Taff Up-Over part 4
Sunday:
We got back to Llanelli without too many hassles, although my nostalgia dial was still set at 11 all the way back. We picked up some nice easy vege-meals at Tescos’, one of these was Tesco’s own ready-made colcannon, which was gorgeous, especially when served with Quorn bangers and gravy. This made me rather envious as we don’t get anything like that quality of vege ready meals in Oz. So we went and decamped at me Mam’s place, and cooked up, and stuffed ourselves.
Mam was in a chatty mood that night, so me and her sat up talking until gone midnight, and very nice it was too.
The next day, LeeAnne and Bethy decided to go down to the beach and hire some cycles to do a bit of the coastal cycle trail there. I was going to stroll around the neighbourhood and wax lyrical and poetical about my youth to myself in my sub-Dylan Thomas, prosaic, style. Pointless I know, but fun. Well at least I enjoy it.
Anyway, I hadn’t got as far as the end of our street, when it pissed down. So I drove down to the beach to rescue my two ladies, and hunted high and low for them, only to find them snug and warm, enjoying a cuppa and the view from the cafe.
I managed to talk my mother into coming up to town with us for a spin. We strolled about, and changed some cash into pounds, and wandered in and out of the markets, but still no one recognised me. I’m a stranger in my hometown now.
That evening Bethy had kindly offered to baby-sit Mam for us, so LeeAnne and I packed an overnight bag, and took a train to Swansea. We promised ourselves that, as for most of the holiday Bethy had either been sharing a room with us, or had been too close for comfort for us to have wild, uninhibited, kinky sex, we’d have at least one childfree evening, and this was it. We’d booked an “executive suite” in Swansea’s Grand Hotel as a treat for ourselves.
http://thegrandhotelswansea.co.uk/
I’d wanted to stay at the Grand as it gets mentioned in a number of Dylan Thomas’s short stories, as well as featuring heavily in another book “Freaks” which was one of those “New English Library” pulp fiction novels that were about in the 70’s. (I’ve still got it somewhere.)
http://www.trashfiction.co.uk/freaks.html
We got there and booked into the room, which was plush without being ostentatious. There was a great view of Swansea; “that ugly lovely town” (Dylan Thomas) from our balcony, and the room had a DVD player and large screen TV. Hmmmmm, that could be useful…
So I told LeeAnne that I’d try and get something “worth watching” for us to view on the DVD player. I checked the local yellow pages, looked under “Adult shops”, “Adult DVD’s”, “Adult services” “Hardcore wank DVD’s”, and “Farm supplies” seeing as we were in Wales, but nothing.
“I know what I’ll do,” said I, “I’ll get a cab driver to take me to one, that’ll work!”
Oh boy, here I go again…
So of course, seeing as we’re staying in Swansea’s most plush hotel, and across the road from the train station, I’m bound to get a cab straight off, aren’t I? Am I hell as like.
I waited and waited, and eventually noticed the sign to the cab rank, which was across on the other side of the station. So I strolled over. (You have to remember that while all this is going on, I’m walking bent almost double as I have a hard-on you could cut concrete with.)
Fortunately there’s no one else at the rank. So I wait for another ten minutes, of course, for a cab to show up. Then one arrives. Driven by a woman. Bollocks.
So sod it, I’ve been waiting long enough.
“Hi, I hope you’re not offended by this, but you couldn’t take me to an “adult” shop, could you?”
“Oh, there’s one just down the road, on the corner of Ivey Street, just at the corner of High Street.”
“You wouldn’t drive me there would you?”
“Save your money bach, it’s only just down there.” She pointed vaguely down the road I’d just walked up. “It’s only five minutes walk, it’s a knocking shop really, but they’ll have what you want.”
So I strolled off in the direction she had pointed, getting hopelessly lost, and wandering what the hell she had thought it was that a “knocking shop” would have that I would have wanted?
Anyway, after walking for an age, I found myself outside the “knocking shop”, which happened to be next door to the hotel.
Now call me spoiled, but I’m now so used to the “Adult” shops in Oz that this one came as a surprise to me. Oz shops make no bones about what they are selling or have on offer; “Come on in and look at our huge range of wank DVD’s, starting at only $5.00” and “All sorts of interesting things you can stick up yourself, or up your friends, at bargain prices” “Come and try our new range of lubricants, guaranteed to stop you getting a sore arse!” and such are all plainly advertised in the windows. Our favourite shop, “Adam and Eve’ even has TV adverts nightly. You can wander about these brightly lit shops, and avoid the pretty and helpful staff that inevitably serve there, and browse with the other customers, and it’s all very open and clean, and no one gives a flying fuck about you or what you’re buying.
But this place was “old school”. It had blacked out windows, a seedy, grotty hallway, and nothing to intimate what was inside. I was just plucking up the courage to go in, when a guy walked out who was the spitting image of how our parents warned us we’d end up looking if we masturbated too much. So I gave up the ghost, went back to the hotel.
LeeAnne and I then spent a very cosy thirty seconds or so in the bar downstairs before rushing back to the room.
And the rest of the day and night we’ll draw a discrete veil over….
Monday:
The next morning we got up late and went down for breakfast. I don’t think the waiter believed that a scruffy looking shite like me was staying in the executive suite, so he double-checked our room ID. Tosser.
We got ourselves together and got all the way across the road to find that we’d missed our train by ten minutes, and that we’d an hours wait for the next one.
We got back to Llanelli, visited Wynn, Jac, Bron and Dyl, briefly, mainly to apologise for being unable to stay the day with them, and to say good bye. Shopped about for bangers and pies. Went back to my mothers house, cooked and crashed.
And that was Monday. (A night of hot sex can really take it out of you at my age.)
Tuesday:
Saying a sad farewell to my mother, and promising to return in two years or so. (And boy was it a strange emotion that that engendered.) We drove off. We stopped off at the Tesco’s and filled up with snacks for the long journey ahead.
I’ll take this opportunity to say sorry to all my mates in Llanelli, who we’d promised to have another night out with on our return to the town, but time tide, and my inevitable cock-ups wait for no man, and Bethy was due for her treat, seeing as I’d had mine.
We drove out of Wales passing, Swansea, the very beautiful Port Talbot, the capital Cardiff, the wonderful Castell Coch, and out over the Severn bridge. Bye-bye Wales.
We headed off up the M5 following the Welsh borders, passing Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city, and the city which only has one redeeming feature; Edgebaston. We were heading into uncharted territory for me as well as the other two, I’d never visited this corner of the UK before. It’s got no real mountains or cliffs, so why would I have?
We eventually got to our destination; Alton Towers.
http://www.alton-towers.co.uk/themepark/
It was a real surprise to find the place. After driving through the sort of countryside that really did make you feel like singing;
“Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England–now!!
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops–at the bent spray’s edge–
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower
–Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!Oh, to be in England, Now that April’s there, And whoever wakes in England Sees some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood we arrived
we arrived at the village of Alton, a tiny hamlet of beautiful, old-brick, cottages, true rural idyll. Boy, must they have been pissed off when the UK’s biggest theme park was built next door or what?
Having worked in a Theme park, and being something of a snob and elitist, I am normally quite disdainful of the sheer bloody awful tackiness of these places. They seem to cater to all that is lowest common denominator, naff, rubbish and ugly, with their vacuous, safe, “thrill”, rides, their grease and sugar catering, and their scamming of money from the stupid and unimaginative. Having said that, and after seeing the rides a couple of times, I did want to go and have a go on them, so yah-boo-sucks at me then.
We saw the rides more than once, as we had got on the monorail train which traverses around the park, and no one had told us when to get off. How were we to know it was a circular ride? Anyway we found where we wanted, the Cariba water park, and after spending in excess of my mortgage on three tickets, we went in.
http://www.alton-towers.co.uk/waterpark/
Now me and water parks get on like someone who is terrified of water gets on with a big theme park full of water related activities. But I stuck it out, and Bethy was having so much fun that I couldn’t begrudge her the 300-mile drive, the expense of getting in, and the cost of cleaning my swimming costume. So we stayed there all the day, and Bethy had great fun.
Not having booked anywhere to stay, we drove off eventually with the “joire-de-vivre” of those that know wherever they chose to stay they are going to regret it, so why worry?
It was getting dark by now, and we were getting worried that a night in the car was looming, when we passed a cheery looking pub, the “Royal Oak” at Mayfield. “We’ll try here;” said I.
http://www.pub-explorer.com/derbyshire/pub/royaloakhotelashbourne.htm
So we went in, and a rather harassed young lady told us we could have rooms for the night. She led us up to a room, a beautiful oak beamed bedroom, which looked like the decor hadn’t changed since the 1960’s, or possibly the 1860’s, but looked all the more fun for that. It even had a 60’s B&W TV, cute. We dropped our kits, and went down stairs. “Any chance of some food?” we asked, “sorry we don’t have a chef on tonight, we’re leaving here this weekend and some new people are taking it over. There’s plenty of places around here to eat though.” She then gave us directions to a pub that had “a great reputation for grub”, directions I immediately forgot.
We jumped in the car and drove off, and within two miles I was lost. And it was foggy. I could hear Bethy sharpening a knife in the back, and thought she may start eating the seats, if I was lucky. Eventually we saw a sign for a pub/restaurant. We drove through what was obviously some private parkland with deer and antelope looming out of the mist. (“They’ll cook up a treat if we get even more lost,” I thought.)
Go to the address below to see this wonderful little bit of god’s earth.
http://www.ashbourne-town.com/villages/mappleton/mapp.htm
We eventually found “The Oakover Arms”
I can only say that the pub was fantastic, the food glorious and well deserving of all the praise which had been written their guest book. The beer there was some of the best kept real ale (Old Hooky) I have ever had the luck to try, and I’ve tried lots. I was being all self-congratulatory on finding this palace amongst pubs, when LeeAnne pointed out; “shame we didn’t find this place first, what a great place to stay. I bet the breakfast would be out of this world.”
Bugger… and there’s more to come.
So we got back to the other pub, and those two took themselves off to bed. I stayed down in the main bar and read for a while, and then chatted with some of the locals. I got invited into a round with two guys, Phil and Dando, and boy could those two drink? I felt like a real light-weight compared to these two. Phil was an “agricultural power assemblage maintenance technician” (combine harvester mechanic) and Dando was a tyre fitter. Great lads, both of whom seemed to find it odd that, having emigrated to Oz, I’d ever find the need to return to the UK. Mind you, Phil admitted the furthest he’d ever been in his 32 years of life was to the Royal Agricultural show, for a weekend, and he had got homesick then. Eventually, after saying goodnight, and promising them a postcard from Oz, I went up to bed myself. This was via a devious route of my own devising which took in the snug, another bar I’d not seen before, the cellar, someone else’s bedroom, (fortunately unoccupied,) and three trips back to the main bar. During one of the trips back to the bar I even found myself wandering around in the car park, desperately trying to find a way back indoors.
Wednesday:
We got up and found there was no milk for an early morning cuppa. Anyone who’s spent an early morning with LeeAnne will know that not getting several cups of coffee down her, before attempting to communicate with her on a human level, can be fatal. Oh bugger.
Then Bethy found a note on the door from the owners apologising that they hadn’t been able to get a cook to come in to make us our breakfast, and so here was a refund of some of our cash.
Shite.
So we showered, at least the water was warm, and packed up and pissed off.
Now as I said earlier, I’ve not been to this part of the world before, and seeing it through the early morning spring mist, I found I’d missed out on a lot; “The Potteries” is a truly beautiful area.
We saw signs for Stoke-on-Trent, and having used the city name as an euphemism for…work it out yourself... for so many years, I thought it would be a good place to visit. Not only that, but there would be a good chance to get some breakfast, but more importantly to get coffee into LeeAnne before one of us (me) died.
So we followed the signs for the city centre, found a car park, and set off. We hadn’t gone a hundred yards when we spotted a cafe. We looked at the menu in the window, it was a huge and slightly confusing menu, but we spotted a fair whack of vege options, so we went in.
One thing that struck me about the place was the name; “The Tontine cafe”.
tontine
n 1: a form of life insurance whereby on the death or default of a participant his share is distributed to the remaining members [syn: tontine insurance]
2: an annuity scheme wherein participants share certain benefits and on the death of any participant his benefits are redistributed among the remaining participants; can run for a fixed period of time or until the death of all but one participant
The mind boggles.
On the menu they had “breakfast oatcake pancakes, filled with mushrooms and three cheeses”, well I’ll try anything once. In fact they were yummy, and I tried them twice, greedy bugger that I am. (I was even contemplating a third go they were that good.) Bethy ordered the “full English”, LeeAnne ordered intravenous java. While we were waiting for the meals a gang of builders came in, all of whom had names ending in “a”, Dekka, Billa, Rodga, and Smakka, or at least that what it sounded like. They all ordered the “full breakfast” too, so we knew Bethy was in for a treat, when builders ask for a breakfast they don’t want muesli. When it arrived it was huge, and she did enjoy every bit of it. Well nearly every bit, she balked at the “black pudding”, and who can blame her?
So we drove off once more, and got caught in a traffic jam that added an hour to the journey, and took some of the sheen off my newfound love of the potteries.
We drove down to Wiltshire. At this point I must apologise to Dan the Man, and Panorama Paul both of whom we had fully intended to meet up with while we were in this neck of the woods. Unfortunately, while we were packing we had left our telephone numbers list in Derbyshire. Sorry guys, you’ll just have to come visit us instead.
While I’m diverting myself here; I had a realisation, a revelation in fact today, which I thought I’d share with you. You may or may not remember me bunnying on about how much the return to Devon had affected me this trip? Well I think I’ve found the reason.
The other day the mother-in-law asked me to copy K. D. Lang’s “Hymns of the 49 th. Parallel,” for her. I’m not a fan of the slap-headed lesbian, but I thought I’d do us a copy, as maybe LeeAnne would like it. As it happens I’ve warmed to it myself, even if some of her renditions are a little clinical for my taste. But there I was, listening to her version of Neil Young’s “Helpless”, and these words came in to focus…
There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.
And that for me is Devon, all my changes were there. Taff was born aged 22 in Plymouth, and R.I.P my old self.
Anyway, enough of the existentialism, and back to the bollocks,…
We at last managed to get off the motorway, and drove through the rolling chalk downs of Wiltshire. There was something here I was sure that Bethy would love, and which would set the scene for where we were going, and fortunately I was right.
http://wiltshirewhitehorses.org.uk/cherhill.html
The Cherhill white horse is the second oldest of the Wiltshire horses. It is situated on the edge of Cherhill Down, off the A4 Calne to Marlborough road just east of the village of Cherhill, and is just below the earthwork known as Oldbury Castle. Nearby is the obelisk known as the Lansdowne Monument. Very well placed high on a steep slope, the horse is easily visible from below and from a distance.
So having taken the obligatory panoramic photograph, we moved on. We soon arrived at Avebury, one of the UK’s best known ancient monuments, and one that I think is far better than the ‘Henge.
One of the most important megalithic monuments in Europe is spread over a vast area at Avebury, much of it under Trust protection. The great stone circle, encompassing part of the village of Avebury, is enclosed by a ditch and external bank and approached by an avenue of stones.
Well as I’d only ever visited the stones of Avebury once before I was hoping memory served me well, and that Bethy and LeeAnne would find them as bloody fantastic as I had on my first visit. First things first, we went into the Red Lion Pub which is unique being the only pub situated within a stone circle.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/villages/redlion.shtml
Fortunately they had a room for the night available, so we were able to drop off our kit, and have a wash and brush up after the journey. More than this though, we also had a room with a view out over the stones, in a pub with a good food guide recommendation, a real ale guide recommendation, and in one of the most awe inspiring places in the UK. Sorted. The room itself was superb, real “olde-worlde” stuff.
One of the bars downstairs housed the old village well, 80 foot deep, now illuminated and covered with a glass lid. This was inscribed with the tale of how many a drunken villager had fallen down it and drowned. We thought that this legend, and the fact that they were advertising for staff to work in this “haunted pub” might scare Bethy a bit, but she loved it. (The influence of all those Harry Potter books no doubt.)
Here’s the tale of the ghost..
A jealous husband returning from the English Civil War threw his wife Flori down a deep well after finding her in bed with another man. This legend haunts the Red Lion pub, with several customers and employees seeing Flori, dressed in black, walking around the pub in search of a bearded man. One eyewitness report detailed a spinning chandelier with a bearded man sat underneath. Customers have seen Flori in the ladies toilets and a previous pub landlady said the ghost of Flori hurled salt and pepper over tables and chairs. Ghostly horse-drawn carriages have been seen pulling up outside the pub, which dates back to the 16th century.
A load of old bollocks I know, but fun when you’re ten.
I rang me Mam, just to let her know we were safe, also to get the number of my Uncle Terry and Aunty Noreen, who live locally. I managed to get through to Noreen and invited them to join us for a beer that evening.
Noreen and Terry aren’t really my aunt and uncle, Noreen’s some sort of second cousin or something to me. But they had been a big influence on me as a kid. Things like the fact that Terry had been a keen biker, and had owned some beautiful big bikes stands out in my memory. (And he still owns beautiful big bikes!) They had a car, no other bugger in my family did, and so they regularly took us for days out in the summer holidays. They had been keen to try new and different things, things as radically strange for Llanelli as Indian food, foreign holidays, moving house, bettering themselves, leaving the town, learning new things, and earning good money. These were all revelations to me as a kid. Could people from Llanelli really do that? What, even me?
So the three of us set off around the stones. The stones are so bloody amazing that I’m not even going to begin to start to try to tell you how bloody amazing they are. You’ll just have to go see for yourselves.
We’d been strolling around for a while each step bringing gasps of awe from us as each corner revealed a new wonder, and we had decided to head on up the hill along the stone row, when someone shouted from behind us. There were bloody Terry and Noreen, stomping up the hill! So after doing the introductions we strolled on together, the three girls chatting and me and Terry swapping tales. To be fair, Noreen and Terry did most of the talking, as they can chat twenty to the dozen, neither of them have lost the accent, and they both have that Welsh knack of asking you a question, supplying the answer themselves and then moving onto the next point, all without pausing to draw breath. It was great to catch up with them both, and it was amazing that even though we moved apart twenty or more years ago, we still have loads in common, more now than ever I think, and that we could touch base on so much.
Terry led us around the back of the hill, along a little used path and up a steepish slope to where we could get a superb view of Silbury hill. Here you go…
Silbury Hill, part of the complex of Neolithic monuments around Avebury in Wiltshire (which includes the West Kennet long barrow), is the tallest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe and one of the world’s largest. On a base covering over 2 hectares (5 acres), it rises 39.6m (130ft) high. It is a display of immense technical skill and prolonged control over labour and resources. Archaeologists calculate that Silbury Hill was built about 4600 years ago and that it took 18 million man-hours to dump and shape 248,000 cubic metres (8.75 million cu ft) of earth on top of a natural hill. Every man, woman and child in Britain today could together build such a mound if they each contributed one bucketful of earth.
And the funniest thing about Silbury Hill is that no bugger knows why it was built; it’s a complete mystery.
So we strolled on, and chatted and caught up, and made it back down to the village. Terry and Noreen were shooting off from there, they have to keep a strict schedule on their whirlwind social life. So we said our goodbyes, and promised to keep in touch. The nice thing is though that they’re coming to Oz at the end of this year, so I get to drag them up my local hills. Though if my form remains true it’ll be a case of them dragging me up my local hills.
While Bethy and LeeAnne went back to the pub for a sit down, I strolled around the village, taking more shots of the stones, and being annoyed by bloody hippies. These gits, and there were swarms of them, places like Avebury are hippy/nutter magnets, were hugging the stones, banging drums, playing bagpipes, chanting, waving “dream-catchers” and generally being fucking annoying twats in the way that only hippies can. Can we have an open season for hippy shooting please?
I collected the girls and we went for a coffee, visited the museum, and went to the local shops. I’d run out of things to read, and was desperate for a book, I can get rather tetchy if I don’t have reading materials to hand constantly. Browsing around shelves full of books with titles like: “Feng Shui your pet to better health”, “The Roswell diet, lose weight and meet space aliens”, “Knit your own garlic dream-catcher”, “The Tao of plastic bead curtains” and “You’re a fucking woman, live with it bitch,” (I may have imagined that last one) I found “The Trials of Arthur”
http://www.warband.org/The%20Trials.htm
Ok now Avebury must have had it’s ley lines crossed at that point or something, as I normally wouldn’t use that sort of book to wipe my dogs arse with, let alone read, leave alone pay out good money for it. But, in a moment of stunned-hippy-like delirium I bought it. Not only that, but I bought a signed copy with “Bright Blessings, Arthur Pendragon” scrawled on the inner leaf. I’m sure the incense they were burning in that shop was drugged you know.
Ok, here we go…
Mad, bad and shamelessly bold, self-styled king Arthur Pendragon, Druid and Eco-Warrior, fought a fourteen-year battle for the public’s right to attend Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, and won. He has taken the Home Office to the High Court and Her Majesty’s Government to the European Court, has stood his ground on numerous battlefields, from the wooded enclaves of the Newbury By-Pass construction site, to the studios of Clive Anderson’s Talk Back. Through the wonderfully entertaining story of Arthur, his origins and his exploits, this book explores the state of Britain today, contrasting the old landscape of sacred groves and ancient monuments that Arthur inhabits, with the new landscape of drive-in McDonalds, car parks and shopping centers that have become the moral backdrop of the modern British psyche.
Come with us on a quest for adventure, through fields and forests and sacred places, in the company of bikers and pagans and eco-warriors, in search of the enduring, real Britain behind the dreary spin of modern consumer
capitalism.
See what I mean? For fuck’s sake, get a grip Taff.
We headed back to the pub, me carrying the book in a plain brown wrapper. We had a meal at the pub, a three-course job, and bloody good grub it was too. While eating I had the book out on the chair next to me, our waitress, a very attractive hippy bird noticed it; “Oh that’s my mate Arthur’s book, he’ll be ever so pleased you bought it.”
He may be pleased, but would I ever live it down?
A funny thing is that they lock you in the pub at night. They gave you a key to let yourself out in emergency, but warned you that you’d set off alarms if you entered the bars or the dining areas. The girls gave me the key and I let them up into the bedroom, and returned to the bar. I had a very entertaining evening, reading the book, chatting with the Ozzie barman, and gradually getting more pissed, which increased the entertainment value of the book no end. For some strange reason the music being played in the bar that night was “Leonard Cohen’s Greatest Hits”! I kid you not, old “laughing Lenny’s” best dirges, not exactly the sort of tunes that lend themselves to a nights quaffing, but sort of fitting, in a melancholy sort of way. Eventually I made my way up to bed, without getting too lost and setting off the alarms, and tried not to wake up either of the girls for fear of them thinking me the ghost.
Thursday:
We woke early, and went down for breakfast. Seeing as we were down before the chef clocked on for the day we had a bit of a wait. Breakfast was brilliant though, as we were the only people down at that point, the geezer just rustled up whatever we wanted to order, and a fine job he made of it too. Bethy had the thickest cut of bacon I have ever seen, it looked like they’d scraped the skin off a pigs buttock and fried it up whole.
We then drove to Heathrow, and, after washing the car and making sure it was spotless, returned it to the rental people. They took a brief glimpse at it, decided it was all there, and returned my deposit. I’m still not ever using them again though the conning buggers.
We had a curtesy car take us to the terminal, and then got a tube into central London.
This proved not to be as big a nightmare we had envisioned, thankfully, it wasn’t fun by any means, but it could have been so much worse. As you can imagine by now we had more luggage than your average coach party. I had a suitcase on wheels so big I could have happily camped out in it, LeeAnne had a similar affair, Bethy had a rucksack which she vanished under every time she put it on, and the three of us were festooned with hand luggage, hold-alls, and carrier bags. Getting on and off busy tube trains could have been a nightmare.
But the fates smiled on us, and we managed to travel half way across London, three tube changes, on virtually empty trains with no problems.
We found, to our dismay, that the hotel we had booked into, the Custom House Hotel, was opposite London’s Exhibition Centre, which that weekend was hosting, of all things, a WWF competition. The hallway of the hotel was thronged with small kids, skinny, spotty, teenagers, and beer-gutted men, all wearing black T-shirts with; “I love Big Death Mangler” or “The Rock Kills all Losers” or “I’m such a fucking retard I don’t know bad acting when I see it”, and such stuff on them.
Why are the sort of people who fall for this sort of thing exactly the sort of weak, scrawny, tits who would last about 0.02 of a nanosecond in a real pagga?
Honestly.
We checked in, and went up to the room. For the price we were paying it was something of a bargain. It had a double bed for us, a bunk bed for Bethy, TV, a shower and reasonable sized wardrobes, and was spotlessly clean and soundproofed, all for fifty quid for a night. That’s fifty quid for the room, not each. Just to put it in perspective, we’d paid 40 quid a head for the room at the Red Lion the night before.
All told it was a bargain, so if you’re ever travelling to London and want a good place to doss on the cheap, try the Custom House Hotel in London’s Docklands. Tell them Taff sent you. This won’t get you any bargains, it’ll just confuse the buggery out of them.
However, we only had two mugs in the room, so LeeAnne went down and asked if we could have a third, and they said they’d send one up.
So we dropped our stuff in the room, and went for a walk around the docklands. Nothing much to see there except bloody great warehouses that have been converted into twee and expensive shops.
Although I did manage to get the latest batch of pictures from my camera burned onto disks without being given a faulty product. However this took at least a decade. I think the Indian lady who was doing it was transferring them individually by hand, and oil painting them onto the disk.
We strolled back to the hotel and asked at the desk for a place to eat. The best places were, apparently, a choice between the pub next door, or the Chinese eatery in the hotel. You know my thoughts on Chinese grub, so I managed to bully the girls into going into the pub. It didn’t look promising when we got in there, it was packed out, noisy, and rather smoky. However they were fine with kids being in there, and we found a table to ourselves. I got myself a pint of Fullers “London Pride”, a G&T for LeeAnne and a soda for Bethy, and we perused the menu. They had a fine vege choice, and when we looked into the back of the pub there was an open kitchen area, with all the meals being freshly prepared by hot and busy chefs. None of your ready-made microwave’d, bog standard, pub grub then.
We ordered the grub, and another pint for me, as the first one had proved to be very good indeed, and sat back and relaxed. That’s a rare thing for me to do in London, relax. The food took a while, but was well worth the wait. It was a very big serving, and bloody delish too, I was having to reconsider a lot of my preconceptions about “the smoke”. Not change them, just reconsider them, this is me we’re talking about here.
We found when we went back to the room that we still only had two mugs, so I went down and reminded them, and they said we could have one in the morning.
We got off to bed early, and girded our loins for the next days exploration.
Friday:
We got up early, and made our way down to the breakfast room. Breakfast was an “all you can eat”, self-service, buffet, and therefore I helped myself to all I could eat. Which is a fuck of a lot. The food was good, and considering I alone ate a good twenty quids worth of breakfast, the room was turning out to be even more of a bargain.
However, back in the room we were still drinking by rotation, and so LeeAnne went down and reminded them that we wanted another mug, and they told her that they’d definitely have one put in the room by the time we got back.
We took a train to Tower Bridge, to go to the Tower of London. We had the aim of buying Bethy’s dad a book on armour and armour making, as it’s an interest of his. We’d been trying to get one everywhere we went, and as we’d been to St Michaels Mount, Tintagel, Castell Coch, Exeter, and Avebury so far, you’d have thought we would have been over-burdened with such books by now. But nope, and there was nothing here either, zilch, not a sausage, bugger all.
Ah well, so on we went.
Next stop was the Natural History Museum. Now I’m like a kid when I go to the NHM, it’s always been a mindblower for me.
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/
The building alone is worth travelling to see, with carved animals decorating the walls and arches, and fantastic decorative brickwork. The exhibits and shows there are all first rate, and they keep a wonderful store of all that is weird and fantastic in nature on display. Also it’s free, I like free.
We headed straight into the dinosaur exhibition, as the full-sized, animated, T-Rex was back on display there. Unfortunately the whole of London had the same idea. The queue was miles long, snaking through the whole of the dinosaur exhibition and back, and even “up and over” on an elevated walkway. We dawdled along, unfortunately stuck behind an American woman and her two kids. She insisted on reading each display card aloud, interjecting it with strange, out-of-context inanities, and had one of those s-l-o-w accents, (I’m sure my American chums will be able to tell me where from,) the sort of accent that can string out the average sentence for a good hour. I would have minded so much but her kids were about twelve years old fer christ’s sake. Also she had a really strange way with breaking up her sentences, and at the end of each exhibit she’d say exactly the same fucking thing.
So for each display we got something like the following:
“Hey now guys this is the Dipl-odo-cus. It was a sau-rop-od, a group which were especially abundant in the late Ju-ra-ssic period. It was the longest …gosh can you believe that…. of the land animals but not the heaviest. Much of its length …that mean it’s longlyness… was taken up with its strong whip-like tail …wow can you imagine?… It had a brain the size of a fist, ….that’s a mans fist, like daddies... and a concentration of nerves in the base of …it’s so much fun being here... its spine. This helped it to cope with it’s enormous size, …that’s its bigginess… and control its hind legs and tail. Well haven’t we all learned something new to day”
I reached the point where if I heard; “Well haven’t we all learned something new to day,” one more time, I was going to educate her kids in; “what it’s like to have your mothers head ripped off in front of your eyes.” But we were passing the T-Rex exhibit, so I tipped her over the fence and the fucking thing ate her.
So we took in the rest of the museum, and had a cuppa outside, and were all very excited and educated.
We took a rather roundabout tube journey through a packed underground system. It was congested as the Circle and District lines were down, thank god we didn’t have our mountain of luggage with us that day. We made our way across the town, and under the river, and to the London Eye.
http://www.londoneye.com/default.asp
Bethy had been so upset when she came over for our wedding, as the day we had planned to go on the eye it was down for maintenance, not today though. We got in the queue and LeeAnne went off for the tickets. Just as we reached the front of the queue she arrived back, and so we hopped on. It was a fine “flight” as they call it, and we managed to get the obligatory photo’s looking out over London, and down at Parliament. I could have pissed in Tony Bliar’s tea mug from up there.
Bethy loved it, LeeAnne “enjoyed” it, as she’s not a great one for heights. The views were great, though one can only imagine how much better they would be if the eye was erected somewhere nice.
So back onto the tube, and off for another long long trip through the depths of London’s bowels.
We decided to go to Covent Garden, to get some grub and to watch the buskers. We had difficulty finding grub, and when we did it was overpriced crap, that’s more like the London I know and loathe. But we were here to see the buskers, and we weren’t disappointed.
Busking at Covent Garden is actually regulated and you have to audition for a pitch. This ensured the quality of the performances, and that all performers are insured for public liability. Believe me not? Go here:
http://www.coventgardenlife.com/info/street_entertainers/misc/rex_boyd.htm
The first guy we came across was a young lad with a battery powered amp and an electric guitar. Hmmm…
He first played the opening chords of “Smells like teen spirit”, badly, very badly in fact, so badly in fact that I know I could have played them better. Oh boy, he’s going to die a death! The crowd started moving away. Then he sat down on a milk crate, and lay the guitar flat on his lap, interesting. He them proceeded to play the fretboard of the guitar like a keyboard, with both hands, and it was beautiful. Now I’ve seen heavy metal and jazz guitarists play the fretboard this way, Jeff Healy is a master of it, but I’ve never seen anyone do it using both hands. His hands played melody and rhythm on the fretboard simultaneously, which necessitated some incredibly deft and intricate playing. Then he played “Romanza,” and it was awesome, and a flood of coins dropped into his guitar case.
We strolled on and came across a juggler, he had a good patter and had the crowd in stitches so we stopped and watched. He dragged Bethy up on “stage” at one point and had her throwing things to/at him while he juggled, which earned him a large donation from us. The kill off of his show was riding a nine foot high unicycle while juggling knives, very close to the crowd. “Reasonably impressive”; said Taff, who cannot juggle a bank account.
The next act we saw was a group of English morons dressed in white and red flags outside a pub, celebrating St George’s day the traditional way by being drunk, thuggish and obnoxious. So we didn’t give them any money.
We watched other people, a harpist and some traditional Chinese musicians leap to mind, and they were all great, and so the evening passed.
By the time we got back to the hotel we were all knackered, so knackered that we didn’t even go down and complain about the absence of the mug we’d been promised, so we crashed and slept the sleep of the entertained.
Saturday:
After yet again trying to make a profit on our stay by eating more than we paid for the lodgings in breakfast foods, we bravely ventured forth, stopping only to remind them at reception that there were three of us staying in the fucking room, and that we “WANTED ANOTHER FUCKING MUG!”
We took a train to Baker St Station, to have a look at Madam Tussauds. I wasn’t that keen truth be told, and when we saw the queues and the prices, the chance of seeing a plastic effigy of David Beckham or the Queen lost it’s intense glamour, so we decided to do something else. I managed to talk the girls into strolling down Baker St itself, looking for 221 b. Yes, I know there was no 221 b in Conan Doyle’s day, but there is now, and it’s a Homes museum. The girls went off for a coffee, and I was given strict instructions, as in; “don’t spend the whole fucking day in there!”
http://www.sherlock-holmes.co.uk/
Well I went in and it was great, absolutely fab. They even had an old duffer dressed as Watson, who answered your questions about the canon, (and I couldn’t best him on that, try as I might,) with whom you could have your photo taken. (Yes, of course I did.) I would have stayed all day, but I know which side my bread is buttered.
So off we set again.
We made our way to London Zoo. I love the zoo there, even if it does seem to be full of the worlds most bored animals. We saw a couple of the events on offer there, including an outdoor show where the animals came out over the audience and displayed “natural” behaviours. This had a Macaw in it, the largest of the parrots. The parrot showed natural behaviours like cracking a walnut with one crunch of its beak, flying overhead, hanging upside down on a rope, and shitting on a member of the audience, all of which were rather amusing. Other things that stick in my mind from that visit were watching a chimp “manually evacuate”, the beauty of some snakes, and how fucking big gorilla’s are, and how pissed off they look in captivity.
“You have to remember, when I first caught Gerald he was totally wild.”
“Wild? I was absolutely livid!”
After our fill of animals we took a London Black Cab, another treat we’d promised ourselves, back to the Baker Street station. To be honest, the “musher” was a bit of a disappointment; he didn’t come up with any “Cor blimey, do what? Knock it on the head John, ere didn’t you kill my brother?” patter that we thought was standard for these trips. He didn’t try to con us out of fifty quid either. Maybe he was ill or something?
We got back to Trafalgar Square by tube, and there was a celebration or a protest or something going on, hard to tell really. So we got photo’s of Bethy on the lions, and went off tat shopping. LeeAnne had promised friends back at work some souvenirs of the royal wedding, the one between Jug-ears and Horse-face. But try as we might, we couldn’t find any. Please god, they haven’t been sold out? That would have made me lose all hope for Britain. Eventually we did find a shop with mugs, tea-towels, and spoons commemorating the marriage of the odd and ugly couple, so we bought a lot of them, I’ve never seen such a happy shop keeper in my life.
By this time we were flagging, so we decided to sit the evening out at an I-max cinema. We took the tube across town. We arrived at the I-Max to find we had missed a showing, and had an hours wait for the next one, and that wasn’t going to be a 3-D one. Bugger, I love those.
So we decided to go for a stroll and see if we could grab a cuppa, to take the weight off our feet. We strolled through an underpass, which had a rather lovely poem on the wall. It was so good I memorised it so I could share it with you.
I am not afraid as I descend,
step by step, leaving behind the salt wind
blowing up the corrugated river,
the damp city streets, their sodium glare
of rush-hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain;
for my eyes still reflect the half remembered moon.
Already your face recedes beneath the station clock,
a damp smudge among the shadows
mirrored in the train’s wet glass,
will you forget me? Steel tracks lead you out
past cranes and crematoria,
boat yards and bike sheds, ruby shards
of roman glass and wolf-bone mummified in mud,
the rows of curtained windows like eyelids
heavy with sleep, to the city’s green edge.
Now I stop my ears with wax, hold fast
the memory of the song you once whispered in my ear.
Its echoes tangle like briars in my thick hair.
You turned to look.
Second fly past like birds.
My hands grow cold. I am ice and cloud.
This path unravels.
Deep in hidden rooms filled with dust
and sour night-breath the lost city is sleeping.
Above the hurt sky is weeping,
soaked nightingales have ceased to sing.
Dusk has come early. I am drowning in blue.
I dream of a green garden
where the sun feathers my face
like your once eager kiss.
Soon, soon I will climb
from this blackened earth
into the diffident light.
We found a shopping street and were strolling down it, when this huge, fat, black woman stared yelling at LeeAnne; “Ooh, is he with you? The blondie, is he yours? Oooh he’s fucking gorgeous! Gorgeous he is!!” And she followed us down the street, yelling all the way. Typical, the one time I get called gorgeous in the street by a stranger, and she’s the size of a chieftain tank and as mad as a bucket of frogs.
She veered off at the end of the street, as it was full of cops. Apparently Nick Cage was doing his debut stage appearance in a theatre there that night, and that apparently warrants a police presence. Funny that, having watched “Con-Air” I thought he would be tough enough to look after himself.
We had a coffee, and wandered back to the I-Max, and watched “Robots” which was ok, but not great, and then took a tube back to the hotel. We’d planned to eat at the pub again; I was drooling in anticipation of it, but found out that food service had ended ten minutes before we got there. Arse.
So we went into the Chinese restaurant at the Hotel, and, yet again, were pleasantly surprised by the quality and quantity of the vegetarian grub. Hmmm…Am I missing something here? We got back to the room, and it was my turn to do the by now ritual; “return to reception and threaten to set fire to the room if we didn’t get sufficient beverage holders supplied pronto”.
Sunday:
We got up, and packed everything away. We went down for breakfast, and had three of everything and then some more. We’d arranged to leave our bags at the hotel for the day, kind of them to look after them. At reception we booked our bags in, and ordered a taxi to Heathrow at 5.00pm. As we were leaving I heard the guy behind the desk shout to a porter something about a mug for room 191. Funny, that was our room?
We took a tube to Oxford street, in order to do some last minute shopping for presents. I also wanted to buy a new soundcard for my computer, and as we could claim back VAT on leaving, so now seemed to be a good time to get one.
We got to Oxford Street and strolled around popping into the shops and buying bits and bobs. I came across a computer shop; “Do you sell M-Audio sound cards mate?” “Nah, try the next street down, that’s full of computer shops, you’ll get one there.”
For want of having a clue where we were going we strolled on down, and the next street along was actually full of high-fi and computer shops, amazing, we found where we were looking for.
Unfortunately, they were full of high-fi and computer shops run by the most surly bastards on the planet. Typical conversation went; “Do you sell M-Audio sound cards mate?” “Na,” followed by the ignorant twat turning his back on me or talking to someone else. After a dozen such encounters, interspersed by surly sods trying to convince me I didn’t want M-Audio but a Creative Soundblaster card, ( Yeah, right sunshine, sure, top quality, I believe you,) I gave up.
It was raining consistently now, and as we were outside a Virgin Record store that had a coffee shop in the basement, we decided to have a coffee. We strolled downstairs to be confronted by, not only a coffee shop, but London’s biggest retailer of M-Audio products. Ok, now that’s clever.
While the girls sat and had a coffee I ran about like a kid in a sweetshop. I had a chat with the girl behind the counter, and she looked into my claiming back the VAT on the card. She came back and told me it really wasn’t worth claiming back VAT unless my purchases were over 100 quid, the card was £70.00.
Bugger! Hang about, I know….
“Babes, can I have a keyboard to go with my new sound card, I’ll be good for ever I promise, and I’ll keep my room clean and tidy always.”
He he, so I now had a keyboard (Oxygen O2) to carry about London all day, as well as the soundcard and all the other shopping.
We then took ourselves off to Harrods for lunch. Harrods has gone downmarket terribly, its now like an “Everything a £1” shop for posh gits. However the food was good, even though we shared the counter with a couple who looked like they’d had extensive plastic surgery done by a pissed surgeon. Or maybe it was because of that. I’ve never seen people eat without their facial features moving, it was like watching a very clever cartoon. Mind you, it was obviously worth every penny they had spent on it, as even though they must have been a year or two into their fifties, in a good light they could have passed for people in their early fifties.
We strolled around, and Bethy got herself a bracelet, and then we made our way down to the memorial to Di and Dodi. This was wonderful, it summarised all that Harrods now stood for under Mr El Fayed’s ownership, never have I seen something so….just take a look at the photo of LeeAnne’s face taken at the memorial, that says it all… The vial of Di’s tears was particularly apt.
We took a bus to Hyde park, and watched the squirrels for a while, just to calm down after the hysteria of Harrods.
We got a tube back to the hotel, and an Indian chap was asking for his passengers to Heathrow, just as we arrived there. (This was at about 4.30) We told him we were the passengers, and loaded our kit into his minivan. He asked us what price we’d agreed with the hotel, and we told him fifty quid, which we thought we’d agreed with him rather than the hotel, but he seemed pleased enough with that, and so we set off. He had a GPS system which told him that turns he should take were coming up, and what to do after he’d managed to miss them.
He managed to miss quite a lot, as he was an excitable chap, and very fond of showing off the toys in his van. The GPS was the first thing he showed us, missing a turn while he fiddled around with it. The next thing he demonstrated was his sound system, which put out approximately 10,000 watts per channel; “Do you like bhangra music? Listen to thi……………..”
Three turns missed, along with four sets of eardrums going missing.
The next thing was his DVD player, he flipped this out and put on a Bollywood movie for us. I couldn’t make out head nor tail of what the hell was going on in it, three guys fighting over a bird was the closest I got. But seeing as the lead Indian chick was gobsmakingly, jaw droppingly, bowel looseningly, beautiful, as were most of the other woman, and most of the blokes, it was worth watching. Our driver found the movie riveting too, more riveting than the road or the GPS in any case.
Funnily enough, for someone obsessed with gadgets, he didn’t seem to mind that his speedometer wasn’t connected.
He got us to Heathrow safe and sound surprisingly, and we gave him a decent tip, partially out of relief and partially for his entertainment value.
We checked in, and got shot of our ton of luggage, and went off to spend money on duty free goodies. Then, loaded with fags, booze, sweets, and a very nice 7.1 megapixel digital camera, we went to one of those fake Irish pubs, “Fergal Sharkey O’Mahoney’s,” or some such shite, for food. Funnily enough, there on the menu was “Quorn sausages, colcannon, and gravy”, our fave! So we tucked in, and I had a couple of Irish Scotch’s (yes I know,) to get me sleepy for the flight. (Feeble excuse I know, but there you go.)
Just as we finished the meal we heard “Last call for Japan Airways Flight 997. Last call for Japan Airways Flight 997 to Tokyo. Last call for Japan Airways Flight 997,” over the tannoy. “Jesus, that’s us!!” So we rushed like buggery and joined the endless queue to get on our flight. Last call my arse, bloody over efficient Japs.
And that’s the tale of our holiday. There won’t be any more of these bloody long letters, or at least no more for a good while. It don’t half take it out of me writing them, and I really should do some client contact while I’m at work.
Thanks for all the feedback and nice things you’ve said about them*.
TTFN, love
Taff, LeeAnne & Bethy.
In reply to these 17-20 page letters some of you have stretched all the way to nine word replies. Mr Nicol hods the record for brevity, he managed all of two words on the one in which he featured heavily; “very good”.
Gosh it makes it all the effort worthwhile… 🙂
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