stephenturner

Six thousand years ago, Neolithic man started ripping big lumps of rock up and arranging them in a nice circular pattern. Nobody knows why they did this for sure, although I suspect that the reason was much the same as why we are trekking around the country looking at them: they wanted to see something impressive, and they wanted something to do. Perhaps the people of the late stone age left these for us to find as examples of the oldest waste of time known to man, the ‘team building’ weekend, or lifetime, as was probably the case with Stonehenge, which appeared to take around 1,500 years to complete before it was abandoned as a pointless and futile project, much like ‘The Public’ building in West Bromwich, if we are looking for a modern equivalent. It ... read more

“Getting confused by local lamplight” Contrary to the song title, I do have a map, or at least Google does. Just out of interest, I plugged in where our travels had taken us so far (and will do up to where we have planned so far), and the blue lines on the map show us exactly that. If we had travelled the whole lot in the car, we would have travelled 2,819 miles, so even if we imagine that some of the journeys were shortened by use of the train, we could have made it to the North Pole by now if we had just headed due north and kept going. It’s a long way. Looking back is all very nice, but it won’t help us decide where we are going next, and nor will I. ... read more

The Natural History Museum is one of those wonderful Victorian buildings, so abundant in London, that draws your eye before you even get close. The architecture itself makes the museum a truly remarkable place before you have even stepped into the main entrance. Of course, when you do step in, you are greeted by a diplodocus, or at least the carefully welded-together bones of a diplodocus that probably died around 150 million years ago. The bones don’t stop there though; a huge section of dinosaurs contains dozens of nearly perfectly preserved dinosaurs and fossils, and by the time we were through the ‘blue zone’, maybe a quarter of the whole museum, it was approaching twilight outside, and once again we sacrificed the completeness of the visit for moving on to somewhere new. The Natural History Museum ... read more

There was a knocking on the door. It was an impatient knock, and it was no surprise to discover that on the end of it was the hotel owner, rushing around letting everybody know that the kitchen would be closing soon. Fortunately we were ready, for it was 9.00, the exact time we had agreed to have our breakfast during the owner’s very brief introduction the night before. Her husband was much more relaxed, and cooked a good breakfast, which we enjoyed while we listened to husband and wife arguing somewhere in the kitchen, one being too slow, the other too fast, quite possibly. As the weather had turned out so well, it almost felt a waste to be away from home and not go for a big random walk somewhere, so we arranged for Mark ... read more

“Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by our sun of York” - Shakespeare, Richard III For a summer that was neither glorious nor particularly ridden with golden rays, it has, in many ways, been kind to us. Barring a bit of rain in Buxton, a persistently wet afternoon in the Lake District and a washout of a weekend in Edinburgh (but then it is Scotland, rain is a fact of life up there), we’ve been pretty lucky. In the intervening months since we returned from the Lakes, there has been something of a mini-heat wave which I failed to take advantage of through a lack of organisational skills. By the time I finally got around to arranging York, summer was well and truly over. Or at least it should have been. Only ... read more