Wagons ho and wheels up

Humanity is doomed.  There is no hope.  I have the proof.

Tourists should be the pinnacle of human development.  These are people who are earning enough money to travel for leisure, and have the intellectual curiosity that compels them to visit new places and experience new cultures, rather than spend their holidays on the couch with a box set, a behaviour by the way I hasten to add I do not judge or condemn.

Like early man, tourists are tool users, unlike early man they have pull-along suitcases, and access to room service, and access to people possibly living in fear of deportation back to a country they certainly did not leave with tourism on their minds, to fold down their bed sheets and fold the end of their toilet roll into a point.

Indeed a tourist, in particular a foreign tourist, is more of less using all of the knowledge and development of human civilisation to this point, from the airplane that they travelled on, to the sophisticated fabrics in the sort of colour that once only an Emperor could afford to keep the rain off.

Why then, are tourists such fucking idiots?

Tourists exhibit, for a group that have travelled, have gone to the time and expense and inconvenience of leaving their couch, presumably to go places, baffling behaviour.  For a class of people whose very existence is predicated on movement, why do they love stopping so much?  And not at convenient places, but rather at busy intersections or, my particular favourite, the entrance to a railway station.  These are people who have so little self awareness that they decide to stop in a doorway to consult each other, their mobile 'phones, a map, or for all I know the spirit of a long departed ancestor for advice.

I've got some advice, walk forward ten fucking steps so you don't block the busy entrance to the place like a cagoule cork.

That problem is as old as the Aussie backpacker who thinks that the bottom of an escalator on the Underground is an excellent place to halt to get his bearings.

A more recent phenomenon actually harks back to the early days of pioneering, with tourists with wheely suitcases forming a wagon train along the pavement.  Actually this I don't mind so much, because at least it's picturesque and ordered, and one can always anticipate the spectacle of the tourists circling the suitcases if they come under attack.

Full disclosure, I have done this wheelie suitcase thing myself, forming a very short train with Mrs GandP.  It's actually rather pleasing to glide along, as long as you are aware of your surroundings.

Of course, being at the pinnacle of human development and being a fucking idiot are not necessarily mutually exclusive properties, it's just that I'd like to think they are.

Maybe the explorer, rather than the tourist, is at the summit of the pinnacle, traditionally an explorer is somebody who does not pause when they come to a entrance, especially if it is of a tomb and there may be some bling behind the door.

Oh, and for the avoidance of doubt, if you call yourself a 'traveller' rather than a tourist when visiting a place, then unless you are doing so in a caravan and your arrival prompts headlines in the local version of the Daily Mail and text alerts in the local community about locking up their pets, then you are not a traveller, you are a tourist.  Visiting somewhere where there is a hostel and sporting half a dozen different bracelets on your non-dominant wrist does not make you a traveller, nor does constant reputation of the term once you get home.  You are at best, a visitor, like when you visit a National Trust property at the weekend, except that it is hellish difficult to get a decent afternoon tea in downtown Laos.

Postcard from Yorkshire: Yurts and all

Just outside Masham, near the village of Ilton, is the Druids Temple. Not actually raised by those bloodthirsty beardy types at the dawn of time, this Neolithic style stone ring and assorted sticky-uppy cairns was in fact created in the Victorian age, yet another folly raised by beardy types, just not bloodthirsty ones in robes.

It's an interesting enough wee place to visit and one does not have to bee an anthropologist to work out that it has been used ritually, the ritual in question being Helen where the local teens sneak off somewhere to make a campfire, around which they drink cider, make out and pass out. At the rear of the temple is what might be termed the holy of holes but is more accurately described as the 'cave of piss and cider'. A couple of discarded lighter fluid cans suggested that the youth either really like getting their babies going with a bang, or supermarket cider isn't cutting it anymore. I dread to think what the effect of sniffing lighter fluid is but can only hope they don't attempt it while smoking a fag.


The other folly in the area is the brand new camp site 'Bivouac'. When we to led up this consisted of half a dozen yurts in a field, a camp site shop/office, a toilet block, a cafe and a business model best described as ambitious. Turns out, this is an environmentally friendly camping site. Which means no glamping. If I rent a yurt, I expect hot water, a microwave, a bed with a topper and wi if. What I do not expect is. Standard of comfort that, if the brochure is to be believed, would have Gengis Khan saying 'fuck that' and off on his pony to the nearest Travelodge.


The environmental aspect is good for business, and I sense a real business opportunity in running a combined drystone wall building adventure weekend and drystone wall repair business. I can imagine if I read the Guardian this is just the sort of place I would go camping and it has to be said the scenery is spectacular, as long as you can see over the drystone walls.. The problem is that to get there, I would have driven from London in my 4x4. Having a coffee in the cafe and resisting the urge to leaf through a copy of 'green parent' (I was aware of the folklore relating to green children, but was hitherto unaware that it was a genetic thing), I was worried when I asked for directions to the loo that I would be handed a trenching tool and dictions to a bank of soft earth. However, the loos were actually rather lovely and, fair enough, the wee shop sold a 'breakfast' lit for a tenner that essentially consisted of a lot of pork arranged in various meaty ways. Just the thing for a hungry yurt dweller.

Postcard from Yorkshire: Fountains Abbey

After seeing Fountains Abbey, an eight hundred and something year old ruin of an Abbey complex, there is an argument that all places of worship should be open to the sky. This not only allows one to glimpse the wonder of God's creation at first hand but, crucially, allows God to keep an eye on those monks who claim to work in his name. Choirboys. Say no more.

The Abbey may be a ruin, but The National Trust manage to keep at least four tea shops fully functioning. These being Yorkshire teashops, they sell cakes. I had a scone roughly the size of a bus, with enough cream on it to clog the arteries of a mammoth. It was truly a thing of wonder, even if I could still feel it lodged in my lower intestine some hours later.

Luckily, the grounds provide plenty of opportunity to walk off the substantial delights of the tea shop. As well as the Abbey, there is a grand house. Not quite a stately home, rather the sort of unpretentious massive pile that wealthy farmers built and which were regularly visited by royalty. With grand houses come grand gardens, and as well as woods and so on, there were formal gardens with straight waterways, polite waterfalls, rustic bridges and, of course, a folly or feature at every turn.


The rich, it would appear, liked only one thing more than building grand houses and grand gardens, and that was building classically inspired mini-temples and castles, essentially vantage points where they could look out over their grand houses and grand gardens and, of course, indulge in a bit of secluded aristocratic rumpy pumpy with visitors. One of the follies, an octagon tower, even had an artificial cave built next to it which functioned as a kitchen allowing the servants to prepare hot food to keep visitors' strength up between bouts of walking and illicit fumblings in the ha-ha. Something suggests that the invention of the thermos flask could not come quickly enough for members of the toiling classes.

The Abbey complex itself is immense and beautiful. Soaring columns and arches make one wonder how on earth the place stays open to the public without being swaddled in yellow and white tape with 'keep out' or at least 'hard hat area' written on it. Rather, the place is a vast adventure playground for children who run around in a perpetual state of over-excitement, while adults ponder if they can pick up a foam sword from the gift shop and dash around the ruins playing knights.


The nearby church is still intact, modern (by comparison, St Mary's is Victorian), small (by comparison) and very beautiful. It's delights include a spiral staircase to the organ lift that would appear to per-date the work of Crick and Watson by some decades, and some particularly colourful stained glass windows. These are made even more remarkable because, due to a fault in the paint, some of the figures are losing their faces.


As a result what would normally be an ordinary pious looking bloke with a beard is a blank space and what was Victorian suddenly looks terribly modern. The windows are very beautiful and, when lit from without by the glorious Yorkshire sun, colourful. As they depict scenes from the bible, and hence are usually pretty gruesome, it occasionally takes one a second or two to realise that the fellow kneeling piously is not surrounded by people holding scones in anticipation of a cream tea, but is in fact about to be martyred. This is usually a process that involves something unpleasant.

Postcard from Winchester - the Great Hall and the round table

One of the most common occupations for the guides at Winchester Cathedral is redirecting tourists who wander the place in search of the Round Table. Apparently they take quite some convincing that the round table is not, in fact, in the cathedral, but is in the nearby Great Hall and no, you can't have your entrance fee back.

The Great Hall is a pretty spectacular space, it has four main attractions, the table itself, high on the wall at one end, huge and imposing, like a vast medieval dart board, the stained glass windows, the wall decorated with a family tree so vast it's like a family forest, and the gates.

The space itself is astonishing, huge thick walls and lofty beams. This is the sort of place that can be easily populated by the imagination with feast tables crammed with people eating medieval food, which I think was basically things killed in the forest that could have an apple shoved in their mouths or up their arse for a garnish, or equally filled with soldiers and nervous horses about to ride into battle. Or tourists. Actually you didn't have to imagine that last one. There weren't actually that many tourists there but the ones that did come and go were at least polite enough to shut the door, not that it mattered as the Hall was unheated but it was a nice thought.


The table itself is an astonishing piece of work, and the connection with the Arthurian legend is a powerful pull. It's seven hundred years old which means, even if Arthur himself didn't sit there sipping mead from the grail or whatever, it's a pretty potent artefact. And it's round! How cool is that! That means everyone is equal and so sits at the head, or that there's no head. It also means that the folk sitting at the table had to find other means of establishing their seniority, such as getting a tall chair, or a swivel chair, or butchering their neighbour with a broadsword following a trifling argument over pudding. It is not known if the round table etiquette also did away with he traditional knight maiden knight maiden dinner party seating arrangement, and if a kiddy table version was ever used, it is no longer in existence.


At the other end of the Great Hall is a very imposing piece that must have seemed like a really, really good idea at the time. Two gates, made of stainless steel, at least thirty feet high and breathtaking in their design, looking like a something from Lord of the Rings, crossed with art deco, they remind one of the sort of doors that Flash Gordon used to punch Ming the Merciless through. Cut into the top is a C circling a D. Yup, these gates were installed to celebrate the marriage of Charles and Diana. Oops. Guess that makes them as historic an artefact now as the round table.

Croydon Tours

Croydon has, for many years, closely resembled downtown Kabul after a heavy night on the bombing. Driving a tram link through an already deeply unlovely environment left the place littered with the sort of water and twisted metal filled craters that one expects as the result of a laser-guided MK 12 'beardbuster' warhead, not the installation of a light rail link. Now that the dirt has settled and the tram is actually in place, Croydon still resembles downtown Kabul due to the large number of unemployed people milling about, the amputees (the tram link runs along the street and the locals have yet to learn how to dodge) and the violence, looting and burned-out buildings.

Tough to say when the rot set in, after all, the used to be an aerodrome here, the last word in glamour and being a target for the Luftwaffe, but even flying Nazis couldn't do as much damage as the council, who sealed the fate of the place when they removed all of the trees from the town centre and replaced them with a howling sense of hopeless desolation.

Put it this way, the crushing negative energy of Croydon is such that even M&S can't escape it's pull. Croydon is the home to rather a large M&S and, usually, such stores are a place to purchase a prawn sandwich and restore ones sense of equilibrium. If, on a shopping trip anywhere, one is feeling buffeted by the winds of fashion, typhoons of commerce or just struggling with the suspicion that the store has fitted a web cam in the changing cubicle to prevent shoplifting and provide the staff with hysterical footage of 'really I am a size twelve' women trying to struggle into a pair of size twelve jeans without the aid of thigh corsets, magic or being slathered in lard, then you can always pop into M&S to regulate your breathing while stocking up on sensible pants.

Not so in Croydon. The best way of describing the M&S in Croydon is to liken it to one of those KFC wannabe places, a fried chicken shop that can't quite meet the the exacting standards of KFC ('never more than 30% beak') but wants to attach itself to the idea of a brand (see also, any drink with the word 'cola' in it, and yes, I mean you Pepsi, you real deal wannabe you - the acid test: who ever asked for a rum and Pepsi?) so that drunk people will wander in by mistake. The M&S in Croydon is like a flagship experiment by a company that specialises in a homogenised brand dedicating at least 30% of their marketing, signage and shop floor look to reflect the locality, instead of the usual M&S shop design strategy (copy John Lewis). Unfortunately, the local look is 'Croydon', and so the store is shabby, crowded and overrun with morlocks.

H G Wells lived in South London and the influence of the area is plain to see in his works. Who has not returned from a trip to Croydon and not thought that it could really benefit from being levelled by a Martian heat ray? Croydon 2012 is pretty much all the evidence you need that H G Wells did actually possess a time machine, travelled forward in time to M&S, took one look at the creatures shambling around in the gloom, jumped back on his chrono-cycle, pedalled for home like Victoria Pendleton when she has forgotten to set the video to record 'come dine with me' (she's a massive fan, that's Victoria's secret) and started writing. It's a testament to his creative skill that after a visit to Croydon 2012 he wrote an entire novel and not just the word 'fffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccckkkk!' stretched over 200 pages.

That somebody is offering tours is heartening. After all, they do Jack the Ripper tours in the East End, and ghost tours in York (and why, if ghost tours are so bloody authentic, do they never go through walls?), why not tours of Croydon? Directions to the station where trains leave for London every twenty minutes must be worth eight quid of anyone's money.

Postcard from Norfolk - Wells-Next-The-Sea

The first day of October 2011 and the British weather is unseasonable to the point of unreasonable. Shorts and sandals are pulled out of the wardrobe for one last outing, barbeques are pressed into service once again as the air is filled with the smell of lighter fluid, charcoal and the smell of a million grills that were put away uncleaned after their last use, as temperatures reached those more closely associated with sunburn, binge-drinking and ill-thought-out holiday romances in some Mediterranean resort.

One of the great pleasures of being on holiday in Britain in October is that you get the place to yourself. That’s the deal, you will put up with occasional ‘dull’ days (on holiday lashing rain pushed ahead of gale force winds is never ‘foul weather’, it is simply ‘dull’) and in return not only do you get to see a different side of whatever resort you are visiting (that side usually being the ‘closed’ side of any seasonal attraction’s welcome sign) but you have your holiday experience heightened because you know that every other bugger is hard at work while you rise at the crack of ten, have a bit of a scratch and wonder what pub you are going to visit for a pint or two of lunch before fortifying yourself for the evening’s revels with an afternoon nap. There are no queues, no crowds, no parking problems and no issues getting served at the bar or the chippie.

So, in holiday mode (not thinking), I set off to Well-Next-The-Sea with the intention of topping up on some shopping and taking a walk on the beach.

The first sign that something was out of the ordinary was the crowd at the ‘station’. Wells beach is reached from the town by a charming little narrow gauge railway, which if it were any smaller would be mounted on chipboard in some lucky boy’s bedroom. This takes the tourists who cannot be faffed with the half hour walk from town to beach out to a little station situated in the caravan park by the beach. In October, it doesn’t run. Odd then that there are many, many people waiting, like the world’s most relaxed and ill-dressed commuters.

The little train was running. There were crowds walking along the path to the beach. Wells was mobbed.

In retrospect, I should have guessed that record high temperatures would have drawn everyone in Norfolk and, by the look of it, everyone in East Anglia, to the seaside. Still, there was a huge car park on the beach, surely that couldn’t be…ah. The car park was beyond full, there was a queue down the beach road to get into it. This is a car park that is usually so empty you can practically park on the beach.

Taking the attitude that I did not come on holiday to wait for a train, queue in traffic or endlessly circle a car park looking for a space (all things I come on holiday to stop doing), I turned around and we headed back to the cottage, where there was a beach three minutes walk from the front door that did not require queuing in traffic or a fixed light rail route to reach.

Thinking about the railway, the operator missed a trick this weekend. Looking at the crowds on the station and those who took the option to walk, it was clear that anyone who felt they could walk to the beach was already lithely striding along the headland, while anyone who waddled rather than strode had decided to take the train option. This means that all it took was one or two passengers to get into one of the wee carriages and there was already an overcrowding problem. The train people should have thrown a couple of extra carriages on to the end of the train (possibly requiring another engine) and, more importantly, stuck a dining car on there too, ideally selling chips. They’d have made a fortune.

We didn’t see the queue for the chippie but I strongly suspect it was like one of those you see in emerging democracies when all of the population turns out to vote for the first time.

Back at the cottage at Holme-Next-The-Sea, our holiday home really is next the sea. Three minutes takes you from the front door to the beach, and that’s the indirect route, respecting the back garden of the people next to the cottage. The route to the beach takes one between the 10th and 11th hole of Hunstanton Golf Club’s course. Signs implore you to check left and right for low flying golf balls, experience suggests that one should also check for golf clubs being hurled in anger by golfers swearing off the bloody game forever. This adds a certain charm and danger to the beach walk, and that to a certain extent is what sets Norfolk apart.

Postcard from Blenheim Palace

Blenheim Palace is so posh that even the grass in the car park is posh. It’s been parked on, walked on and driven over and yet it still remains a comfortable and complete carpet of green, so unlike the municipal quagmires or off-roading challenges that normally typify parking at visitor attractions, leaving your car looking like you’ve just completed the Welsh mountain stage in a rally and your passengers stress-eating wine gums if you have them or chewing the magic tree air freshener if you don’t.


Blenheim is one of the self-proclaimed ‘Treasure Houses of England’. From what I can work out this is a collection of grand houses that are still owned by the families that built them a few centuries ago, a collection of posh people who have realised they can turn a profit by hanging on to the house and flogging ice cream and coffee to tourists, rather than those posh people who lurk in the private chambers of their houses now owned by the National Trust, silently seething with resentment as the tourists plod round their former pile. The Treasure House group have realise that if you brand something, people will regard it with the same kind of affection as they do English Heritage or the National Trust, and immediately start looking for the gift shop in search of lavender scented things.


The other way in which these places turn a profit is hosting events. This is why you see incongruities such as Hip Hop artists playing castles and stately homes. The event on the day we pitched up to check out the gift shop and attached stately home was a bike race. Or rather, bike races. There appeared to be several going on.

The first was a time trials for people in lycra with thighs about as thick as my torso. There were also amateur competitive races I think, because there were a lot of young couples in matching lycra wandering around, looking like they wanted to have a water fight with their Foska bottles and then collapse giggling into a hedge for some fit giggling nooky.

There was also a race sponsored by Brompton, the manufacturers of those bicycles that fold up quite small so as to fit on a train but not so small as to not be a bloody nuisance on a crowded commuter train. The people in this were racing on their Bromptions. It’s one thing to see some gent unfold his bike and whiz off down the platform to the office, quite another to see it being used like a proper bicycle. It was like watching something out of its element, like a bird elegant in flight waddling on land, or a middle class person in Asda. A Brompton is designed to weave in and out of traffic and be sworn at by cabbies, not whoosh down wide open avenues.

With all the races happening, I was rather hoping that they didn’t all meet at the crossroads and, if they did, there would be some sort of motorcycle display team riding going on as they pass one another at right angles, missing by inches, until the inevitable catastrophe, resulting in an almighty crash, the sort of bell ringing normally associated with a royal wedding, some groans and a single Brompton wheel rolling into the distance.


Blenhiem Palace itself is spectacular, no doubt about it. If you think the car park is well looked after then wait until you see the formal gardens. The house itself is stately home standard, lots of portraits look down from the walls wearing silk knickerbockers and enormous wigs. There is a portrait of the current lady of the house to keep things current, it certainly looks current – is it possible to botox a portrait?

There’s the usual heavy, dark furniture, the usual vast library of books in good condition (aristocrats prefer hunting, shooting, fishing and fleecing to reading) and surprisingly ugly pottery. In fairness there is also some rather beautiful pieces, Persian and Asian, that have been trusted to the public gaze. Best of all, for any boy or bloke, Blenhiem’s military connections means that there are more than your average amount of toy soldiers. Not just the lead soldiers that were played with for generations of the family, but cases where the British Modeller’s Association display some rather excellent dioramas. Made me nostalgic for the days when happiness was an Airfix kit, some glue, some paint, some thinners, an inadequately ventilated room and an out of body experience.


It’s also the birthplace of Churchill and had a museum with artefacts connected to him, principle among these being the letters that young Winston wrote home from boarding school and some paintings, as well as a rather curious collection of Hallmark cards that used his paintings.

Having been to Chartwell and now to Blenhiem, it’s clear that every place related to The Great Man jealously guards whatever treasures it might possess. I rather hope that out there somewhere there is a village with a preserved telephone box where he stopped off to make a call, converted into a very small museum containing a little tin of dropped cigar ash (viewing by appointment, post cards available in the gift shop).


As stately homes go, it was stately. It had manicured grounds that obviously took a couple of centuries to knock in to shape, less decking and more ‘let’s plant here and come back in fifty years’. It had a little train to transport delighted visitors from one part of the estate to another. Nothing delights quite like a little train. Finally, it had statues. Many many statues. Some sat on ledges, some hid in alcoves, some held things up and some perched atop pillars. They fulfilled the function of classical statues everywhere – bringing a touch of the splendour that was Rome to a corner of the Oxfordshire countryside, and sporting little willies so as not to make the big knobs feel inadequate.

Cultural Guides

I suppose that travel is what you make it. The problem is that so many people conspire to make it as unpleasant as possible, from Ringtone Joe on the train through Fastlane Fuckwit on the roads to, possibly more seriously, terrorists in the air (or malicious baggage handlers, they’re about on a par).

I was on the motorway this weekend, travelling to see my family and as usual my wife saw the opportunity of our being trapped together in a speeding metal box for two hours as an excellent opportunity to discuss our relationship in circumstances that make my trying to step out the door deeply inadvisable.

So that was time well used, but it’s not always the case. A lot of the time travel is limbo, you’re in hiatus as you travel from point to point. A good example were the airport cabs I saw, travelling from Gatwick to Heathrow, ferrying folk from one airport to another, presumably to make a connecting flight. The journey is about an hour, which is a short time in terms of air travel, but a long time to waste. Which got me thinking.

More and more cars these days have these in-car DVD players, to make sure that the kids get in-car DVT rather than getting exercise and entertainment through the traditional routes of squabbling, fighting and violent bouts of travel-sickness. Most travellers are curious about the country they are visiting or about to visit - so why not have a ‘cultural guide’ DVD in the car. No segment longer than two minutes, talking about all the things you really need to know about in a country; tipping, how to avoid being roped into folk-dancing, how to greet the chap standing at the urinal next to you, that sort of thing. You can use the DVD menu to navigate the various categories and geographical areas and, of course, you can listen to it in the language of your choice (note to manufacturer, always get the translation checked, you don’t want what you think is an Armenian translation of your piece about the canals of Birmingham to actually being a bloke saying: ‘visiting Birmingham? Then make sure to visit Jeff’s knocking shop, only two minutes from the station’).

Of course the real place for this sort of programme is on YouTube as a cultural guide channel. Every programme is a maximum of two minutes, talking about one feature of your town and the thing is, you can make stuff up! I’d love to see some proud local strolling through the pretty but unremarkable graveyard of his village church pointing out the burial places of Shakespeare, Dickens, JFK, Elvis and Frodo Baggins.

Everybody must have one feature of their home town they are proud of. I’d like to see somebody standing in front of a kebab van extolling the virtues of chilli sauce with the sort of brio you normally associate with a travel journalist doing a spot in front of the Taj Mahal. Or got an area where you want to advise visitors to avoid? How about a dispatch from Dog Shit Alley wearing a BBC approved flak-vest.

On the plus side, a balanced an honest view of the off-beat delights of an area may be refreshing, the only drawback is that after seeing a few cultural guides, the tourist may well ask to tell the cabbie to turn the car round and head for home.