We lived in an apartment above a shop at the top of the High street. The living room window overlooked the town square. It came with an excellent view of the so-called Market Cross, an octagonal stone shelter with a cross on the roof. You can just see our living room windows on the left of the first story of the yellow building behind and to the right of the Market Cross.
As it says on the dedication, Malmesbury's Market Cross was erected using funds kindly provided by the then king, Henry VIII. Malmesbury's Market Cross was of the kind fairly common in old market towns, but to my Australian eyes, it was pure magic, and was the main reason I was keen to rent that particular apartment. Over time, the apartment turned out to be less ideal in other ways, being as it was, very close to two pubs. When we lived there, pubs all closed at the same time, and at closing time each night, the patrons from both pubs would mingle in the market square for the purposes of ritual abuse and the occasional mutual thumpings. The ensuing noise was typically low level early in the week, building up over the days to reach a crescendo on Saturday nights. It became a nightly precursor to sleeping, and While it was amusing in the short term, it did get a bit tiresome over a longer period. You can just see the edge of our living room window on the first floor of the yellow building at the right of the pic below.
I worked at Lucent Technologies in Malmesbury. The office was a pleasant 20 minute walk from our apartment, and a clear half mile from the edge of Malmesbury, on the road to Swindon. The site consisted of a rambling collection of WW2 era brick buildings, arranged in two rows along a bank of the Avon river. The building I worked in was on the river's edge, and the windows let in muted light, dappled by the trees that grew along the river bank.
"Avon river!" I thought when I saw the sign on my first day of work. "I wonder if it's the same one that Shakespeare lived nearby at Stratford." I soon discovered that "Avon" is the olde Englishe word for river, and that there are almost as many river Avons as there are rivers in southern England.
Adjoining the Lucent site was a dairy farm, and used as I was to urban office environments, it was a refreshing novelty to watch the cows cavorting in the Spring sunshine from the office windows. Occasionally you would see the farmer driving a tractor towing the Liquid Manure Spreader down the laneway adjoining the site. The Liquid Manure Spreader was a large apparatus with a sizeable tank and a complex arrangement of pumps, pipes, arms and nozzles hanging off the back. A distinguishing feature was that the entire thing was completely covered in cow shit. It definitely was a piece of equipment that you wouldn't want to be near when it was in operation. From the way that the shit was evenly distributed over the device, it must have operated in a fug of liquified cowshit droplets when it was in full swing.
The Lucent workplace was similar to what I had been used to back in Australia, consisting of mainly computer hardware and software engineers and support staff. Middle management were all from engineer backgrounds and the place had the refreshing sense of mathematical logic that pervaded decision making processes. In keeping with similar setups world wide, the dress code was casual. Surprisingly, there was the concept of "dress-down Fridays," maybe a hangover to more formal times. These are common in workplaces where the dress sense is suit and tie, but this was the first time I had encountered it in an engineering workplace. So every Friday, we would all endeavor to wear clothing even more casual than the usual weekday standard. This was not an easy thing for some of the more casual dressers, but they always seemed to rise to the occasion. Dress down Fridays at Lucent Malmesbury often looked like the zombie apocalypse.
