of leftovers – some ghee roast chicken, some bhuna venison, some keema biryani. The first meal of a holiday is always special, but even having a staycation this felt as special as any dinner I’ve had away.

The following lunchtime, nursing a moderate to severe hangover and fresh from the series finale of Severance, I reheated it all in a saucepan for the two of us for lunch. The kitchen went from smelling of reed diffusers to smelling amazing in the space of five minutes, and if that jumble of flavours didn’t go I can honestly say I would never have noticed. You don’t get this luxury when you holiday abroad, I thought to myself.

* * * * *

On the Friday night, hangover largely under control, I did something I don’t do nearly often enough: I went to the theatre. I’ve always loved Progress, the proudly independent theatre on the Mount, and despite moving into the neighbourhood last year I’ve not visited anywhere near as frequently as I ought. So months ago I booked tickets for Zoë and I to watch Lovesong, Abi Morgan’s bittersweet portrait of a 40 year marriage.

As an aside, I should say that although Progress is a five minute walk from my house it’s a surprisingly difficult distance to travel by taxi. You feel faintly embarrassed even asking, and Zoë had to explain the situation to her cab driver, waggling the moonboot lest she be judged as too posh to push. But once you’re there, Progress really is quite a charming place – a little bar, full of affluent, cultured patrons and an auditorium with seats that are surprisingly comfy and spacious.

Does it ruin the overall effect to say that I didn’t love Lovesong? Probably, although I thought a couple of the performances were excellent. Some of that, I think, was down to it being a bit of a bummer: a play which ends with the husband counting out the pills so his ill wife can take her own life – sorry about the spoilers – is never going to give you that Friday feeling. It reminds me of the time when I sat down with Zoë to watch Vertigo, having told her what an incredible film it was, to be met with blank rage when the credits rolled.

“You didn’t tell me it was going to end like that!”

“What did you expect? He wasn’t going to run through the streets to get to the airport just in time to deliver a big speech and stop her getting on the plane. It’s not that kind of film.”

Honestly, she was furious: I’ve never made that mistake again.

But Lovesong, well, it induced symptoms akin to Vertigo. We took the comically short taxi journey home dead set on eating chocolate in front of the television and watching something slightly more uplifting. Like the news. Even so, I recommend adding some culture to a Reading staycation, because mine wouldn’t have been the same without it. And I can’t recommend the whole Progress Theatre experience highly enough – in fact I’ve already booked a ticket for the comedy next month, to watch the splendidly named Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. I honestly can’t wait.

* * * * *

My final meal out of the first leg of my staycation was one of the biggest treats of all, Gurt Wings at Blue Collar Corner. I have been eating Gurt’s food since they first turned up at Blue Collar in Market Place, and I remember Glen telling me how good they were before he even landed them as a semi-regular trader. I recall trekking to Market Place regularly during lockdown, back when Glen wasn’t even allowed seating, and eating my chicken on the little concrete posts opposite Picnic.

I even remember eating their slightly obscene chicken burger special, served in an iced doughnut with a strip of candied bacon on top. They did it once a year, and I reckoned once a year was enough – until I had it two years in succession, and realised that once in a lifetime was probably enough. And of course, I remember going there after Zoë was discharged from the Royal Berks with Covid, in the winter of 2021, and them giving me a big portion of chicken for her, telling me to run like the wind and get it back to her.

That kind of thing makes you a fan. I have followed the hokey cokey of Gurt opening permanently at Blue Collar Corner, then pulling out, then coming back for special occasions. In that time I’ve eaten their chicken in Bristol, from time to time, and watched them open a permanent site in Bristol’s Wapping Wharf, team up with seemingly every influencer known to man, expand their fleet and start popping up at exotic locations like Royal Wootton Bassett and finally, in January, coming to Blue Collar Corner again, back for good, Gary Barlow style.

And even though I can now have them whenever I like it doesn’t, yet, make their food feel any less special. Besides, eating it when you’re on holiday – even if it’s a Saturday when everybody else is off work too – did feel a little different, sitting on the benches, people watching and waiting for the buzzer to go off. I decided to be clever and try one of Gurt’s two influencer-inspired specials – god knows why they’ve never asked to do a collab with me – strips loaded with garlic butter and festooned with Parmesan. It was a departure from my almost habitual order – popcorn chicken “Lost In Translation”, with gochujang and sriracha – and I enjoyed it, but not enough not to slightly regret not sticking to my guns.

It helped that we had the huge blocks of halloumi too, covered in habanero chilli syrup and crumbled honeycomb. That made everything better. Afterwards I put a picture of my food up and someone, online, said the chicken to tater tot ratio seemed all wrong. My instinct was to jump to Gurt’s defence, but looking back through my many photos of Gurt’s chicken strips I had to concede that the commenter had a point.

But that’s 2025 all over: you get less, for more, and if you decide to be outraged by it you’re not only hurting yourself but the businesses you love. There are times to be aggrieved by shrinkflation – I feel a bit stabby every time I buy a 90g bar of chocolate – but when you’re on holiday is not one of them.

Our commitment to using buses to spare Zoë’s foot was so total that we then did something ridiculous. We walked from Blue Collar to the very top of the Oxford Road, just so we could get the number 1 bus from Newbury. We did that because that bus terminates halfway up Blagrave Street, a stone’s throw from C.U.P. And we did that so we could sit in our time-honoured seats up at the window, on those fetching leather stools, drinking mocha and looking out on the town.

It was a Saturday, and opposite our seats we could see the Town Hall, and the entrance we’d emerged from ten months ago, into a swarm of confetti, newlywed, dazed and happy. I always love sitting there when married couples come out, mobbed by their friends and relatives, and I remember that glorious sunny day last year when that was me. I often holiday in the same places – Malaga, Bruges, Granada, Montpellier – and some of that is about going back to places that hold such happy memories for me. It turns out that a staycation in Reading is like that, too.

* * * * *

For the second leg of my staycation, the following week, there were some chores to do. Despite having moved last summer there were still boxes to unpack, order to impose on chaos, shit to get done. I am not someone who enjoys doing those things in my time off – I moan, grumble and gripe (“when else are you going to do it, then?” Zoë asks, and then I gripe some more because I don’t have an answer). But I agreed to it, just this once, on the basis that we interspersed it with treats. And the treat I had very firmly in mind – for the first morning of the staycation, no less – was a trip to Fidget & Bob.

Fidget & Bob has changed quite a lot from the place I visited and reviewed seven years ago. Back then it stayed open til early evening, and its weekly char siu was the stuff of legend. Its scrambled eggs, too: I still think about those. But it took a cautious approach during Covid, and since then it has honed what it does to remain excellent at it, just within carefully constrained limits.

These days it’s closed Sundays and Mondays, and the rest of the week it shuts just after lunch. And Fidget & Bob’s social media is self-effacing almost to a fault: they easily spend as much time promoting their weekly delivery of excellent doughnuts from Pipp & Co as they do talking about their own gorgeous sandwiches. That is, to be fair, typical of them: they’ve always been really good, they just don’t necessarily shout about it.

In the old days I would have gone there for brunch on a Sunday, but my chances to visit it are far fewer than they once were, so my staycation presented an opportunity that I absolutely seized with both hands. And it was lovely to sit in that room again – not quite as diehard as the people outside in the plaza – and drink Fidget & Bob’s terrific coffee.

So many memories are attached to that place: it was there, for example, that I went for a celebratory lunch after having my first Covid vaccine, crammed into a room at the Madejski Stadium with people in my demographic. “I reckon it’s the first time I’ve been in a room with so many people my age in a very long time” said my friend Mike when he had the same experience. “And all I could think was, do I look that tired?“

But the big draw at Fidget & Bob is, and possibly always was, the O’Muffin, their take on the sausage and egg McMuffin. I miss their square pucks of sausage meat, served as part of a brunch with their superlative scrambled eggs, but I understand why they stopped offering that. And the O’Muffin is far from a consolation prize. It remains one of Reading’s loveliest brunches, that floury muffin bursting at the seams with sausagemeat, fried egg, American cheese.

It is one of my favourite things to eat, just as going out for brunch is one of my favourite things to do on holiday. I personally like to dip mine in a little pool of HP, much to Zoë’s horror. I also like to have it with hash browns, a coffee, another coffee and, ideally, a brownie. And, precisely because I was on holiday, that was exactly how I had it.

* * * * *

I went to Orwell’s during my staycation. You might well already know that, because I’ve written about it.

I’m not going to repeat all that, but it did make me think about the benefits of a staycation. Because if I went on holiday, if I did a city break somewhere, I would plan loads of meals out. Some would be casual, some would be higher end. But often on holiday I might push the boat out for one of my meals and go somewhere fancy – Palodu in Malaga, for example, Parcelles in Paris, Bruut in Bruges or Michelin starred Reflet d’Obione in Montpellier. And yet, in this country, I wouldn’t necessarily do that: I seem to associate that kind of meal with going on holiday.

So here is another benefit of a staycation in Reading: giving yourself permission to do those things, the things that might otherwise be inextricably linked with going abroad. Maybe this is just me, and you’re all much better at allowing yourselves those luxuries. But, for me at least, it was lovely to be on holiday in Reading and to think right, what do I never get to do, and where have I always meant to go? As thought experiments go, it was an especially enjoyable one. Like my commenter said, all the way back at the start of this piece, it’s nice to pretend you’re visiting.

* * * * *

On the Friday, the post chores treat was a trip to Geo Café in Caversham. One chore, which was all Zoë and for which I take no credit, was to get our garage looking like this.

I don’t know when I got a garage that looks like a branch of Oddbins: it just kind of happened. I used to have a basement at the old house, and Zoë moved in and then next thing I knew she was buying racks off eBay and turning it into a beer repository. Then came the fridge, humming away and full of IPAs. I knew there were also boxes and crates of lambics under an old coffee table, ageing better than I have, but I’m not sure I realised the enormity of it.

And then we moved house, and moving the booze was an ordeal. So many boxes, so many bags and bags for life. Beers Zoë bought years ago, whole crates of Orval she was ageing “for an experiment”. Several bottles of gin we’d got as presents but not started drinking. And of course the wine – wine bought on trips away, wine bought on holiday, a couple of wines left over from our wedding, bottles of fizz given to us as gifts.

“Don’t worry, I’ll build you something” my father-in-law said to Zoë when he saw the space we had in the garage. And I believed him: my father-in-law is like a cross between the Wombles and MacGyver, he picks stuff up on his travels and is just very good at turning them into tangible things. One day he arrived with a bunch of wood, and the next thing you knew he had constructed this bespoke booze storage. Shortly after we moved in last year somebody tried to break into our garage – unsuccessfully, I might add. If someone managed it now I think we’d find them the next morning, comatose.

During the staycation we made a conscious attempt to make inroads into our stock levels, moving stuff into the fridge for drinking, picking some beers we’ve wanted to try for a while, opening one of the nicest white wines in our collection on a beautiful warm day. Didn’t even scratch the surface.

* * * * *

Another advantage staycations have over holidays – or not, depending on how you see these things – is the chance to catch up with friends. So I was delighted to make it over to Geo Café on a warm sunny afternoon, sit in the Orangery and have a good natter up with Keti, my friend who owns the place. Talking to Keti is one of my absolute favourite things to do, catching up on the comings and goings of Caversham and Henley life, hearing about her family and her kids.

It’s also a great way to keep yourself mentally sharp: Keti usually has three conversations with you simultaneously, and will effortlessly change lane from one to another seemingly at random, forcing you to keep up. It’s more effective, I suspect, than doing Sudoku. So Zoë and I stretched our legs out in the Orangery, drinking beautiful coffee and hearing all Keti’s news. I had an utterly marvellous plate of bacon and eggs – I may have been slightly hungover again, but what are holidays for? – and felt thoroughly fortified by the whole experience. It was, as people say, good for the soul. Seeing Keti’s new dog, who was absolutely adorable, was good for the soul too.

We had plans to be at Loddon Brewery that afternoon, but Keti refused to let us call a taxi. “Zezva will drive you” she said, in a way that suggested she wouldn’t hear anything to the contrary, from Zezva or from us. And so Zezva drove us out to Dunsden Green in the sunshine in his lipstick-red BMW, a recent acquisition of which he was very proud, and we settled into the leather seats and enjoyed south Oxfordshire whooshing past. A frequent part of holidays, for me, is finding my favourite café: but I did that in Reading, to be honest, long ago.

* * * * *

I had never been to Loddon before, so this is where you can all shout at the screen that you’ve known for a very long time that it’s extremely nice and question, with some justification, what took me so long.

It’s a beautiful spot, in the middle of nowhere, and I can see that for those of you who live nearby, or like yomping across the countryside from Emmer Green, dogwalking or otherwise, it must feel like a blessed place. It has a little farm shop – not extensively stocked, but nice all the same – and tables outside, and sitting there with a cold pint of Citra Quad, on a day just warm enough to allow for it, I got why the place is held in such reverence.

That weather didn’t last, but heading inside to their covered terrace if anything I liked it even better. “It reminds me of Buon Appetito” said Zoë, and I could see that, could see how the sun-dappled terrace and clear corrugated roof conjured up memories of the courtyard where I’d had so many memorable meals in the summer of 2022.

Loddon is kind of a craft beer tap room reimagined for affluent, rural, cask beer types. I don’t say that as a criticism, but at mid-afternoon on a Friday in March I was possibly the second youngest person there, and I was drinking with the youngest.

All that changed around five, and the demographic became fascinating: people finishing landscaping work nearby, coming in wearing their uniforms; young couples; mums with their kids, taking advantage of the boardgames stored inside. I loved how random it seemed, although I’m sure if I knew the place and the area better all those connections would make sense, and not be happenstance.

I’d also wanted to go to Loddon because I wanted to try the food. It used to be done by an outfit called Proper Takeout, but they now had a permanent site at the tap yard, and had rebranded themselves Proper Kitchen. They do different dishes on different days of the week – burgers on Thursdays, pizza on Saturdays, roasts on Sundays and so on. But on Fridays it was fish and chips, and I very much fancied checking it out.

The team behind Proper Kitchen are James Alcock, who used to work at Mya Lacarte and Thames Lido, and Nick Drew, who used to be head chef at Thames Lido. I rather offended him when he worked there, which I wrote about here, but fortunately for me he didn’t seem to recognise me when I went up and placed our order. If he did he was too professional to say, and if he gobbed in my tartar sauce it was too delicious for me to notice.

Almost everything we had from Proper Kitchen, would you believe, was knockout. Some of the best fish and chips I’ve had for a long time, combining pearlescent, flaky fish with light, lacy batter, the whole thing served on a pile of extremely good chips. The tartar sauce had that great combination of comfort and bite, and the battered halloumi, three thick squares of the stuff, was possibly my favourite thing of all. Only the frickles – big and watery, the batter just a tiny bit too sparse – slightly let the side down, but I was far too happy with everything else to care.

The taxi we booked to bring us home was late getting to Dunsden Green – I think they’d given the job to someone right in the middle of town, which forced us to spend an extra half hour there. It was about as far from a hardship as I could imagine: I went up to the bar, got us a final half each to finish on, and we sat there enjoying ourselves, aware that everybody else’s evening was several pints away from coming to an end.

* * * * *

Would you be put off eating somewhere if it only had four dishes on the menu? This issue reared its ugly head on our final dinner of the staycation, when a taxi whizzed us down the A4 to the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence, one of my favourite pubs. Zoë has been there without me, for something to do with Reading CAMRA, and I went there last year without her to review it. But we’d not eaten there together since before the pandemic, and a holiday afforded a chance to remedy that.

But everything went wrong. We’d initially booked for lunch, but ten minutes before our cab was due to arrive we discovered a leak under the kitchen sink. So we needed to do something about that, and the booking and the cab were rearranged for the evening. It is a beautiful pub, and although the sun had gone down by the time we got there it was still a gorgeous, cosy place with that whiff of woodsmoke.

And yes, there were only four main courses on the menu, but that didn’t matter because one of them was made of magic words: 12 hour slow cooked lamb shoulder and so really, it didn’t matter what any of the other choices were. Except that our waiter sauntered over and, by way of introduction, told us they had run out of the lamb shoulder. No matter, we thought: the Bell’s venison burger was magnificent, and always on the menu, so the fallback option would do nicely.

Then the waiter wandered back and advised us that actually, they had also sold out of the venison burger. So a cancelled and reorganised booking and a pricey taxi later, I was presented with a choice between the fish course and a vegetarian risotto. Normally I get hangry when I don’t know where I’m going to eat on holiday but this was a new one on me: getting hangry because I wasn’t wild about either of my two possible dishes. If it hadn’t been for the sixty minute round trip, I’d probably have gone elsewhere.

But that just shows how little I know, because despite that setback I had the most fantastic meal. It started with the Bell’s selection of beers – a gorgeous IPA on keg by Mad Squirrel Brewery, and an even better one on cask by Swindon’s Hop Kettle, a brewery I love but whose stuff I never seem to see anywhere. And then, ordering from the menu, even with those limitations, everything was beyond top notch.

That meant sourdough toast golden and shining with melted whipped lardo, great charcuterie with a cairn of cornichons, all mine, in the middle of the plate. It meant a pigeon Caesar salad – who knew there was such a thing – which was a riot of game bird, immaculately dressed lettuce, bronzed croutons and lashings of grated cheese. And it meant the risotto I had been so sniffy about, a stodgy, starchy puddle of the stuff which combined elasticity and comfort, shot through with the first of the season’s asparagus, perked up with lemon and blanketed with Spenwood. Who needs twelve-hour slow cooked lamb shoulder anyway?

And then, because it was right at the very beginning of spring and because the Bell is very good at it, a sticky toffee pudding. It turns out that it’s okay to go to a place that only has two choices on the menu, provided it’s as trustworthy as the Bell. I shall never doubt them again, if only because Zoë said I told you so more than once on the taxi ride home.

* * * * *

I never like the final day of a holiday. Zoë likes to have a bit of a last day in our destination, leaving your bags with the hotel and taking one last wander before a late afternoon flight. For me, I can never enjoy that – although I’ve tried – so I would rather get up and go, taxi to the airport after checkout and have some of the day at home.

But there is something to be said, at the end of a holiday, for revisiting your favourite places before you start the sad journey back. And a staycation made that so much easier, and gave me the chance to right the biggest wrong of the week into the bargain. So Sunday lunchtime, mini-jetlagged from the clocks going forward, found us back at Blue Collar Corner, and this time I placed the Gurt order I should have made the first time.

They might be called Gurt Wings, but for me it’s always been about their JFC, their popcorn chicken. It’s the most generous, the most delicious and the most photogenic thing they do – chicken thigh, marinated in soy, fried up and then bathed in gochujang, striped with sriracha mayo and speckled with sesame. I remember the dark days before Gurt did popcorn chicken, and I remember trying an early prototype and thinking: yes, this. This is what you should be doing.

I am delighted they’ve never taken it off the menu since, and it will be months before I go to Gurt, order something else and realise, again, that I shouldn’t have strayed from the true path. Some places you visit on holiday have a signature dish, and if you ignore that you might as well not eat there at all. Afterwards we took that bus across town again, and had one more mocha in the window at C.U.P. It’s odd: normally I am sad about returning from holiday but happy to be reunited with my creature comforts, my stuff, my bed. How strange, and strangely welcome, to have a holiday where you’re never parted from them.

* * * * *

One final postscript before I take my leave of you this week.

A couple of days ago I was tagged on Instagram by a couple, readers and subscribers to the blog, who were on holiday in Bruges. They had been using my guide to the city, and I saw a picture of De Kelk, one of my favourite Bruges bars. I sent one of them a message to see how they were getting on, and I got the loveliest messages back. They’d eaten at a Bruges restaurant I loved, Bij Koen en Marijke, on the previous night and I was sent a picture of the two of them posing with Marijke. Marijke was beaming: everybody looked like they were having a marvellous time.

But the loveliest part was the next bit. My reader told me that she’d been eating at the restaurant with her husband and they got talking to a couple at the next table, who were from Sydney. They asked the Australian couple how they’d chanced upon Bij Koen en Marijke and – and I promise I’m not making this up – they were told “we found it on a great blog called Edible Reading”. How nice is that? That somehow out there in the universe, halfway across Europe, two couples who read my blog, living continents apart, both ended up in the same cracking restaurant on an April evening in Bruges. It’s a small world, sometimes.

I am pretty sure that people – from all kinds of places, not just Reading – use my guides to Bruges, Malaga and Granada to help them have a delicious holiday in those cities. And that makes me very proud indeed. But I know that if I published a piece called “City guide: Reading” it wouldn’t get anywhere near the same footfall (it would also be dishonest, of course, because wishing Reading was a city doesn’t make it so). So nobody will ever chance upon this piece of writing and decide, from somewhere else in the U.K. or Europe, to plan their next holiday in Reading. And that’s fine: those articles in the Sunday Times or The i Paper aren’t going to have that effect, either. I know people are missing out, but I won’t be able to convince them.

So the only people I might be able to persuade to have a holiday in Reading are those among you – and I knew many of you reading this will fall into this category – who already live here. And for what it’s worth, having done it, I heartily recommend a staycation in Reading. Stay in your own bed, plan to really make the most of spending time here without having to go to work, make time to revisit your favourites or discover something new. I’m so glad I gave it a shot, and it won’t be the last time I do. See our town slightly through the eyes of an outsider and you might fall in love with it a little, all over again. I certainly did.

As of January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.