Round and round

Usually I look forward to the Open Doors weekend but somehow this year I didn't realise it was this weekend until mid-morning.

It's a brilliant opportunity to see buildings you'd never otherwise see and my curiosity was piqued by finding that an unprepossessing insurance office in the High Street was open. Well! You'd never know from looking through the windows that the people working in the back are sitting in a medieval refectory. Opposite their desks are some stone steps leading down to a vaulted cellar with, to my delight, the entrance (now blocked up) to one of the tunnels under the High Street that I'd heard about but never seen. This was Tackley's Inn, built in 1320 as an academic hall. In 1549 the hall and the shops in front were leased by Oriel College to a Dutch Protestant refugee who sold books from the ground floor and wine from the cellar and by the end of the seventeeth century it had become Puffett’s Coffee House. I don't know when the metamorphosis to insurance happened but I'll certainly think about A-Plan insurance differently in future.

Of course a visit to the Blavatnik School of Government was irresistible, where this year I pointed the camera down the staircase rather than up.

And to the maths building where our June blipmeet tried to find repeating patterns in the Penrose paving which 'does not repeat'. The friend visiting this weekend is a maths teacher and we spent more time than I have before thinking about the geometry of the two tiles that make up the paving. This time I found a group of 35 tiles which repeated elsewhere so I'm very slightly closer to the question I need to ask Penrose should I ever meet him. Not that I'd dare. I'd never understand his answer.