cock!

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the last book I read

The Colour Of Blood by Brian Moore.

No, not that Brian Moore, this one. It's the Irish pronunciation, Bree-an, rather than the more usual Breye-an; Moore was born and raised in Belfast and retained the Gaelic pronunciation for the rest of his life, despite spending most of the latter half of it in Canada and California. This threw me a bit of a dummy when I started the book as I assumed, when it introduced the principal character, a Catholic cardinal, that it was set in Northern Ireland. However, it's actually set in an unnamed satellite state of the former Soviet Union - somewhere like Ukraine or Moldova, we're invited to assume.

Cardinal Stephen Bem is the head of the Catholic church in this unnamed state, and survives an assassination attempt in the first couple of pages. Thereafter he's constantly on the run from a number of shadowy enemies - the Soviet-run secret police, a shadowy revolutionary group hoping to foment a revolution and a group of maverick churchmen sympathetic to the revolutionary cause.

Read as a straight adventure story with plenty of exciting pursuits and double-crossing it's very satisfying; needless to say there's some subtext regarding the conflict of loyalties between church and state, and what influence the former can have over the latter, particularly under a regime where dissent, however politely expressed, usually lands you with a one-way trip to the salt mines.

Subtext or not, it all builds to an exciting climax, with a bit of a last-minute twist. The book was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1987, but lost out to Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger, to which, having read both, I say: fair enough, really.

plane crazy

Like many people I'm a slightly nervous flyer. But, to be fair, I always manage to get on the plane, though I'm usually a bit happier about it if I've managed to get myself outside a couple of drinks first. But, I have to say, the sight of a plane like this one (it's a BAE-146) might disturb my fragile equilibrium, regardless of how many Bloody Marys I've put away.

Why, you ask? Well, look! It's got the wings on the top! Oh, look, I'll explain. You've got your plane, right. Which has big old jet engines attached. And those engines are attached to the wings. So in a very real sense it's the wings which are the bit doing the actual flying; everything else is just along for the ride, as it were. Including the bit you, the passenger, sit in (i.e. the fuselage). And how are the wings attached to the fuselage? I'll tell you. Glue. No, seriously. Glue. Pretty strong glue, granted, not just a couple of dabs with a Pritt-Stick, but still.

That being the case wouldn't you rather be perched on top of the wing area, rather than hanging off it? I mean, imagine the glue fails. In the "on top" scenario, you're balanced on top, i.e. still potentially OK unless you go into some sort of nose dive. In the "hanging off" scenario you're plummeting groundward, still clutching your non-anaphylactic packet of faux-peanuts. And it's not even like the wings can fly blithely on to execute a perfect landing at Gatwick, 'cos the wheels are attached to the fuselage. In fact they're probably poking out of some orifice freshly torn in your mangled corpse shortly after the whole thing pancaked into the ground.

I should point out I have been on a BAE-146, once, in New Zealand, flying from Queenstown via Christchurch to Auckland with the good people of Qantas New Zealand. And we didn't die, so that was nice.

Speaking of glue, how is it that we can muster the awe-inspiring technology required to put a man on the moon, but we can't manage to prevent Copydex smelling of fish?

I appear to be utter-bollocks-intolerant

I am not a doctor, as you know. But I'm pretty sure even I can spot a couple of problems with the so-called science in a couple of the articles in The Independent today. Which is a shame, as I like the Indy very much, but this is just a bit embarrassing.

Firstly, Jeremy Laurance's article about some studies done on acupuncture and back pain in Germany. Note the headline: "Acupuncture is best way to treat back pain, study finds". Then note the numbers in the body of the article - conventional treatment: 27% successful, acupuncture treatment: 47% successful. Convincing? Well, superficially. But then they give you another figure, almost as an aside, and it's this one: "sham" acupuncture treatment (i.e. whereby they just stick needles in you at random rather than in the mystical Qi channels dictated by acupuncture technique): 44% successful. Now (and I should point out at this point that I'm not a statistician either) that suggests a fairly obvious conclusion to me, but it isn't the one in the headline, it's something rather less newsworthy concerning the placebo effect. A very interesting phenomenon, and arguably under-explored, partly because it raises some sticky ethical issues, i.e. the use of placebo techniques by "conventional" medical practitioners involves knowingly lying to your patients, something a lot of people have problems with. But proof of the statement in the headline? Nope, sorry. A similarly nonsensical headline can be found here, though to be fair the article itself does a better job of getting a grip on the reality of the results (i.e. it at least mentions the word "placebo", which is a start).

Secondly, an article about food allergies and intolerances (the original link here doesn't seem to work at the moment, but the same article is available in the Irish Independent). An interesting subject, though one where the blizzard of anecdotal evidence often obscures the actual science. Unfortunately the Indy contributes to the obscuring of science by wheeling in Patrick Holford as an expert, a man with a certain amount of amusing previous in this area, including tangling repeatedly with Ben Goldacre and David Colquhoun, as well as inspiring a blog exclusively dedicated to monitoring his output. A blog with lots of actual good stuff on it, though I'm not convinced the regular lolcats images inserted in the text (funny though they are) project quite the required gravitas.

gonna need drugs. lots of drugs

At my advanced age you need a quiet night in on a Saturday once in a while. You can't be out going to Chinawhites with Sienna Miller every weekend, after all, you need a bit of "you" time. So I invested some of this time starting on the backlog of DVDs I've bought over the last several months and years and never quite got round to watching.

I was in the mood for something mind-bending so I chose the recent Philip K Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly, starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr. and Winona Ryder, among many illustrious others. Some of whom are less recognisable than they might be, owing to the interpolated rotoscoping technique director Richard Linklater has used (essentially the same technique used in Ralph Bakshi's Lord Of The Rings adaptation and A-ha's Take On Me video, among others). Since the whole film is about drug use and the fracturing of reality and personality that it causes, the technique is suited to the source material almost perfectly, particularly the "scramble suit" that all the undercover agents wear to conceal their identities. It would probably be even better watching it while completely off your tits on acid, but I had to make do with a bottle of Chenin Blanc.

What I should have been doing was watching some of the films I've borrowed off people over the years, never quite got round to watching, and never quite got round to giving back either. At the last count these are:

• Richard III, which I borrowed off Phil probably about 5 years ago. For a while there was a bit of a Mexican stand-off going on as Phil had my copy of Gattaca for quite some time as well, but he's given it back now.
• Finding Nemo, which I borrowed from Layla about 3 years ago, and I've never watched. In fact I'm not sure I even know where it is any more. Unless she's reading this, of course, in which case I've got it in my hand right now. The DVD, I mean.
• Good Bye, Lenin!, which I borrowed from James a couple of years ago.

Let me say now, with hand on heart, that I will watch and return all of the above very soon. Really.

your daily video clip smorgasbord

Couple of amusing video clips for you: firstly Bill Maher has a pop at religion, as well as, among other things, Phil Spector's hairdo. And you can never see that photo of Cristie Kerr kissing that phallic golf trophy too often - just to prove it, here it is again.

Secondly, far more amusing than Kathy Griffin's mildly amusing outburst at the Emmys has been the hilariously po-faced reaction from such bastions of moral rectitude as Fox News.

I'll tell you what's far more amusing then some mild political satire and some low-level baiting of god-botherers, though: swearing, and lots of it. So strap yourselves in for Postman Pat: The Sweary Geordie Version.



No particular need to view the various numbered related clips (you should see them along the bottom of the embedded bit above once you've watched it) in any particular order, I don't think, but do watch them all, as they're highly amusing.

Lastly, a cricket clip for you - Yuvraj Singh hitting Stuart Broad for six sixes in an over at the Twenty20 World Cup in South Africa. By a strange coincidence Yuvraj was the bowler when Dimitri Mascarenhas hit five sixes in an over during the recent England-India one-day tournament. If you're wondering how to pronounce "Mascarenhas" then say it as "massacre anus" and have a little chuckle to yourself as you do it. Then try saying "beer can" without sounding like a Jamaican saying "bacon". Thanks to Mr. Angry for that one.

That's it! Off to watch Scotland get massacred (though hopefully not anally) by the All Blacks now.

World Cupdate

Just watched the France-Ireland match in Pool D - not a great game, but very exciting, and a comprehensive enough victory for the French in the end. Nice to actually get to watch a game, the last couple having been on ITV3 which my two-bit chickenshit digibox doesn't seem to be able to pick up at the moment. Here's a few random nuggets gleaned from the first fortnight's action:

• Underrated player alert number 2 - Damien Traille of France. Seems to have been around for years, but his howitzer right boot gives the French a whole world of options at inside centre, not least because they are a bit flaky at outside-half, and I'm thinking of Freddie Michalak in particular here. Gavin Henson fulfils a very similar rôle for Wales, when he isn't either injured or out of favour with the selectors. Then again you can understand the whole Charlotte Church thing being a bit of a distraction.
• Speaking of Michalak, he can be a nightmare at outside-half, but he does have his moments; the try that broke the Ireland game wide open was a moment of utter genius. I still think David Skrela might induce less heart attacks among the French supporters, and possibly be more effective overall, though.
• Ireland have been strangely terrible so far, and I've no idea why. Nonetheless French supporters will be cheering them on against Argentina next week, since an Irish victory might just allow the French to win the group and thereby avoid the All Blacks in the quarter-finals.
• The All Blacks are undoubtedly awesome. But I wonder how much of them having been the pre-tournament favourites before every World Cup so far is a result of them having the best playing strip colour? There's something ineffably cool about black, after all.
  
• England were terrible against South Africa last week; the Springboks won at a canter without really having to get out of second gear. England are unforgivably stodgy and unimaginative behind the scrum at the moment. Josh Lewsey and Jason Robinson have been the only guys who have looked capable of breaking the line - Wilkinson and Barkley may help against Samoa, though neither of them are exactly Barry John, but if their passing isn't spot on the Samoans, and Brian Lima in particular, will rearrange some ribcages, and could even win.
• Mike Phillips of Wales has been a revelation both as Dwayne Peel's understudy and when he got a chance to start a game against Japan this week. He reminds me very much of Terry Holmes - almost like an extra flanker, though hopefully not as chronically injury-prone as Holmes was.
• Stephen Jones and James Hook still pose a selection problem for Gareth Jenkins. I reckon the best arrangement is probably Jones at outside-half, Hook at inside centre, Shanklin at outside centre.
• My quarter-final predictions: Argentina v Scotland, France v New Zealand, South Africa v Wales, England v Australia.
• Based on that, my semi-final predictions: Australia v New Zealand, Argentina v South Africa.
• And my final prediction, as in the last post: New Zealand to beat South Africa.

it's ineggsplicable

Eggs. The fruit of the chicken tree. We all know them, and some of us love them - the ultimate fast food, go to work on an egg, all that drivel.

Some of us don't love them, though, but do acknowledge their usefulness for a wide and diverse variety of culinary applications, from making pastry to quiche filling to pasta carbonara, etc. etc. The trouble is, I don't (I am one of these oophobes, by the way) make pastry or quiche that often, so if I buy a packet of six eggs and use, say, a couple for some pastry, I'm then left with four eggs I don't need, and by the next time I have a need for eggs they'll have long since gone sulphurously off.

So what's needed, quite obviously, is a little jar of dehydrated egg product which I can reconstitute carefully calibrated amounts of as required. Obvious, really - so I'll just pop down the supermarket and pick one up then. Oh, hang on, there appears to be NO SUCH THING. Why is this? For the love of God, why?

It turns out that you can get powdered eggs, both whole and separated into white and yolk, but they only tend to come in catering-size packages. Which is all very well, but I don't really need 500kg of powdered egg yolk, let alone an entire road tanker of the stuff. A small tub like the one pictured above would solve all my oophagic worries at a stroke.

I wonder if there's a bit of a stigma attached to powdered egg in the UK following wartime rationing, though the Bird's powder in the link appears to be egg "substitute" which is a bit alarming. Probably made from cornflour and asbestos or something like that. Well, in fact it's probably made from whatever they substitute for eggs in Bird's Custard Powder, as this contains no actual eggs. I'd assumed this was a side-effect of wartime shortages, but apparently it dates all the way back to when Mr. Bird invented the stuff in the 1830s, and it's because Mrs. Bird was allergic to eggs. FACT. Another factoid for you - novelist Fay Weldon was head of the copywriting team who came up with the "go to work on an egg" slogan.

incidental music spot of the day

Not really incidental music as such, as it's the soundtrack to the new Sky advert, but it's a cracking tune so I'm going to mention it anyway: Joy To The World by Three Dog Night. And they're still touring!

It might be my imagination but there seemed to be a lot of bands around the turn of the 1970s with slightly cryptic three-word names (ones where the first word was "The" don't count, for obvious reasons) - Three Dog Night, Average White Band, Grand Funk Railroad (Homer Simpson's favourite band!), Creedence Clearwater Revival, Barclay James Harvest, Bachman Turner Overdrive..........but hey, enough of my yakkin' - whaddaya say - let's boogie!

for you Tommy, the English-language blog maintenance is over

There's a mysterious German takeover of Blogger in progress, it seems. I noticed a couple of days ago that some of the instructions below the comments boxes had switched to German ("Sie können HTML-Tags verwenden"), now it seems that the post-publishing pages have been infected too ("Blog anzeigen (in einem neuen Fenster)"). Which does at least yield the useful informational nugget that the German for blog is "Blog", which might come in handy.


I was wondering it it was just me, but various others have noticed it too. The last of those links suggests it can be fixed with some tinkering with the language settings, but I don't think I can be bothered. As long as my blog posts are now processed with ruthless efficiency it's OK with me.

it used to be all fields round here, you know

Anyone else find maps completely fascinating? Especially old maps, especially where things on the ground have changed significantly since the map was published? No? Just me? Well, screw you, it's my blog.

This is a postscript to my inconsequential ramblings about last weekend. In the upstairs corridor of the pub we stayed in there was a framed map of the local area from, I would guess, the 1930s or so. It took me a minute or two to realise why I didn't recognise the landscape, and then I realised it was because there was no lake. My puny photographic skills were inadequate to the task of photographing a glass-fronted picture from close range in dim light, but as luck would have it I had a professional photographer on hand to help out.

Wimbleball Lake was constructed in the late seventies; some pictures of the construction can be found here.

Here's a snapshot of the relevant area on the current 1:25000 OS Explorer map:


Here's the same area in an old UK road atlas I've got, which I would date approximately at the late 1950s (no motorways, and Dulverton has a railway station, so it's definitely pre-1960s):



Here's the same map, with the present location of the lake sketched (pretty roughly) in:



Here's the expertly snapped old map from the pub wall:


This one has some contours on it which almost suggest the outline of where the lake would eventually go. Here's the same map with a rough sketch of the present lake location, just in case it's not obvious:

the last book I read

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan.

Papa? Nicole?

Yes, we're in France, where Raymond and his precocious teenage daughter Cécile live a life of carefree hedonism punctuated by holidays on the French Riviera where they loll languidly around drinking champagne and having decadent affairs. During one of these holidays an old friend of Cécile's (long-dead) mother comes to visit and strikes up an intense relationship with Raymond. Cécile, fearing the end of her carefree existence, conspires with her young lover Cyril to prise the couple apart, with tragic consequences.

It's one of those novels which starts by recollecting some mythical golden summer from years past, a sure sign that some sort of disaster is in the offing. Sagan was only eighteen when she wrote the book, but it doesn't read like a sixth-form essay, possibly because it's too short (a fraction over 100 pages) to outstay its welcome. I suppose your perceptions are coloured by what you read last, as well, and it's quite nice to follow a big thick meaty one with something short and refreshing (as the actress said to the bishop), like a refreshing glug of wine after a big meal, before moving on to the next course.

Interesting tangentially-Sagan-related factoids: the title Bonjour Tristesse is taken from a poem by the French poet Paul Éluard, whose wife Gala left him to become the wife and muse of the legendary Spanish surrealist nutter Salvador Dalí. Also, Sagan (whose real name was Françoise Quoirez) took her surname du plume from a character in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, which I will get round to reading some day, honest. I've been training by eating madeleines, so that's a start.

pirate merchandise

Having trouble achieving an authentically piratical tone in your e-mails on International Talk Like A Pirate Day? Try plugging one of these into your laptop.....

shiver me timbers

I hope you've remembered what day it is today. If so try taking the Pirate Personality Test (see below).

You are The Cap'n!

Some men and women are born great, some achieve greatness and some slit the throats of any scalawag who stands between them and unlimited power. You never met a man - or woman - you couldn't eviscerate. You are the definitive Man of Action, the CEO of the Seven Seas, Lee Iacocca in a blousy shirt and drawstring-fly pants. You’re mission-oriented, and if anyone gets in the way, that’s his problem, now isn’t? Your buckle was swashed long ago and you have never been so sure of anything as your ability to bend everyone to your will. You will call anyone out and cut off his head if he shows any sign of taking you on or backing down. If one of your lieutenants shows an overly developed sense of ambition he may find more suitable accommodations in Davy Jones' locker. That is, of course, IF you notice him. You tend to be self absorbed - a weakness that may keep you from seeing enemies where they are and imagining them where they are not.

What's Yer Inner Pirate?
brought to you by The Official Talk Like A Pirate Web Site. Arrrrr!

incidental music spot of the day

Jeff Buckley's Grace, the title track from his only "proper" studio album before he carelessly got himself drowned in the Mississippi in 1997, on Nicholas Crane's entertaining Great British Journeys series on BBC2. Fine album though it is, it's the astonishing cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah that seals the album's legendary status - well, that and him being dead, anyway. If you haven't heard it, sort it out, pronto.

the last book I read

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

I haven't read a real big doorstop of a novel for a while - Riven Rock was probably the last one that might qualify, but this is bigger (650+ pages). For all its thumping weight I zipped through it pretty quickly, though.

Enid and Alfred Lambert live in the fictional midwestern town of St. Jude; Albert is increasingly in the grip of Parkinson's disease and dementia, Enid is in denial about the whole thing, an increasingly difficult position to maintain in the face of Alfred's increasingly slender grip on reality, not to mention more mundane things like being able to make it to the toilet in time.

Meanwhile their three children have some problems of their own: investment banker Gary is an uptight control freak increasingly in the grip of depression and paranoid about his wife and children ganging up on him behind his back, chef Denise is simultaneously sleeping with her boss and his wife, and feckless Chip has been sacked from his cushy academic post, dumped by his girlfriend and is now doing PR for a shady character in Lithuania. Meanwhile Enid harbours somewhat unrealistic fantasies about getting the whole family together for one last big Christmas celebration in St. Jude.

It's one of those novels that starts off by sketching some brief details about the present, firing off into the past to fill in everyone's back-story, linking them all together as it goes, and then emerging back into "now" to tie up all the threads at the end. This can result in a bit of reader frustration as you wait to get the discursive bits out of the way and get on with what you feel, instinctively, is the "real" story. I had some problems in this area with, to name but two, John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, highly entertaining books both, but in both cases by the time the back-story was out of the way there was only a handful of pages to tidy up before the book ended. Clearly this is a problem with my expectations, and them not being met by the books' structure, but there it is. The Corrections just about avoids this by emerging into the present in the nick of time to make you care about the stuff that, by the book's internal timeline, hasn't "happened yet", if you follow me.

Apparently this is grouped, by some at least, into a genre called "hysterical realism", along with a few other authors I'm familiar with; I can see the sense of the grouping to some extent, though I think the comparison with Thomas Pynchon is stretching it a bit. Franzen is actually interested in people in a way that Pynchon isn't, for a start, though I should point out that this opinion is derived from reading Vineland only and not any of Pynchon's other stuff.

Anyway, I digress. It's very good, and it'll take less time and effort to read than you might think. Give it a go. If you want a bit more analysis straight from the horses mouth, as it were, try this Salon.com interview.

album of the day

Liege And Lief by Fairport Convention.

I don't care what you say, there's a shockingly limited range of subjects which are made the subject of songs in the pop/rock idiom these days. Yes, love, sex, bitches, being a playa, popping a cap in some brutha's ass, all that stuff, and that's all well and good, but what about:

• getting press-ganged into the army, deserting multiple times, eventually getting shopped by your sweetheart, court-martialled and sentenced to death, only to be reprieved at the gallows by Prince Albert who just happened to be passing (The Deserter)
• getting picked up by the local Lady Muck outside the local church and spirited back to the baronial castle for a bit of hide-the-mediaeval-saveloy, and proving yourself every bit the equal and then some of Lord Muck in every department, if you know what I mean, and I think you do, only to be confronted by the man himself, armed to the teeth and not best pleased, and messily slaughtered (Matty Groves)
• wandering round amiably enough minding your own business only to be confronted by a bothersome raven handing out vague prognostications of doom (it's a talking raven, by the way) which you kill in a bit of a tantrum only to find that it was a shape-shifting version of your lady friend, who is now dead - ha! that'll teach you (Crazy Man Michael)
• or being spookily impregnated in some unspecified way by some elfin type lurking in a castle whom you then rescue from being dispatched to hell by the evil faerie queen (Tam Lin)

On a more serious note (and I touched on this a while back as well) British folk music has a bit of an image problem, but at its best it's a uniquely spooky genre, for the obvious reason that a lot of the songs still being performed were written hundreds of years ago, when one's day-to-day concerns really were more in the realm of being raped and disembowelled by rampaging Scots, Vikings, etc., or at the very least starving to death or drowning in the village pond, rather than more superficial concerns like what colour lip-gloss to wear or which particular group of Premiership footballers to get spit-roasted by. Most of the songs here are electrified versions of traditional tunes; Tam Lin in particular is based on a Celtic folk tale of some considerable vintage, and also happens to be a rollicking electric folk epic driven by the late Sandy Denny's vocals and some aggressively choppy guitar work from the great and far-from-late Richard Thompson, who, astonishingly, was only 20 at the time.

If you're only going to have one Fairport album, make it this one. The only others you might need are its immediate predecessor Unhalfbricking for songs like Genesis Hall, A Sailor's Life and the Bob Dylan cover Percy's Song, and its immediate successor Full House (after Sandy Denny's departure), solely for the 9-minute Richard Thompson/Dave Swarbrick electric guitar/electric violin duel of Sloth, which I urge you not to die without hearing, lest your life be revealed, in the final reckoning, to have been a hollow sham of a mockery of a travesty. Don't say I didn't warn you.

just in case.....

.....you skip past the Blogger "welcome" page when on your way to post something, as I often do, and miss it, this is really quite addictive - a (supposedly anyway) live feed of pictures being uploaded to blogs. Click on a picture to be taken to the blog it relates to, or click on "show info" to see a brief synopsis - you'll need to read quickly though. Adjust the scrolling speed with the slider at the bottom, it's all fairly self-explanatory.

an apology, and some blokes with guns

I knew the title of the new Russell Crowe/Christian Bale Western 3:10 to Yuma rang a bell, so when it came up in conversation the other day I confidently asserted that it was a remake of an earlier film, though I couldn't remember who was in it.

I now accept that while I was technically correct and there was an earlier film version, the reason I'd heard the title before was that the source material for the film is a short story by Elmore Leonard, written way back in the 1950s when he was mainly turning out stuff in the Western genre, before switching to what he's most famous for, i.e. brilliantly sly and twisted crime thrillers. I plugged Leonard during a brief discussion in the comments for the Carl Hiaasen book I read a while back, but it bears repeating in a proper blog post, I think. Read Glitz, Bandits, Freaky Deaky, Killshot or Maximum Bob; better still, all of them.

The royalties will be rolling in at the moment (not that I expect he needs them) as apparently there is a film of what I think is his best book, Killshot, in production at the moment, and one of the similarly excellent Freaky Deaky as well.

Leonard books are popular source material for films for fairly obvious reasons, not least that he writes dialogue so brilliantly that you can just dump great paragraphs of it into the script verbatim - recent ones have included Barry Sonnenfeld's Get Shorty - not one of the best books, and a film you'll only like if you don't find John Travolta unbearably smug and irritating - Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (based on the book Rum Punch) and Steven Soderbergh's Out Of Sight, which is probably the best Leonard adaptation of all, and features a brilliant central performance from Jennifer Lopez which makes some of her subsequent career moves (music, films, marriages) all the more mystifying. And she never returns my calls, the moody bitch.

weekend fun

Just got back from a brief trip away to Exmoor with Hazel - Saturday lunchtime to Sunday lunchtime; less of a mini-break, more of a micro-break, really. Nice though - we stayed at the George Inn in Brompton Regis (here), stopped on the way there for lunch at the Bridge Inn in Dulverton (here - very nice pies), went for a pleasant late-afternoon walk around Wimbleball Lake and then went back to the George to sample some local beer (Dunkery Ale, which was new to me, as well as Exmoor Ale which I'd tried before).

Today we made our leisurely way back to Bristol via the coast road and Minehead, where we stopped for a quick look around. After a thrilling seafront game of crazy golf, we stopped off at the railway station (the terminus of the West Somerset Steam Railway) as there seemed to be some sort of commotion - turns out it was the 2007 Somerset CAMRA Real Ale Festival, no less. Featuring the splendidly named Tone Valley Jazz Band, as well as (more importantly) a huge range of beer, principally various excellent ones from the Cotleigh Brewery (based just down the road in Wiveliscombe). I should point out I didn't indulge myself in any of their excellent product (though I did pick up a souvenir glass - see picture on the right), but I know it well as they were heavily featured at the Buckland Dinham Real Ale Festival last year.

I took a few photographs, nothing very thrilling I'm afraid, but feel free to have a look.