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: Malham Cove

Malham Cove is a spectacular limestone feature, best described as an inland cliff face with a spectacular limestone pavement on top. Not the sort of pavement one sees lining the side of a road, this one is full of huge cracks and uneven surfaces. Actually, it's just the sort of pavement one expects to see lining the side of the road.


One reaches the village of Malham by following what we now recognised as the standard issue succession of increasingly tiny twisting narrow country lanes, or 'roads' as they are known locally, until you reach a line of cars indicating the boundary of the village and a succession of people too tight to pay for car parking.

The car park is full of people with a uniform sense of excitement and a uniform of walking boots and waterproof hiking jackets in a variety of primary colours that presumably make it easy to locate one in a snowdrift or a heard of sheep. Foul weather gear was not needed today, as the sun was shining brightly enough for your average walker to be comfortable in a tee shirt. But, if you have sprung a couple of hundred quid for an anorak and a performance fleece liner, I can see the logic in wearing the damn thing no matter what the weather.

One does feel a little under dressed without a dog. Surely it is time for us to start emulating Japan which, I believe, has a thriving 'hire a pet' industry with the added benefit if you are Oriental that anything that disappoints by misbehaving can be turned into a snack. Behaving very well in the car park was a cocker called, what else, Jarvis. He was at that doggie adolescent age where everything is over-exciting and yet at the same time a bit daunting, leading to leaping around the place but with a note of caution.


The footpath meanders to the foot of Malham Cove where one is confronted with a sheer rock face, with water and free climbers dripping from it. Free climbers all tend to be very much of a type, wiry from climbing and very thin from either keeping extremely fit or crapping themselves on a regular basis because of the sheer drop and lack of big bouncy inflatable castle below.

The free climbers in question looked to be enjoying themselves very much, yet one had to asking, for safety's sake, one should perhaps spoil their fun and break it to them that the is in fact a sarcasm, cut into the rock,that winds it's way very gently to the top of the cliff and has a constant stream of tourists aged eight to eighty using it.


As one climbs, so the view unfolds and one found oneself looking for Aragorn and the rest of the Fellowship of the Ring. This is exactly the sort of landscape hat they would pass through, on their way to do something violent to an orc. In fact, one would be more likely to bump into HarryPotter, as this is where they filmed one of the scenes from the last movie, Deathly Hallows, when Harry and friends are on the run and camping. The scene, and the scenery, looks like CGI and one imagines that after huffing the camera kit to the top of the Cove, the unlucky hampers were wondering why the scene couldn't just have been rendered in a graphics place in Soho.

The reason was to be found in the gift shop by the car park afterwards, where a youngHarry Potter fan was entertaining the staff with a Harry Potter quiz. The hap was obviously thrilled to visit a place that was in a real live movie about the boy wizard and that in itself must give satisfaction to whatever burly rigger carried the camera and lights and to the runner who was constantly up and down the staircase with coffee.

No lighting was required on top of Malham Cove, up here the brilliant sunshine was reflected back from the snow that still lay on the hills in pockets. It was an odd sensation to stand in the snow in the sunshine with waterproof and fleece tied round the waist, basking in the warm sun as the snow crunched under your boots. It makes one appreciate why walkers walk, hikers hike and people go outside at all, especially here. The whole area is essentially an enormous breathtaking photographic challenge and photography always looses because even if you kit superior to the Hubble telescope, there comes a point where you put your camera away and just sit there, trying to take it all in, knowing that the best favour you could ever do to somebody when trying to convey the beauty of the area would be to replace your photograph with a small piece of card bearing an OS map reference and the phrase 'just go'.


Returning from our walk (less than a hike, but very much more than a stroll) we decided that a cream tea would be just the job. Well, one of us fancied a cream tea, I was very much in the 'chips for lunch' camp. While the snow lay in isolated drifts, I had still been walking in it and so decided that a hot lunch was more than justified and, if that lunch consisted of chips, so much the better. Not that I need an excuse to have chips, but chips being required is quite a different proposition to chips being desired.

Returning to the village by a footpath that ran alongside houses where locals sat in their gardens, enjoying the sunshine and nodding to visitors 'ow do', we happened upon the Beck Hall Hotel, where, beside a brook that, to the delight of the Yorkshire tourist board, was babbling and sparkling in the sunshine, happy groups of tourists tucked into their lunches while opportunistic mallards waddled from table to table on the look out for the odd dropped crust.

A waitress, a young girl of about twenty with the sort of enthusiastic energy that one only finds in the young or the chemically enhanced, rushed to greet us. Her welcome was fairly unconventional; 'Have I told you about our cake disaster? There's no lemon drizzle. We're right out of coffee and walnut and there's barely a slice of Victoria sponge to be had!'. All this in a sort of breathless rush. I was relaxed, as nobody had mentioned a lack of chips yet.
'Do you have scones?'
'Oh aye, fresh baked. Tea with those?'
'Yes please, and a bowl of chips, and a sandwich, with meat in it.'

Five minutes later the table was groaning with food and tea and ten minutes later so was I. The drawback of staying or eating in a hotel that is walker and pet friendly is that it is always going to be just a tiny bit scruffy, those boots in the hallway and the paw prints on the tile floor knock off stars from the rating. And let's face it, nobody expects somebody who runs a hotel catering for walkers or dogs to keep the place spotless, you'd have to employ somebody just to Hoover from dawn to dusk. What you get though is a relaxed and friendly atmosphere and, when it comes to food, an understanding that it is best served promptly and in the sort of portions that are appreciated by folk who have just walked from one edge of their OS map to the other with only a banana to sustain them. My sandwich came with crisps, salad and coleslaw. As well as chips. This wasn't a snack, this was a meal!

The mallards went hungry.

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 - Hunstanton

Saturday saw Wells crowded with folk enjoying one last weekend of summer sunshine (in October!) before the onset of winter, heralded by the first appearance in supermarkets of Christmas advent calendars. I have no issue with Christmas stuff going on sale early, it helps families spread the cost of an expensive season but, if you are going to sell advent calendars in October, have ones with three months worth of countdown doors on them, let’s start building the excitement and winter-weight early.

So, hoping to dodge if not the crowds then at least the traffic, I headed west for a few minutes into Hunstanton. ‘Sunny Hunny’ is famed on the coast because through a quirk of geography, it faces West, meaning it’s the only resort on the coast you can enjoy the sunset from without having to turn around or something. Certainly, the sunset last night was spectacular, I enjoyed it through the bottom of a wine glass in a desperate attempt to keep cool through constant application of cold white wine from the fridge. It worked. I think. Consulting the notes of my experiment my handwriting deteriorates sharply after a few glasses for some reason.

Hunstanton was, to use a tourist board term ‘busy’. The seafront was lined with cars and the sunbathers were lined with tattoos. In part, the cars were parked on the seafront because parking there is free, but also because all the car parks were full. In the end, we parked up at Tesco (as it was free, I was expecting the parking bays to be marked out with blue and white stripes; every little helps!) and walked into town.

The grassy parks, normally picturesque triangles of green in the centre of town, were now a modernist mix of green and pinky red as those who did not have enough energy to get to the beach, or who decided they wanted to be close to the attractions of the town (chips!) chose to relax in the parks and gardens along the seafront.

In Norfolk, everyone has a dog. This is because walking is the regional pastime and its best enjoyed with a dog, not because a good walk is made better if you have to carry a small bag of dog poo with you to the nearest red bin, but because walking on your own makes you look like a serial killer, a rambler, or a rambling serial killer.

Gundogs and hounds are favourites, they come when they are called and lope in an attractive, relaxed way when on the beach. Before depositing half of it in the back of their owner’s car. I know some dog owners who have to empty the sand and seaweed out of their cars with a trowel after a week of walking their dog on the beaches here. Terriers, too, find favour and not just with women but with men who are not afraid to be seen with them, because while a terrier in an urban environment is basically a yap on a lead, out here they fly across the beach like wind-up toys, bark with alarm at something (such as a wave, a seashell or a washed up bottle) and then bolt back to their master before doing it all again. They are also excellent for sorting out anything nasty in the woodpile.

In Hunstanton though, the locals and visitors seemed to favour breeds more muscle than brains, the sort of thing that one normally sees guarding a crack den, or fighting in a gypsy encampment.

Like Wells, Hunstanton has a little train. Unlike Wells, theirs does not run on rails but rather is some sort of converted milk float affair, painted a jolly, and very bright, yellow, pulling a train of carriages that also resemble milk floats, but with passengers rattling round in the back nested of bottles. Like Wells, the owners could have benefited from adding a couple of carriages. Hunstanton has a long sea front and it's a pleasant walk but an even more pleasant ride.

The bright yellow road train is something of a local landmark, even featuring on postcards. Obviously, when something is that striking (and that yellow) the only reaction is to embrace it. Hunstanton used to have a proper railway station, it's how the hoards of tourists used to get here for their holidays before the car became the popular mode of transport and unpopular clutterer of villages that it is today and so any link to that heritage, no matter how tangential, remains popular, this explains the little train and the signal in the town car park where the station used to be.

So popular is the train that I think for the next season the should think about developing it, nothing creates a profit on a train quite like first class accommodation, although a sleeper service along the coast to Cromer might be pushing it a bit.

It was good to see the town so busy, with the traders making the most of this unexpected end of season trade. As the tourists made the most of the late sunshine, the traders made the most of the late rush and anywhere that sold coffee or chips was doing very well. The little corner bakery that I stopped in at had a coffee shop tacked onto the side, and onto the pavement, and had discovered that core requirement of all good coffee shops, the twenty first century equivalent of a teenage girl in an awkwardly formal waitress uniform (although it had those too); free wifi. The password to the network for customers was, charmingly, not handed out like some secret code or printed on a till receipt (a hangover from the bad old days of having to buy your Internet by the half hour) but chalked on the blackboard along with the specials of the day. Casual passers-by who were not customers were deterred from using it by the simple feature of it being about fourteen characters long. Genius! By the time I had entered it correctly on my third attempt, I was more than ready for my coffee.

Hunstanton caters for the bucket and spade brigade, there’s plenty of shops selling beach essentials (windbreaks and so on), and the fun-fair was in full swing, the thrill rides being enjoyed by those unaware or uncaring about the effects that salt corrosion can have on the load bearing metal struts of a roller coaster. The odd thing is that there’s no tat end and posh end, rather the two co-exist in the town with a seasidy atmosphere that is the result of more than a receding tide and vinegar splashing on hot chips. The rest of the coast may be painted a soft sedge green, but Hunstanton is pink lit by neon and funfair bulbs, and gloriously so.

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.

Postcard from Ireland - Dublin

Dublin’s not a large city, it just seems large compared to all the villages, hamlets and sheep grazing points that constitute habitations in the rest of Ireland. It is, though, incredibly busy – mostly due to the hoards of tourists who crowd the streets, but especially crowd the Guinness souvenir shop. Judging from the number of people walking around clutching Guinness shop carrier bags, at any one time the population of Dublin is around 90% tourist.

Traffic is a problem, especially if you have spent the last week driving roads quiet enough to allow the absolute necessity of stopping in the middle of a secluded road to photograph yet another breathtaking view. To cope, Dublin has many pedestrian crossings, which announce when it is safe to cross with flashing lights and the sound of bongos!

If you are young or an alcoholic, then there’s lots to do in Dublin, and by that I mean that there are lots of bars to visit.

For those of us who have been battering their liver all week and were actually looking forward to spending some time not in the pub, there’s the Book of Kells. Housed in Trinity College this is a display about bibles, just the thing for a God fearing country. And while it is amazing to see illuminated manuscripts, you get the feeling that justice is not being done. The public, for whatever reason, love Dan Brown’s books and so we’re happy to learn a lot more about hidden symbolism in the pictures. And I’m sure that the older tourists would have appreciated labels on the artefacts that were slightly easier to read than the minute latin text they were describing.

A missed opportunity to make more of a fascinating subject. Frankly, if I were a monk doing nothing but sitting freezing all day, copying out text and dodging buggers, I’d want a bit more credit when my work went on show.

After that disappointment, the Long Room at Trinity College was a revelation. Simply put – I want one. It was like a cathedral meets a bookshop meets a computer game arena meets the opening of a Dan Brown thriller. Dr Bob Langdon has to find the secret of the Book of Kells, but discovers that it’s not in the museum after all, but rather hidden in plain sight among the thousands upon thousands of volumes in the Long Room. But is it filed under ‘K’ or ‘B’. That Dan Brown, I don’t know how he comes up with such fiendish puzzles.

The other place of pilgrimage is The Guinness storehouse, half shrine, half funfair, all about drinking. Years ago when you went to Dublin you could do the brewery tour. Now because of heath and safety gone mad you go through this specially made tourist attraction. Actually it’s not half bad, the start of the tour describes brewing and it’s a bit like Willy Wonka’s factory, but with beer.

The tour finishes at the Gravity Bar, where you get your free pint of Guinness or a soft drink. There is no cash bar and that, combined with the worst service I got from bar staff in Ireland, ensures that you have your one pint and then go. Otherwise I suppose people would be up there all day, enjoying the panoramic view of Dublin and drinking beer, enjoying themselves.

Better to make a swift exit, find a pub and watch the tourists over a pint.

Postcard from Ireland - Glengarriff to Dublin

Just when you think you’ve seen all the rugged beauty of the wild west Atlantic coast, you round (yet) another bend and some other view is revealed. If you gave into the temptation to stop the car and take a picture every time you wanted to when driving through the Killarney National Park, your progress would resemble a stop-motion animation crossing of the hills and valleys.

There are those of course that have to drive the roads every day – like the chap with the van stopped by the side of the road hefting a sack of sheep feed onto his shoulders. The feeding troughs for the hillside sheep are within easy tipping distance of the road and the sheep seem terribly pleased to see the feeder – I don’t know what sheep feed tastes like, but it’s obviously an improvement on the normal fare of tuft and thistle.

In Killarney itself we stopped for coffee and cheesecake. In accordance with the rule that no meal or snack in Ireland shall consist of less than seven million calories, the huge slice of cheesecake comes with a scoop of ice cream. Nothing sets one up for a long journey quite like metabolising a lot of sugar.

The motorway in Ireland was a revelation – a smooth ribbon of tarmac and, compared to the crowded motorways at home, blissfully free of traffic. Possibly the locals are put off by the signs that adorn the junctions, explaining that motorways are not the place for scooters and learner drivers and, right at the bottom of the list of prohibitions, stating ‘no animals’. Trap racing may have its place in Ireland still, but that place is not the overtaking lane.

The road signs on the motorway continue in gaelic and English. Normally having signs in both languages is a sign of trying to resuscitate a dying language that is dwindling but here in Ireland people do actually speak gaelic and for those who don’t, it adds a delicious sense of being abroad. Visiting Ireland, English speaking and driving on the left, can be somewhat unsettling. There’s much that is familiar but you’re constantly reminded that the place is different to home, in a way less obvious than when you visit, say, France (which is bloody different from home, what with everyone being French).

Gaelic and English may be thriving languages in Ireland, but the most common language is Romanian. I’ve never been anywhere were there are so many foreign workers – including abroad. Obviously the thing that’s done is that

After the wild romance of the south, Dublin is a much more cynical place. It’s the capital city of course and, as cities go, it’s intimate but still manages to hang on to some charm with a historical centre, making much of the Georgian architecture. And, indeed, if you’re looking the craic, then Grafton street is the place to find it. Buskers busk and tourists move along slowly in a Brownian motion of gawking. Possibly the best addition to the street are the flower stalls. They turn street corners into tropical gardens, with the flowers raked up, like waterfalls of colour against the drab city centre.

Tourists too at Temple Bar, this time French school children, all sporting identical orange backpacks, clustered round a busking rock and roll band. Tres cool.

Postcard from Norfolk - Market day

What’s your favourite bookshop? Probably the bookshop I buy most of my books from is Amazon. But that’s not really a shop, is it. The mental image I have of Amazon, the vast warehouse from the final scene of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ is probably hopelessly quaint; Amazon is probably a vast network of vast warehouses, based on the moon or something, or the Isle of Man, as that’s where most of the DVDs I order from Amazon come from.

I’m not a total luddite. I’m not, for instance, wholly against the idea of coffee in a bookshop. It’s good to be able to take a stack of books to your table, have a coffee, brows, decide which one you want and put the rest, now with coffee rings and biscotti crumbs evenly distributed among the pages, back on the shelves. The day some genius puts a wine bar in a bookshop, I’m there!

But for me a bookshop sells books. Calmly, efficiently and with the minimum of fuss. The problem is that a lot of big chains are about as soulful as supermarkets (which is where you can also buy books, in between buying dog food and tampons, you can slip the latest beach-read bonkbuster into your basket). A good bookshop needs some sort of indefinable charm.


Much has been written about the perfect bookshop, most of it by Terry Pratchett in the novel ‘Good Omens’, so I won’t repeat it here. I will add though that the perfect bookshop is well stocked, has lots of books in the windows which, together with high shelving, cuts out harmful UV and, er, light, leading to the feeling of the creation of a literary womb or cave. Any hermit taking up residence would at least have plenty to read. It will be run by an eccentric proprietor who will make favoured customers tea and offer them rich tea biscuits (never digestives, as these crumble too easily having been dunked). His hours will be erratic, his footware will be slippers.

Top three fictional bookshops? Black Books, Bernard Black proprietor, from the television programme of the same name. The Eloquent Page, the science fiction bookshop run by Uncle Rogi Remillard in the novels written by Julian May. And the bookshop in ‘Before Sunset’ where Ethan Hawke meets up with Julie Delpy again. Okay, that’s actually a real store (Shakespeare and Company, Paris), but in this case it’s fictional because hey, it’s in a film.

But it brings us on to real actual bookstores. Okay, top three. In third place, Toppings and Company in Ely. Toppings is probably the last place in this dimension to be selling books at their cover price. How do they get away with it? Well, many of the hardbacks are signed by the author and come sealed in little plastic bags with an attractive band wrapped round them proclaiming ‘signed first edition’. Not something you get at Asda or Amazon. In addition, it’s a shop of great physical charm. The staircase up to the first floor is steep and twisty, but worth the climb to access the books on mountaineering – handy in the fens. Having recently moved Mrs Rochester out, they’ve opened up the attic and you can now have a coffee (free, there’s no Costa or Starbucks up there) and read a book while looking out the attic window at the cathedral lantern. The state of semi-hypnosis that this generates results in you splashing full price on books and not resenting the hell out of it.

Okay, second favourite (previously favourite). The Brazen head bookshop in Bunham Market, Norfolk. Exactly what a proper second hand bookshop should be. Crammed with books and with an enthusiastic owner. The last time I was in there he had just acquired some new stock and was looking through it, he got very excited about a ‘Biobull’ – a Gaelic bible. I should have bought the thing there and then, despite not being able to understand a word. They make their faith like granite in areas where Gaelic is spoken and this appeared to me to be just the sort of religious artefact to take comfort from in a faith emergency or vampire attack.

But my new number one favourite bookshop? It’s not a shop at all, it’s a stall. The Wednesday market at Sheringham in Norfolk is host to stalls selling everything from screwdrivers to football team themed duvet covers. Also, there’s a book stall. It’s fantastic. The chap who own it has his books lying flat on some tables in fruit boxes (if ever you need to transport your library, these are the carriers of choice) and also – and here’s the genius part – stacked up in ‘shelves’ by halving the fruit boxes and stacking them one on top of the other.

The stall sells second hand books – everything from the latest beach read that’s been read once and still smells faintly of tanning lotion where it’s rested on a baking tummy somewhere along the shores of the Med all the way to old penguins that have obviously spent a lot of time travelling in the pockets of various chaps.

The sheer variety is breathtaking, you could become ridiculously well-read by visiting once a week with a fiver. And you leave with some paperbacks in a paper bag, a lot more cheerful than you arrived and usually with a surprise buy. Now that’s a shopping success and that’s a great book stall.

Postcard from Sorrento - slim fit

Sorrento is beautiful. It’s also on the cruise circuit. This means that every day, even off season when I was there, there’s an elegant cruise ship anchored in the Bay. It also means that the population of Sorrento, by size, is as follow: American, German, English and Italian. By volume, its American, German, car horn, scooter, Italian, English.

God alone knows what the place is like in high season, but the little medieval alleyways were already crowded with tourists. This does not stop mad-arse Italians on scooters zooming down them at speed. Obviously, they are practicing manoeuvres for bag-snatching before the start of the tourist season.

The Italians here are all turned out really well. I felt like a right scruff in jacket and jeans. Luckily, I was able to improve my appearance no end with the purchase of a proper Italian shirt. I had cleverly left my shirt I had intended to wear to the wedding at home. Along with my camera. Oops.

So needing a replacement shirt I wandered into one of the many clothes shops and selected a fine white one, 16½ collar. Great. The lady at the till looks at the shirt and looks at me.

‘Sleem fit?’
‘Er, no…I suppose not’.
‘Ahhhh, Eenglish fit’. Smirk.

Indeed.