Rule Britannia

I loved London the first time we were there, and I loved it again this time, even if it is a dirty, crowded, polluted city with shoddy weather; I love the underground and the gloriously imperialistic we-stole-half-this-shit-from-our-colonies British Museum (I spent half a day there last time, and half a day there this time, and still haven’t seen any of Africa and only one room of Asia – the clock room, however, is brilliant), and how you can walk up behind a crowd of tourists to see what’s so interesting and find it’s some obscure royalty-related ritual that been going on for six hundred years and no-one even really knows why anymore, and most of all I love how familiar all the street and district names are because they’ve been mentioned in literature for years and change about as often as the royal rituals do.

But anyway, for all that, I didn’t take any photos of London this time; we did the tourist rounds last time – though I did take a couple in a rather impressive food market that Jamie Oliver supposedly shops at, and where I had a very nice slice of banana cake – look away now if you’re doing Ramadan and don’t want to see photos of food, especially pig-based food. In fact, I do keep mentioning food in this entry, so you might want to avoid it altogether...







So this is a stack of cooking chocolate. You know how cooking chocolate for years was this horrible low-quality inedible stuff which was supposedly improved by being melted down and stirred into other things…I don’t think this is quite the same.

And this is a roasted suckling pig the likes of which we hadn’t seen since our visit to Spain. £85 a kilo, my friends, or thereabouts; they sell it by the 100g, which we wanted to get just to try, but the wait for carving was half an hour. And isn’t it interesting their weights system is metric but distances and currency aren’t.



We stayed in New Forest, which was mostly heathland despite the name, with lots of ponies by the side of the road (there’s a sign I never thought to see, ‘Risk of Ponies’), and Dartmoor, a suitably gothic moor with suitably gothic weather (Heathcliff wasn’t set there, but it might as well have been), and then spent quite a bit of time in Cornwall. We ignored castles and cathedrals, having done them last time, and continued the theme from Malta by looking at ancient standing stones and prehistoric village remains. Cornwall ice-cream, by the way, is the best ice-cream of those western counties.



I lie, we did do two castles: one was St Micheal’s Mount, near Penzance, if only because we did the French island-castle Mont St Michel; unlike the French version, it’s boats only to the castle until low tide when the causeway appears.

The other was Tintagel, attached to a very pretty town of the same name, and supposedly the birthplace of Arthur, though they were surprisingly upfront at squashing that legend in their very good information centre. Tintagel castle was made from the slate which predominates the area, makes for unusual ruins.


The town of the trip was lovely little Lynmouth, at the bottom of a large hill in Exmoor to the north of Devon/Somerset. The other half of the town, Lynton at the top of the hill (joined by a water-powered Victorian cable train) is not nearly so pretty because it doesn’t have the river and gorge. We also had the meal of the trip in Lynmouth, at the Eat Moor café – closely rivalled by a meal at the A Little Moorish Spanish restaurant in Ashburton near Dartmoor, they do like moor puns.

We spent an afternoon in Bath, but did not do the baths, because we have seen an entire Roman city plus baths for literally a tenth of the cost…we also drove right by Glastonbury and its highly visible tor, and Salisbury, but did do Stonehenge and Avebury.


The Avebury stone circle is very cool if only because the village is built in the middle of it, meaning the inn and other village institutions get to claim to be only one of their type built in a pagan circle (the churches seem to get a kick out of that). The inn also claims to be one of the top ten haunted sites in the world, I’m not sure how they worked out their ranking out…

We had the insult of the trip in Avebury – looking for accommodation for the night, we were showed a lovely B&B room, and then told the price was £150 a night – for context, the next most expensive place, also with a ‘view of the stones’ which is apparently a selling point, was £80 a night, and the place we ended up in was £50; for more context, it would have cost us nearly AU$1000 for two nights. Nice room, okay, but still just a place to sleep.

We told the guy showing us the room, politely, that it was little more than we had expected to pay and we would look elsewhere. His polite response? ‘The nearest Salvation Army [homeless shelter] is in Salisbury…just kidding.’ Well, we know where our nearest wanker is…just kidding. The Lodge in Avebury, look him up sometime.