Seeing heaven much better

After work, I bought some lunch and decided to find a quiet place to eat. I chose, surprisingly, the rooftop car park of the Merrywalks shopping centre. Away from the bowling centre entrance, there's not much going on: a few cars coming and and going; someone else having their reading break up there. I used to love going up there years ago, and gazing down on the building site, while the cinema complex was being built and the bus station demolished.

Sadly, it's also a suicide spot, as it partly overlooks the A46, and I lost a friend that way, nine years ago, while the balance of her mind was disturbed. I don't go up there as often as I used to.

Back to today: I gazed northwards (?) down Bath Street and up the Slad road, and made friends with a distant collie whose head poked up among some rootops above the Canine grooming parlour. The light was what TussockTales calls DFO: dull, flat and 'orrible, but I got some views of the Slad valley, that might be interesting to others. Laurie Lee wrote about the village of Slad in Cider with Rosie, but this is the beginning of the Slad road, with its Georgian former police station promiment in the foreground, The beautiful brick house is residential, and the modern brick houses behind on the left are in what we affectionately call "Del Boy grove" which is in fact Delmont...

The suburb on the slopes above Slad road, to the left of the road, is called Uplands. It's handy for the town centre, but I've only ever lived on the grim valley-bottom side of Slad road. I was there for two and a half years, but felt in exile from the part of town I loved, so was glad to return in 1999 to the Golden valley. In case you are wondering, Stroud is a town built around five valleys: the Chalford/Golden Valley, the Nailsworth; the Painswick; the Ruscombe and the Slad valleys. This might explain why in Stroud, unless you are on the A46 below the Merrywalks, you will nearly always be walking up or downhill. It's a 20-minute jog downhill to my place of work; and a half-hour slog back up!

Song: Up the ladder to the roof, where we can see heaven much better

In other news, I saw The Great Gatsby. It is a spectacle, and the lead actors are convincing, but ultimately it fails to move. What I took away from it is the ambiguity of trying to be a moral character in a landscape that appears to be populated by vain and fickle people, only interested in hedonism and celebrity. Plus ca change...