loitering within tent

A few notes from our brief trip to Dorset over the Bank Holiday weekend: -

• We stayed in a campsite called The Dorset Hideaway, which does what it says on the tin by being tucked away in a secluded rural spot. "The middle of nowhere" is a relative term, especially in southern England, but it is a mile or two from the nearest villages. Those villages are Shave Cross, which is really just a few houses and a pub which appears to be currently closed, and Whitchurch Canonicorum, which is very slightly larger and has a pub which does appear to be a going concern, though we didn't get a chance to call in. Anyway, the campsite is perfectly nice, though it pushes the "glamping" angle quite heavily (as you'll see from the website) and, possibly as a consequence, doesn't really have enough toilet facilities for us plebs in the tent field, especially on the hottest weekend of the year when it's busy. 
• It's a pretty handy location for the various beaches in the area, though, which is an important consideration when it's scorchingly hot. As it happens the Jurassic Coast isn't the best place for traditional sandy beaches; most of them are either various grades of shingle or, at best, a mixture of sand and shingle. Great for fossil hunting, less good for sandcastle building. The best beach for traditional stuff like that is probably Charmouth, which just happens to be the one we were closest to; other more shingly experiences can be had at Bridport, Lyme Regis, Sidmouth and Exmouth. We did also go to Weymouth, which has a reasonably sandy beach, although as it was Bank Holiday Monday when we went you'd have struggled to see any of the sand through the expanse of shoulder-to-shoulder flesh that was occupying it. 
• We didn't go to the beach in Bridport, but we did go to a couple of food and drink establishments that I deem worthy of mention: firstly Mercato Italiano, somewhat bizarrely situated in a warehouse on an industrial estate but serving excellent pizzas, and secondly Soulshine, a cafe in the centre of town which supposedly does nice food but which we only had time to pop into quickly for a refreshing glass of fizzy rhubarbade. 
• We briefly met up with some friends for a lunchtime picnic after packing up at the campsite on the Wednesday - they live in Bournemouth so we went for something in between there and the campsite. I selected this location, fairly unscientifically, by looking at an Ordnance Survey map and finding a big green area that also had the big blue and white P that denotes a car park. That turned out to be Powerstock Common Nature Reserve, a funny little place tucked away under a disused railway bridge (more on this in a minute) and featuring all manner of delightful species of butterfly, newt, and, thrillingly, a population of rare mud snails who I would hope have the good sense not to slurp out onto the paths to be crunchily trodden on by unsuspecting walkers.
• But enough of that heartwarming gastropod-centric nature crap, you'll be saying, what about this disused railway you so mouth-wateringly dangled in front of us just a bullet point or so back? Well. This is the remnants of the old Bridport branch line which connected with the still-operational main line between Bristol and Weymouth, was earmarked for closure in the Beeching report of the early 1960s but limped on until 1975 before eventually closing. All the track has been lifted and part of the trackbed incorporated into a circular walk round the nature reserve of probably no more than 4 kilometres or so, but which we didn't have the time, inclination or, in some cases, shoes to attempt.

• The bridge itself incorporates a height/clearance warning sign and you just know I checked that shit against the database from the earlier post. This is in a much more commonly-encountered height range than the weirdly low bridge at Bishton so it's already been bagged; the example given is from Bromsgrove. All I would say to whoever daubed the accompanying graffiti, which says, if you're struggling, "STOP DEMOLITION OF THIS BRIDGE" is: well, so far so good, lads.
• Lastly, it was Hazel's birthday on the Tuesday - all I would say here is: if you have chocolate-based presents to hand over on an occasion such as this, then a tent on the hottest few days of the year isn't the best place to store them, at least if you want to ensure they're in tip-top store-fresh condition when they eventually get opened. 

waiter, there's some wiener in my schnitzel

One thing that struck me while reading Staying On was the whole business of the Smalleys living in a little annexe off a bigger hotel complex and mostly subsisting off the food provided by the hotel, sometimes ferried across to them on trays by hotel staff. This set off an odd echo in my mind of our time living in Bandung, specifically the brief period shortly after our arrival in late 1978 when we stayed in one of the chalets attached to what was colloquially known by everyone in the expatriate community as the Bumi Club (pronounced to rhyme with "roomy"; stop sniggering at the back there), but is apparently more properly called Bumi Sangkuriang. It's a distinctive building in some sort of Dutch colonial style (lots of swoopy roof gables) built in the 1950s, and still there in a slightly modified form today. I say "slightly modified form" on the basis of having compared a photo taken in the outdoor recreation area at the rear of the main buildings in 1978 to one from the TripAdvisor page linked above: as you can see some of the buildings in the background have been expanded somewhat and the sloping grassy banks removed. For reference you can compare the original roof-lines and observe that the bit right in the middle of the newer picture with the distinctive notch at the back is the one in the older picture, with new sections built on top of and in front of it.

I'm reasonably sure that's me in the background in the top picture, standing on the pool steps (my two sisters are in the foreground), probably with some trepidation since as I recall the pool designers had made the bold decision to have the steps lead straight into the deep end. My (possibly flawed) recollection also tells me that the rightmost section of building in the background housed the room where (having evidently exhausted the entertainment options available elsewhere) I watched The Hindenburg twice in an afternoon.

Anyway, the thing that actually twanged my memory synapses was the food thing; I can't remember exactly what the arrangements were at the Bumi Club, including whether we had any facilities for preparing our own, but I do vividly remember some of the stuff we used to get from the club's own kitchens and - presumably - have delivered over to us. Or maybe we went to some communal dining area to eat? I can't remember. Anyway, things that stick in the mind (and probably stuck to the ribs at the time) were the thick crepe-style pancakes that always seemed to be cold (did they start out hot? I have no idea) and smeared with some sort of Nutella-esque chocolate spread, and the two varieties of schnitzel, which were badged as Wiener schnitzel and paprika schnitzel but could have been pretty much anything. You might, for instance, ask yourself what sort of meat it was likely to have been. Pork? Unlikely in a largely Muslim country, I'd have thought. Veal? Maybe. Chicken? Dog? Human flesh? Who knows.

I note that some other less specific Bandung reminiscences were prompted by my reading of Eight Months On Ghazzah Street back in 2010. More can be found here, here, and here. 

river deep, mountain high

More exciting outdoor-adventurousness news as promised, but first a bit of scene-setting: we went on holiday to Scotland at the end of July. It's a long old drive so we stopped off on the way to visit our friends John and Tracey at their home in Silverdale, just south of the Lake District. We were only there for a day or so but did get to do a bit of exploring, in particular the spectacular coastal location at the northern end of Morecambe Bay. 

Morecambe Bay is a vast expanse of estuarial sand and mudflats and fairly notorious for its shifting landscape and dangerous tides, and most famously (in recent times anyway) for the incident where over 20 Chinese cockle-harvesters drowned in 2004. Just to demonstrate the fickle nature of the landscape, there was until recently (properly recently as in a few weeks before we were there) a vast flat expanse of sand extending out from Silverdale Cove to the main channel of the River Kent as it emerged from its mouth a couple of miles to the north, but recent heavy rain had induced a sudden course change and the river had turned south, carved out a great gouge in the sand and created a substantial sand cliff only a couple of hundred yards from the beach, which Alys and Nia kindly posed by for scale and subsequently hilariously pretended to push their little brother off.

Despite the apparent foolhardiness of attempting such a thing, guided walks are periodically available, weather and tide conditions permitting, and a person with the grand title of the Queen's Guide To The Sands (well, presumably King's Guide these days) has the job of scoping out a safe route. As publicly-accessible walking routes go it's probably not as dangerous as the Broomway in Essex - less chance of being maimed by discarded military ordnance, for instance - but definitely not to be trifled with. It is at least still passable, though, unlike the Wadeway in Chichester Harbour where you would now disappear into a canal halfway across.

Anyway, we didn't do any of that, preferring to head home for a refreshing beer and a soak in the hot tub. The following day we headed off to continue our journey north to our destination of Hunter's Quay holiday village near Dunoon on the Cowal peninsula, which I see I mentioned here. I see that I laughingly make reference to there being no point building a bridge across from the mainland (the intervening channel being basically the confluence of Loch Long and the Firth of Clyde) as it wouldn't get much use. That may be true, but more pertinently it's a couple of miles across and would therefore be a fairly major feat of engineering, not to mention one spanning a major shipping lane. Whatever, there isn't one, and so once you've got as far as Gourock (which you do by basically heading north into Glasgow and then turning left) you are obliged to queue for a ferry. Anecdotally, and I'm not saying this justifies the cost of a bridge, the ferry terminals were pretty busy in both directions when we crossed, and by no means everyone got on the first one that showed up.

Anyway, the holiday village was perfectly nice, featuring the usual chalet-slash-static-caravan accommodation and the usual array of food and drink facilities plus some entertainment for the kids. I'm always unavoidably reminded of Hi-De-Hi in places like this but it was actually perfectly nice. More importantly a) Hazel had managed to wangle a super-cheap deal for a short break and b) a shortish drive north (no ferries required this time) takes you to the north end of Loch Lomond and the vicinity of the Arrochar Alps, some of Scotland's most southerly and therefore most easily accessible Munros. Technically the most southerly Munro is Ben Lomond, but from where we started it's rather awkwardly situated on the east side of the loch, and in any case I'd been up it before, back in about 1999.

So, emboldened by everyone's conquering of a rather wet and soggy Pen y Fan for my birthday in February I devised a walk (basically this one) that would bag two Munros and offer the possibility of a crack at The Cobbler, just short of Munro height but an interesting scrambly challenge. I had mentally earmarked that last bit as very unlikely to come off, but it's good for Plan A to be ambitious as long as there's a Plan B you can fall back on. 

There's a car park by the shores of Loch Long just outside the village of Succoth, which I expect you can make up your own jokes about - you know, Elizabeth I visiting and declaring "the mountain view enchanteth most delightfully, but the neighbouring village sucketh most egregiously", that sort of thing - anyway, point is it offers a good starting point for the walk. If you've been paying attention, though, you'll have clocked that Loch Long is a sea loch, and that therefore you are going to be obliged to gain all 3000+ of those Munro feet without a head start. Moreover, if you follow the anticlockwise route I'd devised, the usual route of ascent up Beinn Narnain, the first Munro, is a relentless direct upward slog along the remains of an old cable railway, of which only a few lumps of concrete footing remain. Once you get out of the woods the relentlessness eases off a bit and it's quite pleasant, though challenging. Eventually you arrive at a pretty intimidating wall of rock which you have to find a scrambly way up to get onto the summit plateau and bag the trig point. Beinn Narnain is 926 metres or 3038 feet and (depending which list you use) is around 257th of the 280-odd Munros on the current list.

It's not the Black Cuillin, but it is far from easy - considerably more challenging than a good few of my previous Munros, and I was and am inordinately proud of the kids for giving every impression of enjoying the whole thing and seeming engaged by the idea of coming back and doing some more in future. I should also add a word for Hazel who had sustained a badly bruised ankle in a comedy incident with a shot putt at school sports day a couple of weeks earlier but clearly didn't want to let the side down and struggled up anyway. That constraint did mean that we had to abandon the idea of bagging the day's intended second Munro, Beinn Ime, which was disappointing but which I was half-expecting before we'd even set out. 

The walk out down the valley which separates Beinn Narnain from The Cobbler is a delight, as it's a pretty good path alongside a pretty river and affords excellent views of the Cobbler's knobbly profile in particular. A bit of steep zig-zagging back through the woods and you're back at the car park. After a long and strenuous walk like that a pint is very much in order and I heartily commend to you the Village Inn in Arrochar which has excellent ale from the Fyne Ales brewery. Two things to say about Fyne Ales: firstly haha, you see what they did there, and secondly I'd had them before in a pub in Edinburgh in 2011.

Anyway, the important thing here is that this was the kids' first Munro, and the first time I'd had an opportunity to add one to my list since back before we had kids. We actually did three Scottish trips with our friends Jenny and Jim and on those trips bagged four, four and zero Munros respectively, so this was actually the first one I'd been up since 2010. My personal count now stands at fifteen. 

Route map and altitude profile are below: total distance is about twelve kilometres or seven-and-a-half miles.

Just to cap off the holiday activities, once we came to the end of our stay in Dunoon we headed back across to another quite similar holiday park just east of Edinburgh for a couple of days and spent some time doing the usual tourist-y stuff in Edinburgh including a trip down into Mary King's Close which was very interesting, and a walking tour of locations relating to JK Rowling (a former resident of Edinburgh) and the Harry Potter books. I would describe this as a commendably game attempt to get some tourist mileage out of some incredibly tenuous connections: once you've been to the site of the former cafe where she sat and wrote some of the early books you're reduced to pointing at various knobbly buildings and saying: hey, might this not have been partial inspiration for Hogwarts? Go on, squint a bit. Our tour guide was an engaging enough bloke, though, and it was pretty good fun. We didn't have time to climb Arthur's Seat but we did have time for me and Nia to have a crack at the Meadowmill parkrun on Saturday morning. Anyone fancying a bit of Scottish parkrun tourism should be aware that most if not all of the Scottish ones start at 9:30am rather than 9am. Not sure if this is a daylight thing or just a bit of bolshy being different for the sake of it.

leaving the parc? I'm in the darc

A couple of unstructured thoughts after returning from a long weekend at Center Parcs with the family.

Firstly that "with the family" is how most people choose to go to Center Parcs; there are doubtless reasons why as a couple or small group of child-free adults you might choose to take a holiday at Center Parcs, but it's not completely clear to me what they are. That is in no way a criticism of either Center Parcs as a place or those people as people, it's just that a lot of the stuff is clearly targeted at people who have kids: the pool with its many exciting slides and rapids, the easy access to various kinds of food, the boating lake with various relatively sedate and low-speed child-friendly boat adventures. Yes, you'll be saying, but you can take the bikes and go and do lots of healthy bike stuff on your bikes. To which I would say, well, sort of. We'll come back to this.

Secondly, a word on spelling: "Center" in the American style with the "er" instead of the "re", and Parcs in the European style with the "c". These things reflect the organisation's Dutch origins, although following a split in 2001 the UK and Ireland operation is now a wholly separate organisation, though (presumably) retaining the spelling for continuity and brand recognition and stuff like that.

Center Parcs is not the only game in town when it comes to village-style experiences with centralised food and entertainment facilities, and we have previously gone (three or four times, I think) to Bluestone, which is over near Narberth in west Wales, and generally had a lovely time each time, If my records are correct the last time we were there was in December 2018, so the kids were a lot smaller then. One thing that affects is the kids' desire for more gnarly pool adventures now they're a bit older, and it must be said that the rapids at Center Parcs are a good deal more adrenaline-fuelled than anything Bluestone has to offer, as nice as the Blue Lagoon is. It should also be said that adults of adult height and weight being cajoled by their kids into traversing the rapids upwards of 30 times over the course of a long weekend will come home with a substantial collection of bruises to ankles, hips, etc. and in my case one ear filled with a lethal cocktail of earwax, pool water, cryptosporidium and child's piss which seems reluctant to unbung itself. I'm sure it'll be fine though. Anyway, more objective analyses of alternatives to Center Parcs, including Bluestone, can be found here. 

One thing I definitely can say about Bluestone is that, as lovely as cycling around the site is, it's also possible to seamlessly incorporate a trip off-site if you want to do a longer ride. I know this because we did it in 2014 as part of our first visit, when we hired a couple of bikes and one of those little trailers which we put Nia in (she'd have been two at the time).

The photo shows me and Nia heading around one of the paths at the northern edge of the resort which eventually leads up into the western end of Canaston Woods and joins the Knights Way. We did a fairly unambitious route up here, over to the bridge by Blackpool Mill and back again, with a few stops for exploring in between, all without at any point having to pass through a gate, an airlock or any other security barrier or being stopped by any sinister uniformed individuals slapping us across the face with a leather gauntlet and demanding to see our papers. The mill, by the way, was pretty much abandoned in 2014 but has since (under Bluestone's management, though it's outside the resort) been transformed into quite a ritzy-looking restaurant.

Anyway, when we planned our Center Parcs trip I noticed that the site (the first UK Center Parcs site, opened in 1987) was right next to the much larger Sherwood Pines Forest Park, a place with lots of cycle trails. Excellent, I thought, since now Nia has graduated from being a two-year-old in a trailer to a terrifyingly fit and active thirteen-year-old with her own bike, we could do with somewhere to go that offers longer rides than the Center Parcs site, which is fairly small. A quick look at an OS map shows that there is a big junction of paths right by the top left corner of the Center Parcs site; surely, you might think, an ingress/egress point for those wanting to do some longer cycling routes. Not so, as it happens, or not that we could find, anyway. Google Maps suggests that there is an egress point along the western boundary of the site but Nia and I cycled out there and had a look without finding it, and taking the route marked in red to the corner of the site doesn't yield an escape route either, there being a high fence on your left all the way round. 

The charitable view here is that this is more about keeping non-residents out than keeping residents in, especially important, one would imagine, at the Longleat site where non-residents who might want to get in include ACTUAL FREAKIN' LIONS, but there is a suspicion that it is a bit of the latter as well. Given that residents are issued with wristbands with some sort of RFID device which controls access to your lodge, swimming pool lockers etc., it's not impossible to imagine some sort of gate system controlled by the same device. Or they could just be less uptight and take the more easy-going approach that Bluestone take; don't signpost the route either internally or externally but make it available for those enterprising enough to want to take it. My personal inclination is to be irritated by cycling down a track that I expected to lead to freedom and adventure and personal autonomy and choice and be confronted with this:

In the end we found plenty to do without getting out into the wider forest area, and it is clearly physically possible to leave the site by the main entrance and loop round back into the Sherwood Pines site, albeit at the cost of 3-4 kilometres of extra distance. The whole thing is a little vexing, though, and does conjure up memories of the delightful public relations disaster that the Center Parcs organisation endured when trying to appear sufficiently reverent in the wake of the Queen's death in 2022. 

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE YOUR LODGE https://t.co/FvuMjS2HRy pic.twitter.com/YVjRaC1fcP

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 14, 2022

A couple of footnotes: firstly anyone planning a visit to Bluestone and noticing its convenient next-door proximity to the Oakwood theme park should be aware that Oakwood has now, as of earlier this year, closed down permanently.

Secondly, this trip was actually my third visit to Center Parcs (all of them to the same Sherwood Forest site), this one and our previous family visit in 2023 but also a trip waaaaaay back in what would have probably been either 1992 or 1993 with my then-girlfriend Posy and her family during the course of which this absolutely splendid photo was taken of me. 

My principal recollection of that trip is of me and Posy's younger sister's boyfriend (who I suppose would have been about 18) spending most of the week leaving the girls to do their own thing and disappearing off to the sports hall for a ferociously-competitive series of bouts of various racket sports, bouts from which I have chosen to recall I emerged triumphant.

the last book I read

Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester.

Hong Kong? Phooey! No, really, it's true. Former British colony, business powerhouse, cultural melting pot, land of opportunity, hive of scum and villainy. And the people! Well. Let's meet some of them. 

Dawn Stone is a journalist, taking a pretty standard Glenda Slagg route through UK tabloid journalism, showbiz scandal, obsessive royal-watching and all, until an ex-colleague makes her an interesting offer: come and work for him on a new magazine he's starting up in Hong Kong. Bit of tabloidesque fluff required, naturally, but also a potential opportunity for some Proper Investigative Journalism, and, hey, maybe there's a book in it. Dawn is a bit bored of her current job, and of her current boyfriend, so she jumps at the chance.

It's all pretty fabulous at first - exciting new culture, lots of sipping gin while being whizzed around the harbour in luxury yachts, although there is a bit of shadiness about where some of the money is coming from, and how the slightly murky Wo family are pulling various strings and controlling various interests with a thin veneer of respectability but probably also involving a visit from some guys with meat cleavers if you get in their way.

After getting the go-ahead from her boss to do some digging into the local business set-up, with its murky links to the Triads, drugs and illegal gambling activities, Dawn works up an article she's pretty proud of, only for it to be made clear to her that it's going to be spiked, as the business pies that the Wos have fingers in include the magazine she's written the article for. The man delivering the message on behalf of the Wo family, Philip Oss, is very nice about it, though, and has a couple of alternative ideas for Dawn to consider: firstly a very lucrative executive position as a sort of PR person for the Wo business empire, and secondly a very lucrative SEXecutive SEX position as his mistress.

A change of viewpoint now: Tom Stewart, a simple country boy from Kent but with a restless urge to travel, sets out on a long boat journey to Hong Kong in 1935 without much clear idea of what he's going to do when he gets there. He meets a motley band of fellow travellers on the ship including Sister Maria, a Chinese nun who teaches him to speak Cantonese and who will feature intermittently but significantly in his life thereafter.

Tom is a bright, ambitious and hard-working chap and soon gets a good job at a prominent local hotel. A few years of making a nice peaceful living come to an end when World War II breaks out and the colony comes under threat of Japanese invasion. Tom's Cantonese skills make him highly valuable to the resistance effort and he slightly reluctantly becomes involved with some shady activities, until his group is inevitably betrayed and he is imprisoned by the Japanese invaders. 

Eventually the war ends, Hong Kong is liberated and Tom briefly returns to England to see his family, but soon chafes at domestic rural life and decides to return to Hong Kong permanently. He reunites with Sister Maria after some intermittent contact during the war - Maria has been helping with some translation work which has indirectly helped in the prosecution of a minor member of the Wo family, and - although it can never be proved - it is assumed, certainly by Tom, that the Wos are in some way responsible for her subsequent disappearance. 

Tom remains in Hong Kong and lives into relatively contented old age, making a nice comfortable living off the hotel. No romantic entanglements to speak of, and, well, yes, you'll be saying, that's because he was somewhat inappropriately IN LOVE with A NUN, i.e. Sister Maria, the whole time. A pity he couldn't, you know, do anything about it, but that's life. Hardest game in the world, the old nunning game. Well hold onto your wimples, because while Tom is having a grumpy-old-man-style altercation with some surly youths at a taxi rank a young man approaches him, sees off the youths with a spot of the old kung fu, and introduces himself as Tom's grandson. 

The young man, whose viewpoint we now switch to, goes by the (somewhat Anglicised) name of Matthew Ho and when we meet him in the mid-1990s he's a successful businessman running a company making air-conditioning units. Never mind all that hot air (well, cold air) though, what's the story with Tom having a child? Well, you've probably guessed, but it turns out that there was a particularly fraught period early in the Japanese occupation when Tom and Maria were holed up in an abandoned school in the New Territories hiding from the Japanese troops, and Tom decided that the best course of action would be for him to give himself up, Maria herself being just another local as far as they'd be concerned unless endangered by being seen to be harbouring Westerners. Maria attempted to persuade him otherwise by suggesting they get, hem hem, "holed up" in a slightly different way and evidently Tom jumped at the opportunity and then went ahead and gave himself up the next day anyway. 

Matthew delivers some letters from Maria that he'd been entrusted (including the whole explaining that she'd had his child thing) with to Tom and the two establish an affectionate relationship. Over the years his air-conditioning business becomes successful but the impending handover of Hong Kong to China introduces some uncertainty, to the extent that he decides he needs a Chinese backer to avoid the company going under. An opportunity is provided by an introduction to Dawn Stone, now a high-powered executive who's ascended the greasy pole of career advancement partly by her own talents and partly by also regularly ascending Philip Oss's greasy pole. Anyway, Dawn provides an introduction to the people she works for, who are of course the Wo family. Mr. Wo seems receptive and offers some terms that Matthew finds acceptable. Matthew is naturally delighted, but now has to travel to Hong Kong and broach the subject with his grandfather, notoriously not a big fan of the Wo family after their probable involvement with abducting and murdering the woman he loved. Tricky times.

The novel ends before Matthew and Tom meet to discuss the thorny issue of Matthew entering into a business relationship with Maria's probable murderers (or at least people who represent the same organisation), but it seems unlikely Tom will just shrug it off with a heeyyyy, whaddaya gonna do? But who knows? Maybe he's mellowed in his old age. The reader may also find themselves struggling a bit to care much about the fate of an air-conditioning company, at least in comparison to the compelling details of Tom and Maria's wartime adventures. Tom's story is the heart of the book, and the sections featuring Dawn and Matthew which bookend it are much shorter and, to be blunt, less interesting. The sections describing Tom's wartime captivity and the arbitrary indignities he is subjected to are, for obvious reasons, the most compelling bit of the book, and quite reminiscent of Empire Of The Sun. The other book on this list to have Hong Kong as its principal location is Kowloon Tong. 

As always, write about what you know is sound advice, and it turns out John Lanchester grew up (up to the age of about ten) in Hong Kong, and has an evident love for the place. I myself briefly visited Hong Kong in late 1976 and have some hazy memories of it, including a trip on a junk across Hong Kong harbour, which is definitely real as I have photos, and the spectacular approach to Kai Tak airport which is definitely a real thing and where we definitely did fly into and out of, but I couldn't say whether the recollection I have of looking out of the window of the plane during the approach through the Kowloon apartment blocks is real or not.

Anyway, this is all very good, the slight reservations about structure aside. It's also the latest book in this series to carry a map at the front, reproduced below.

snorklebrity lookeyspikey of the day

Today's pairing features my son Huw, in the pool at our holiday house in Brittany a couple of weeks ago and borrowing some of his big sister's swimming accessories, in particular her face-mounted snorkel, and also the strange underwater artificial dinosaur hybrid submarine that I drew for my school yearbook at Bandung International School in Java in about 1979 (when I would have been about nine). Obviously the shape and positioning of the snorkel is the thing that brought the two together in my mind.

The drawing was accompanied by the following explanatory (well, sort of) text:

It's interesting to unpick all the things that (consciously or unconsciously) influenced both the drawing and the text in my nine-year-old mind:

• The BBRFC on the creature's sleeve, and indeed the rest of the design of the T-shirt the creature is wearing, is a reference to Bandung Barbarians Rugby Football Club, a loosely-organised group of expatriates from various countries (mainly the UK, Australia and New Zealand) for which my father used to turn out. My recollection of the various rugby days out we went to during our time in Java was that they were mainly a pretext for epic beer consumption, probably mainly the product of the Anker brewery with whom the club seemed to have cooked up some sort of endorsement/sponsorship deal, judging by the club T-shirt I am wearing in the images below (probably taken at Pangandaran). The beardy guy piloting the craft is also probably modelled on my Dad, though I should point out he has never smoked a pipe as far as I know.

• The general concept for the creature is clearly adapted/stolen from the Tintin book Red Rackham's Treasure which I read approximately a gazillion times. The smaller shark-based craft there was the brainchild of eccentric genius Professor Calculus. That's his English name, anyway, he was called Tournesol in the original French books. Translations into other languages are available, including, rather marvellously, Welsh; who knows what his name is there. 

• Obviously kids love dinosaurs, and you can see bits from at least three separate dinosaurs in the design of the creature: the head with its distinctive crest is clearly a parasaurolophus, the big fin thing on its back looks as if it's from a dimetrodon, and the spiked tail is a bit like that of a stegosaurus, informally known in slightly tedious paleontological nerd humour circles as a thagomizer. The fins at the rear are presumably a hangover from the fish design I stole the idea from, and I have no idea why the front limbs seem to have their elbows on backwards.

rhino what you mean

A couple of further notes following the last three book posts: firstly while I'd had The Pope's Rhinoceros knocking around on my shelves for a decade or so (I don't specifically remember where I got hold of it but it may well have been on one of my strictly rationed trips to Hay-on-Wye), I first became aware of its existence some years earlier, during my participation in a truck safari in southern Africa in early 2000, something I see I mentioned towards the end of this 2008 post and even made reference to my travelling companions' selected reading matter. Well, while I'm pretty sure I recall working through several, the only book I specifically remember reading during the trip was John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy Of Dunces, something that earned me some hipster points with the two young American guys who were also on the truck.

There was also a compartment on the truck containing quite a few other paperback books, presumably partly populated by discarded offerings from previous travellers and offered up for the entertainment of current ones, on the understanding that you'd put your chosen book back when you'd finished with it. One of the books in here was an imposing tome called The Pope's Rhinoceros (the same paperback edition that I have) and I recall a conversation ensued about whether anyone had read it and whether someone might have a crack at it during the trip. Since it is literally impossible that I would embark on a trip such as this and fail to bring enough books, I passed at the time.

Back to the two young American guys, who were called Mike and Andy (no surnames for reasons which will become apparent in a minute) - during the last phase of our three-week trip which comprised a few nights in Victoria Falls they decided to cap the trip off by purchasing a load of assorted drugs. They'd managed to get hold of some LSD, and deeming just dropping it in the truck or while gazing on the thunderous watery magnificence of Victoria Falls from the usual viewing platforms to be a bit tame, decided to drop it so that it kicked in just as they were doing a bungee jump off the Victoria Falls Bridge which connects Zimbabwe and Zambia. I recall being in a local restaurant for a communal meal that evening and Andy, still evidently experiencing some after-effects, spending most of the meal under the table having a whispered conversation with a small carved wooden hippopotamus. 

They also managed to get hold of some weed, and since they had a plane to catch a day before ours, and since we'd partaken of some the night before, the stash ended up in the side pocket of my day-pack in order for us to make use of it round the campfire the following night. It was only on arrival at Victoria Falls airport to catch a plane to Harare that I remembered I still had the remains in my rucksack, whereupon I did a frantic dash for a secluded dustbin to empty it out and blow into the pocket to try and clear any last few telltale seeds and leaf fragments. There is of course a Sliding Doors-style alternate version of my subsequent life where I forgot to do this, got nabbed by the sniffer dogs once we encountered the less lax security regime at Harare airport, and was either summarily shot or spent the next 21 years in a Zimbabwean prison.

Secondly. an odd occurrence relating to the next book on the list, No Great Mischief. In a seemingly unrelated sequence of events, I first became aware of the existence of Canadian comic Norm MacDonald only about six months ago after following some random series of YouTube links. He was one of those guys who was extremely well-regarded by his peers, the sort of guy who'd be described as "the comedian's comedian" or something like that, which basically translates as: not as rich and famous as many of his contemporaries. Many of the YouTube clips (and there are a lot) feature him either being comically disruptive or spinning lengthy shaggy-dog stories on various late-night US talk shows, this being a loosely-structured format that seemed to suit him pretty well, a bit like his UK contemporary Sean Lock. Another thing MacDonald and Lock have in common is that they died this year, both relatively young (Lock was 58, MacDonald 61).

Needless to say after his five minutes of fond remembrance Norm MacDonald has subsequently been Milkshake Duck-ed. I'm certainly not dismissing the allegations, but I guess (just as with To Have And Have Not) you have to find a way of acknowledging that stuff without tipping someone's entire oeuvre down the memory hole. You would certainly have to say, for instance, that he seems to have taken a consistently dim view of female comedians and comedy writers. But, and I don't want to lay a heavy CANCEL CULTURE trip on you here, people contain multitudes, and it would be a shame to only admit to the public sphere those who have never expressed a single thought that deviated from current acceptable cultural norms (pun sort of intended). 

Anyway, back to the book link: in the course of the Jacques de Gautier/Jacques de Gatineau/baby dolphin story MacDonald mentioned his fluidly-named protagonist being from "Timiskaming, Quebec". His rambling, off-the-cuff style of delivery makes it sound as if that was a name he'd just made up on the spot, but not only is it a real place, it coincidentally features in a passage towards the end of No Great Mischief that I read no more than a day or two after first seeing the clip. 

here you go. coincidence? OR IS IT?!!???! the answer, as always, is yes pic.twitter.com/NHWu5EpE4T

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) September 15, 2021

walking back to happiness WOOPBAH et cetera

It was our tenth wedding anniversary at the weekend so Hazel and I managed to wangle a quick break away (specifically, away from the kids, bless 'em) in Pembrokeshire. We borrowed (again) our friend Clare's chalet at the Pleasant Valley Heritage Park (now seemingly just branded as Heritage Park, which seems pointlessly bland and non-specific, but then I am not a marketing guru). Obviously among other things this location, and its proximity to Tenby in particular, allows me to recycle a lame joke I made here and speculate that we'll be going to Elevenby next year, Twelveby the year after that, et hilariously cetera.

Along with general relaxation, getting some reading done, and quaffing lots of prosecco we decided that we wanted to go for a walk on the Saturday (our only full day there). What I came up with was a walk along what used to be known as the Pembrokeshire Coast Path but seems now to have been absorbed into the larger Wales Coast Path for branding purposes (most of the signage says Wales Coast Path now, for instance). You'll recall that the main problem with coast paths is the difficulty of organising a satisfactory circular walk, unless you happen to be in the vicinity of a narrow-necked peninsula of suitable size or are prepared to sign up for a walk that takes a fortnight to complete. As with my trip to Devon a couple of years ago the best solution turned out to be to make use of public transport to get a suitable distance away from the start point, and then walk back. In this particular case there was a convenient railway line with stations at Kilgetty (a mile or so from where we were staying) and Penally (the perfect start point for our walk), so we made use of that. 

A quick note about pronunciation: I was pronouncing Penally's last syllable to match that of Llanelli, i.e. with the proper Welsh voiceless alveolar lateral fricative ll sound. It turns out this marks me out as some sort of hopelessly gauche amateur who may as well have the word TOURIST tattooed on his forehead, as actually Penally is the already-pre-Anglicised version of the name of the village, which in the original Welsh is either Penalun or Penalum, depending where you look. Either way it should just rhyme with Sally; imagine if you will a little alleyway populated entirely by stationery and writing implement shops - that's right, Pen Alley. I recall encountering a similar problem with the village of Llanfoist, near Abergavenny, which we went through on our Blorenge walk - this looks like it ought to be pronounced Llanvoist as a single f in Welsh is rendered as a v sound, but actually the Welsh name is Llanffoist and the single-f version is the supposedly tourist-friendly one. A little learning is a dangerous thing, as Alexander Pope once said, thus conveniently proving my theory from here. 

One final digression: since there are no ticketing facilities at either Kilgetty or Penally and no-one came round during the twenty-minute train journey to collect monies and issue tickets we got the trip for free, which was nice for us but does raise the question of how much fare money these little regional railways with unmanned stations lose in uncollected fares from people who would have been quite happy to pay given the opportunity (it would have cost us about four quid each). I guess there is a calculation of fare loss versus the infrastructure cost of installing ticket machines and/or barriers at stations, and additionally, during the current pandemic, of the risk to on-train staff of coming through and conversing with the great unwashed. It seems like a problem there ought to be a solution to, though.

Anyhoo, the walk. Starting from the station you walk across the dunes, including crossing the south-western end of Tenby golf links, and emerge on Tenby's South Beach. The tide was out when we were there so we walked along the beach; if it's in then ploughing along the soft bit of the beach for a mile or so would probably be a bit of a slog and you might be better advised to take the path through the dunes or the one that hugs the course of the railway.

One way or the other you eventually arrive in Tenby; we'd had a leisurely lie-in before getting the train so we were there just in time for lunch which we did in two stages: first a refreshing pint outside the Harbwr Brewery - I had a pint of the Tamar's Tusk Pale Ale which was very nice. Duly rehydrated, we moved on to the Pembrokeshire Pasty & Pie Co for one of their stupendous lamb pasties which we ate on a bench overlooking the North Beach being balefully stared at by some large seagulls. Technically I'm not sure if birds salivate but these guys looked like they were giving it a go. 

The best section of the walk is the section of "proper" clifftop coast path between Tenby and Saundersfoot; once you get round the headstone at Monkstone Point it's a steady downhill walk into Saundersfoot where we had a pint in the Boat House (I had the Sharp's Atlantic Pale Ale). Then it was on through the old railway tunnels to Wiseman's Bridge for another pint (the Atlantic again) and a very tasty burger and chips in the Wiseman's Bridge Inn, and from there a short walk back to the chalet.

Route map is below (as always, right click and open it in a new tab to enlarge); this is off my phone app and phone signal is somewhat patchy in this part of Wales so the distance and altitude information was worthless. A separate calculation suggests that it was approximately nine miles (ten if you factor in the walk to the railway station right at the start). The highest point was probably somewhere just after leaving Tenby at no more than eighty metres or so above sea level. A few photos can be found here.

on ilkley moor sans chapeau

One thing that has always intrigued me, and almost certainly no-one else in recorded history, and which I was reminded of while we were up in Yorkshire a couple of weeks ago: the prevalence in the north of England of place names which have a French bit in them, usually the word "le" embedded between two English words, sometimes spliced together with hyphens, but equally sometimes not.

I was actually reminded of this not so much by our activities during the week - we stayed at the Crow's Nest campsite up on the clifftops between Filey and Scarborough - but by reminiscing about our trip to the nearby North York Moors between attending two weddings (in Hull and Middlesbrough respectively) waaaay back in the glory glory days of 2007, before my spirit was crushed by a mortgage, three kids and male pattern baldness. While map-reading during a walk from the Spiers House campsite where we stayed during that trip I recall sniggering at there being a nearby village called Hutton-le-Hole - there is also one a couple of miles away called Appleton-le-Moors. 

In this as in all things it's worth validating your own assumptions, so in addition to the obvious question - what's this English/French mashup naming convention all about, then - I asked myself another one: is it actually the case that this type of place-name is more prevalent in the north of England?

All you need to come up with an answer to that question is a bit of persistence and a list of place-names, ideally segregated by what county they're in. Wikipedia has one of these, and there is also the Gazetteer of British Place Names which seems to have a few smaller settlements listed that Wikipedia omits. Search for any place name with "le" or "la" embedded in it, whether hyphen-spliced or not, and here's what you end up with:

County	Occurrences	Settlement(s)
Bedfordshire	1	Barton-le-Clay
Cheshire	1	Thornton-le-Moors
Derbyshire	2	Alsop en le Dale Chapel-en-le-Frith
Durham	8	Chester-le-Street Dalton-le-Dale Haughton-le-Skerne Houghton-le-Side Howden-le-Wear Preston-le-Skerne White-le-Head Witton-le-Wear
East Riding of Yorkshire	1	Thorpe le Street
Essex	4	Kirby-le-Soken Layer de la Haye Stanford-le-Hope Thorpe-le-Soken
Greater London	1	St Mary-le-Bow
Hampshire	1	Hamble-le-Rice
Kent	1	Capel-le-Ferne
Lancashire	7	Bolton-le-Sands Clayton-le-Dale Clayton-le-Moors Clayton-le-Woods Poulton-le-Fylde Walton-le-Dale Whittle-le-Woods
Leicestershire	5	Ashby-de-la-Zouch Barkestone-le-Vale Donington le Heath Normanton le Heath Stretton en le Field
Lincolnshire	23	Ashby de la Launde Barnoldby le Beck Barnetby le Wold Burgh le Marsh Burton-le-Coggles Carlton-le-Moorland Gayton le Marsh Gayton le Wold Holton le Clay Holton le Moor Kirkby la Thorpe Kirmond le Mire Maltby le Marsh Mareham le Fen Normanby le Wold Stainton le Vale Sutton le Marsh Thornton le Fen Thornton le Moor Thorpe le Fallows Thorpe le Vale Welton le Marsh Welton le Wold
Merseyside	2	Brighton le Sands Newton-le-Willows
North Yorkshire	15	Appleton-le-Moors Appleton-le-Street Barton-le-Street Barton-le-Willows Chapel-le-Dale Hutton-le-Hole Laughton-en-le-Morthen Marton-le-Moor Newton-le-Willows Norton-le-Clay Thornton-le-Beans Thornton-le-Clay Thornton-le-Moor Thornton-le-Street Wharram le Street
Northamptonshire	1	Aston le Walls
Nottinghamshire	1	Sturton le Steeple
South Yorkshire	2	Adwick le Street Brampton en le Morthen
Suffolk	1	Walsham le Willows
Tyne and Wear	2	Hetton-le-Hole Houghton-le-Spring
Wiltshire	1	Fisherton de la Mere

Counties with zero occurrences (omitted from the table to save space) are Berkshire, Bristol, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Greater Manchester, Herefordshire, Hertfordshire, Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Northumberland, Oxfordshire, Rutland, Shropshire, Somerset, Staffordshire, Surrey, both Sussexes, Warwickshire, West Midlands, West Yorkshire and Worcestershire.

So, as you can see, Lincolnshire is the clear winner here with 23, followed by North Yorkshire, Durham, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Essex (the major statistical outlier here), Derbyshire, Merseyside, South Yorkshire and Tyne and Wear, of those that have more than one occurrence. Essex is the only one of those that could unequivocally be said to be in the South. Looking at the data on a map will probably make it clearer.

So, as you can see, if we draw an arbitrary but not unreasonable north-south dividing line from the vicinity of King's Lynn across to mid-Wales, respecting county boundaries all the way across, what we find is that the numbers above the line total 70, whereas the numbers below total just 11. Not only that, but the five counties running consecutively from Lincolnshire up to Tyne and Wear up the east coast total 50, a whopping 62% of the total.

A closer look at the results also reveals that, of the 81 items, 5 have an "en" in front of the "le", while three of the four that have "la" instead of "le" have a "de" in front of the "la". Those with "en le" can reasonably be taken to convey "in the", and most of the "de la" items correspond to an old ruling family who had that as part of their name.

It's surprisingly difficult to find any non-crackpot theories as to what the rest (i.e. the ones with the single "le") are about. The most persuasive theory I've seen (which I'm pretty convinced is correct) is that this is a variant on the archaic French word lès (or occasionally lez), often used as a conjunction in place names and just meaning "near".

That's all terrific, but one obvious question remains - why, if this is a legacy of (presumably Norman) French influence, is the concentration skewed towards the north of England, since, all other things being equal, you'd expect there to be a sort of gradient from high to low depending how far from France you were, i.e. with the highest numbers on or near the south coast.

Note also that there are other French-flavoured place names which don't conform to the le/la structure, like Buckland-Tout-Saints and Stoke Mandeville - those two just acquired the names of the powerful Norman families who owned most of the land, but other etymological routes are probably available. There's also Hartlepool, which started out as "Hart-le-Pool" but then got squashed into its current form. That would be one more for Durham, but rules are rules.

what a state to get yourself into

A couple of things I meant to mention at the end of the Spares book review: firstly I see I mentioned in the Never Let Me Go review the similarity of some of the plot points to the plot of the 2005 film The Island; well obviously the same goes for Spares. Since The Island and Never Let Me Go came out in the same year the film must have been well into production before the book was published, so it's on the whole unlikely that one was a rip-off of the other. The situation with Spares is a bit more interesting, though, since the film rights were purchased some time after its publication in 1996 by DreamWorks Pictures, the same company responsible for The Island. Coincidence, OR IS IT, et cetera. Michael Marshall Smith evidently felt it wasn't worth getting embroiled in a big legal battle about it, or, if he were being honest with himself, would have recognised that while the basic idea was his the film actually pursued the plot strand(s) that he toyed with in the early stages of the book but eventually abandoned in favour of exploring some different (and, arguably, less interesting) ideas.

The other thing worthy of mention about Spares is that it's set in Virginia, the same state in which House of Leaves is largely set (i.e. in that this is the state in which the Navidson house is supposed to reside). It could be argued that Mortal Causes and Lanark share some settings as well since some of Lanark (book 4, principally) appears to be set in a highly fictionalised version of Edinburgh.

Back to Virginia, though: I had occasion to consult a large-scale map of the USA while trying to set some questions for an online pub quiz some friends organised a couple of weeks ago and got to thinking about points where several states meet (or nearly meet). The famous one of these is of course at Four Corners, where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet. None of this resulted in a usable quiz question (although I did cash in the one about Pierre, South Dakota from here), but it set me thinking: what is the shortest straight line you can draw on a map which crosses four states? Depending on your point of view the answer could be zero, if you consider the quadripoint at Four Corners to be simultaneously in all four states. If you don't deem that to be an acceptable answer I think a strong candidate is the north-south line joining Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia, as below. Google Maps reckons it's around 18 miles; you could walk that in a day.

Obviously you can extend that question to larger numbers of states: I haven't considered all the numbers but I'll offer you the following theoretical 5-state journey of a little over 60 miles visiting (going NE-SW) Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Needless to say others have considered this question (or very slight variants of it) and, I'm happy to say, come up with the same answer. The only comparable one I could find is the line of just under 80 miles which connects Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas.

Finally, the pièce de résistance: a 10-state journey of just over 400 miles taking in (let's go SW-NE this time) Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Again, others seem to agree that this is the right area, although note that they're asking (and answering) a subtly different question.

the scouring of the shire

I went to Northampton the day before New Year's Eve. Nothing so very remarkable about that, you might say, but you'd be wrong, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the journey there from Newport is a bit of a twisty-turny cross-country route making use of short sections of no fewer than six motorways: the M50, M5, M42, M40, M45 and M1. This motorway-hopping isn't exclusive to trips to Northampton; our occasional trips to see our friends Jenny and Jim who live near Melton Mowbray involve the same first three motorways and then M6, M69, M1 to finish. Any lengthy trip not going either directly north-south or following one of the radial routes out of London will probably be pretty similar. In both cases the trip involves traversing the entire length of at least one motorway - the M50 in both cases and the M45 and M69 respectively.

I'd never been on the M45 before but it is actually Quite Interesting, mainly for historical reasons: it was one of the first to be built, at the same time as the first section of the M1, and its junction with the M1 at what is now junction 17 (more exotically known as the Kilsby Interchange) is the oldest free-flowing motorway-to-motorway interchange in Britain. Yeah, I know, right? It's generally derided as being a bit of an irrelevance these days (most traffic now takes the M6 slightly to the north), but as with all these things that's a question of perspective. If you live in Dunchurch or Daventry it's probably pretty handy, just as the quaint old M50 is to me, should I wish (as I often do) to get from South Wales to the Midlands and beyond.

Secondly, Northamptonshire is smack dab in the middle of a part of the country that I am pretty confident, even now, doesn't actually exist. Here is a rough approximation of my mental map of southern Britain:

So as you'll observe, there are two main things to take away from this:

I am constantly in a state of amazement to discover that Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire share a border, since I deem Gloucestershire to be yokelishly West Country, cheese rolling and all, and Oxfordshire to be solidly Home Counties, dreaming spires, floating languidly around in a punt wearing cricket whites.

But the fact that I am forced to accept that southern Britain narrows dramatically once you get north of a line connecting the upper reaches of the Severn and Thames estuaries makes it all the more implausible that, conversely, stuff, still less several counties worth of stuff, exists between what I've deemed above to be the Home Counties area and the vast featureless expanses of East Anglia. This mythical zone includes things like Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and the aforementioned Northamptonshire, and maybe Cambridgeshire as well, although I'm pretty sure Cambridge exists. I think this problem is compounded (and maybe the Cambridge thing is a good counter-example here) by all of the mythical counties being "shires" whose associated town is, although theoretically real, completely devoid of any significance that might anchor it slightly in the real world. I mean, Bedford, maybe, Northampton, possibly, but Buckingham? Hertford? These are absurd fantasy creations of some sort of SimCountry simulation set in a slightly wider geographical area that has the room for all this stuff. Huntingdonshire was exactly the same, but at least it had the good grace to eventually stop even claiming to exist.

Perhaps part of my resentment of Hertfordshire, just to take it as an example, derives from my discovery that it does not contain a town called Tillit, and that therefore the story about pub landlady Lucy Lykes and her postal address must be apocryphal. That address, for those of you unfamiliar with the gag, is as follows:

Miss Lucy Lykes
The Cockwell Inn
Tillit
Herts

There supposedly once was a pub of that name in Liverpool, but it has gone now. The gag doesn't work without the rest of the address, anyway (and even in its original form you have to deliberately mispronounce "Herts" as "Hurts" rather than "Harts"), although I suppose you could have gone with something like:

Miss Lucy Lykes
The Cockwell Inn
Upper Mersey Tunnel

Anything with the word "cock" in it is worthy of a snigger, though, and it just so happens that the person (a friend of Hazel's) that we were visiting lives round the corner from a pub with the proudly unadorned name of The Cock. I wanted to canvass her opinion on the place, but I couldn't think of an acceptable way to phrase the question. There is also a Bants Lane, if you like that sort of thing.