The Nurses' Home, 1928

Stroud Hospital was built in the late 19th century, and I have blipped the Victorian Gothic building here. But that's not all! On my way to work I pass many of the hospital buildings. This part, which I could've sworn I remember being built in the summer of 1996, says 1928 on the front, and as such was probably the original accommodation for nurses (extended 1938). It's not a desperately attractive building, but it does have the very clean lines of late 20s/30s architecture, with only the slight frilliness of the angel's? head over the windows. Art Nouveau must have been truly over by then, which is a pity, as I prefer it to straight lines and uncompromising starkness.

But...I am studying the 1930s, and I live in a 1930s house, and this week it has been announced that Stroud hospital has been saved from profiteering companies eager to get their paws stuck in, so this will be my blip.

I've lived in some interesting places. A shoe manufacturing town in South Moravia ( Czech Republic) with a 1930s shoe factory built in the functionalist style of architecture; a 1950s block of flats in East London designed to look like an Ocean Liner but resembling a cockroach-infested cesspit by 1990; the servant's quarters of a Queen Anne-period merchant's house in Stroud are but three of them. Never fear, I will not be blipping all of them! Thankfully, at least one is no longer standing. But houses and architecture are important to me, and it's partly through blipping and partly through reading a book by Mavis Cheek that I have come to see that.

My sister TMLhereandthere has written movingly about Knocksinna, our childhood home and the first I can remember living in. It was a truly wonderful place to live, and yet I left with all the excitement of a child knowing (wrongly) of the excitement that lay ahead! Looking back, I feel sure I would have enjoyed my teenage years more in Dublin than the West highlands of Scotland (more opportunities for sex and and rock 'n' roll, don't know about the drugs then...). But, 38 years on from our leaving, I can appreciate how incredibly lucky we were to have lived there at all. My favourite memories of living there are of reading books halfway up a tree in the 'wild patch', and mixing lethal potions involving weedkiller in the greenhouse. For some reason, the grown ups were always trying to stop us doing this!

I am sorry about the lack of comments. My busy life has caught up with me, and I feel i am being sent straight to the knacker's yard, not passing GO, nor collecting £200.