they malverned me

It was our fifteenth wedding anniversary last week (crystal, since you ask); various family commitments meant that we could only get away for a night and most of a day but that did afford an opportunity to do some walking in the Malvern Hills, somewhere I'd never been. 

Any walk in the Malverns will be constrained by the shape of the terrain, a distinctive north-south spine of rock poking out of the otherwise pretty flat ground. In particular, that topography makes it difficult to construct a satisfactory circular walk without either following an essentially out-and-back route (i.e. traversing the ridge twice) or incurring a lot of low-level walking at one end of the walk or the other. Conversely, organising a one-way end-to-end traverse of the ridge involves either two cars, or a reliance on public transport of some sort.

In addition to all that, if the aim of your walk is to walk the full length of the ridge, staying on top of it as much as possible, you have to decide how much of a purist/completist attitude you're going to take (this will additionally be constrained by what the people with you are prepared to put up with). So we could have done what this guy did and walk the entire ridge from its low-level start down at the southern end at Chase End Hill, but that would have involved some logistical shenanigans that we couldn't really be arsed with, plus an early start that we equally couldn't be arsed with, considering part of the point of the trip was to have a nice night away, dinner, a few drinks and not have to get up at some absurd hour.

A brief interlude for some accommodation details, then: we stayed in Colwall, largely for reasons of navigational and logistical convenience, but it happens also to be a nice little village with, crucially, a railway station (we'll come back to this later) and also the Colwall Park Hotel, a nice little country pub/hotel with pretty decent food and excellent Butty Bach which I took the opportunity of having a few of with dinner.

So we got up the following morning, moved the car fifty yards down the road to the railway station car park, and then headed off over the station footbridge and in a generally southerly direction. Basically the choice of Colwall as start point meant that there was a bit of a walk in to get to our chosen access point to the ridge - as you can see from the route map below this results in the walk being shaped like a wobbly letter J with Colwall at the bent end. 

So we cracked on up to the summit of Herefordshire Beacon at 338 metres (1109 feet), which seemed like a satisfying southerly point, all the minor hills to the south of it being lower. This is also known as British Camp, that technically being the name of the Iron Age earthwork that occupies its upper slopes. This first bit is an up-and-back trip from the British Camp car park, which is less satisfactory than a nice neat loop but did provide an opportunity on coming back down to pop into the imaginatively-named Malvern Hills Hotel for a refreshing beverage and a toilet stop before tackling the main ridge. 

Once on the main ridge there is, as with all ridge walks, a bit more up and down than you might expect, but it is in general a delight with (thanks to the flatness of most of the surrounding terrain) spectacular views all the way over to the Black Mountains, the Brecon Beacons and beyond. Named summits that we passed over during this section of the walk were Black Hill, Pinnacle Hill, Jubilee Hill and Perseverance Hill, all really just the tops of gentle undulations in the ridge rather than magnificent craggy peaks in their own right. 

There's another pronounced dip known as Wyche Cutting (at least partly man-made, I think) before the last and highest section of the walk; this handily contains another pub where we repeated the pint-and-a-piss routine from earlier. And then it was off up Worcestershire Beacon, the highest point of the day at 425 metres (1394 feet), and a few more subsidiary hills (Summer Hill, North Hill, End Hill), before dropping down into the northern end of Great Malvern and making our way to the railway station at Malvern Link, but not before a celebratory pint at the Bakery Inn. Refreshed, we then caught a train from Malvern Link to Colwall (two stops, less than ten minutes), picked up the car and headed back home. 

These are definitely hills rather than mountains, but (if you're lucky enough to have a glorious clear sunny day as we did) the magnificence of the views compares favourably with much higher summits, and it's a satisfying walk of almost exactly ten miles which you'll notice conforms to a couple of my informal rules: the low-level walk just to get to where you need to be is at the start rather than the end, and the main focus of the day (the highest point, invariably) is somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the way round. 

the moor the merrier

First of the outstanding walking posts is the follow-up to the Cotswold trip in the autumn of 2025 featuring the same group of people; this time we opted to rent this property for a couple of nights as it afforded reasonably easy access to the north-eastern part of Dartmoor. And as we know, no trip to Dartmoor can ever go spectacularly tits-up. Before we did any walking we did have a pleasant evening trip to the local(ish) pub and micro-brewery, the Beer Engine in Newton St. Cyres. 

One thing that you might not unreasonably expect to be a bit different between a jaunt onto Dartmoor in January and one in June is the weather. That, it turns out, is an expectation that can turn out to be wrong, although barring some absolutely apocalyptic turn of events you are at least guaranteed more hours of daylight to work with.

Anyway, the plan was to drive from the house to the village of South Zeal, park up there and head up onto the top of Cosdon Hill (or Cosdon Beacon, take your pick). This is a respectable 550 metres in height (1804 feet), not quite as high as Yes Tor and High Willhays a bit further west. We took a route that turned to the south just after leaving South Zeal, principally in order to take in the Bronze Age stone row that occupies the eastern flank of the hill, and which some people are calling "the most impressive triple stone row in Great Britain". Those people, I would guess, visited it in somewhat better weather than we did; although it was quite impressive we were disinclined to linger. Anyway, from there we turned to the west, smashed straight up to the summit trig point and then took a route roughly south over Little Hound Tor and then north-west. The original plan here had been to then ford the River Taw and head up and over Belstone Tor and into Belstone village, have a cheeky pint at the pub and then bimble back along the footpath that hugs the banks of the River Taw into South Zeal. A pretty good plan, I think, but a group decision was reached that a more direct return might be prudent given the unrelenting shittiness of the weather. So we skirted round the northern flanks of Cosdon Hill and arrived back in South Zeal, whereupon we took ourselves to the Oxenham Arms, a pub where I had stayed with my then-girlfriend Anne in the summer of 2000, a trip where we went up Yes Tor and High Willhays in absolutely glorious weather, setting an entirely unreasonable expectation for future trips. Anyway, the pub's proprietors were very accommodating about us dripping several gallons of water onto their seats while we carried out some vital rehydration activities. Anyone reading the website blurb and wondering where the standing stone is that's been incorporated into the pub's walls, it's in the back bar, second door on the left after you come in. 

Total walk distance was 13.7km, or about eight and a half miles. Route map and altitude profile are below, below that are a Cosdon Hill summit photo, and, for comparison purposes, photos of me at the top of Yes Tor in 2007 (rain, wind, darkness) and 2000 (glorious sunshine).

We had originally planned a lower-level walk on the Sunday around the woodland area reachable on foot from Newton St. Cyres, but since everyone's kit was completely waterlogged from the previous day we decided instead to head into Exeter, a short drive away, and do a dry walk around the harbourside there. Not very much to say about that other than it was a pleasant and leisurely six kilometres (just under four miles) and started and ended at the very pleasantly-situated Double Locks pub. Getting to the pub car park did require traversing the narrowest bridge I have ever driven a car over, though, and I am clearly not the only one who approached it with a bit of trepidation judging by the encouraging signage they've deemed it necessary to put on the approach (pics from Google Maps):

That's all very helpful, but to be honest the main thing that convinced me that the Mini would be OK was the sight of my friend Martyn's giant Range Rover squeezing across just ahead of me. Anyway, if you're ever in Exeter and fancy something similar the map is below; I haven't bothered with the altitude profile for reasons which I assume are obvious. 

it's the fort that counts

A few loose ends to tidy up, mostly documenting of interesting walks that I deem worthy of mention here. This isn't exactly that, but is something I missed from my list of What We Did On Our Holidays when we went for a long weekend in Dorset a month or so ago. I see I did briefly mention that we'd been to Weymouth, but forgot to mention that in addition to walking around the harbour area and paying a very brief visit to the beach we also went to Nothe Fort, an interesting fortified complex occupying a site overlooking the harbour mouth and Portland Harbour to the south which has served many purposes over the years since its construction in the second half of the 19th century.

Most of the exhibits in the main central courtyard on the hot sunny day we were there were concerned with its use during the Second World War - essentially the same use as it was put to in the 19th century, i.e. as a base for launching big lumps of exploding metal at seagoing vessels belonging to the enemy; only the flag flown by the enemy and the technical complexity of the exploding devices really changing much over time. 

There was also an interesting audio-visual installation featuring some old black-and-white photographs from the fort's lengthy period of dereliction in the second half of the 20th century, and some recent sound recordings of the people who used to use it as an unauthorised adventure playground during that time; mostly teenagers at the time but in their sixties and seventies when the recordings were made. These were interesting, although as with anything involving old-ish people reminiscing about their childhood adventures there was the occasional unpalatable whiff of Kids Today With Their Bloody Computers and some suggestion that It Never Did Us Any Harm, as long as you don't count Fat Alan who fell off a wall onto a rusty spike and died.

A note on pronunciation; the audio-visual material we watched fairly consistently pronounced it Nothe to rhyme with "betrothe" or "clothe", rather than to rhyme with, say "both", "broth" or "frothy". The picture below shows Huwie and Alys at the controls of a Bofors gun, about to mercilessly shell downtown Weymouth to secure enough beach space to build a sandcastle.

the last book I read

A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles.

It's a tricky time to be an aristocrat in Russia, the early 1920s. Admittedly if you've got as far as the 1920s then you've at least survived being brutally purged in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 revolution, but still, if you've chosen to stay in Russia rather than taking the easy way out and swanning off to Paris to live out your days then you may find things less easy than they used to be, what with the peasants having ideas above their station like, you know, running the country and all that.

So here's Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, former heir to a country estate near Nizhny Novgorod, an estate now obviously requisitioned by the new government. The Count himself is still around, though, and swanning around Moscow being a fabulously urbane socialite in a way that grinds the gears of the new governing regime somewhat. So much so, in fact, that they concoct a show-trial at which the Count is accused of being a parasite, an anachronism, an idle, dawdling flâneur who represents the last vestige of a corrupt regime that must be swept aside for the greater good. But he's quite charming and everyone quite likes him, despite themselves, so instead of ordering him out the back to be summarily shot they instead subject him to house arrest in the Hotel Metropol. Not so terrible, you might say, especially since he has made a third-floor suite at the Metropol his residence for a few years now anyway. But the sentence comes with a few extra strings attached - firstly no nice comfy suite but a boxy attic room, and secondly a reminder that if he should breach the terms of his house arrest it'll be No More Mr. Nice Communist and he will be the recipient of a hot lead sandwich.

For all that he has never been obliged to do anything as coarse and proletarian as actually work for a living, the Count likes to keep busy, and he soon finds things to do: firstly knocking though the boarded-up connecting doors between his room and the empty one next to it to afford himself a bit more space, and secondly taking on the job of head waiter at the hotel, a job which requires that he attend regular planning meetings with the hotel's maître d' and the head chef, who soon become his close friends.

Other people also come into the Count's orbit and become friends, or in the case of film star Anna Urbanova, a regular at the hotel, a bit more than friends, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. There's also Nina, a young girl with a keen sense of curiosity and a hotel pass key which allows her access to various parts of the hotel off-limits to normal guests. There are also a couple of representatives of the Communist regime, which continues to keep half an eye on what the Count is up to, and, mainly after the Second World War, some Americans, who appear to be brash types throwing money around drunkenly but who the Count soon clocks as spies. 

Years pass, and Nina grows into a young woman and gets involved, along with her husband, in some activities inimical to the current regime, and there comes a day when Nina has to head off to try and get her husband released from some remote gulag. Before doing so she entrusts her daughter, Sofia, to the Count, who is thus - approaching fifty and with no children of his own - thrust into effective fatherhood. 

Sofia grows up into an intelligent and feisty young woman, but there are inevitably a few bumps in the road, notably when she falls down the stairs and fractures her skull. This entails a dash to hospital in a cab and, as a matter of necessity, the Count's first venture outside of the hotel in twenty-plus years. Fortunately - again - people he knows inside the Communist regime view his plight with some sympathy and arrange to have him spirited back into the hotel once Sofia is safely in the hospital before some jobsworth spots him and pops a cap in his ass.

Sofia shows an aptitude for music, the piano in particular, and soon starts picking up gigs with youth orchestras which entail travel, including outside Russia. This gives the Count an idea for a scheme which will allow Sofia to escape the regime (with a bit of help from the Count's American contacts) and for the Count and Anna to live out the rest of their lives together without having to do so within the confines of the hotel he's spent the last thirty years in.

A Gentleman In Moscow was donated to me by my mother after she'd read it with her book group. It's hard for me to describe it as a "book group book" without sounding snottily, snobbily dismissive, but, well, I'm going to anyway. That's not to say it wasn't an engaging and enjoyable read, but there's a genre of books with a historical setting, wide time-span (usually many years), slightly whimsical in tone, very little sense of the characters being in any physical peril or of anything too experimental or metafictional happening like not ending up with a nice neat tying-up of loose ends that I tend to lump together as "book group books". That probably doesn't make any sense, but whatever. The lack of peril is jarring in this case because Stalinist Russia was pretty good at ruthlessly eliminating anyone who was even a mild inconvenience to the smooth running of the state. 

It's also quite meandering and episodic plot-wise, especially since the Count's situation at the end of each episode except the last is the same, i.e. still in the hotel, and the Count himself is a man of great personal charm, erudition and saintly patience who starts to seem a bit of a Maryovski Sueovich by the end.

Needless to say as befits a book group book it's been adapted as a Netflix series, starring Ewan McGregor who seems to be leaning into the slightly magical charming twinkliness of the character in a way I daresay I would find a bit annoying if I ever watched more than five minutes of it. But I won't, so that's fine. The character also seems to retain his luxuriant moustache throughout the timeline, whereas a major plot point in the book is his loss of it pretty early on. 

Anyway, the book is perfectly fine and highly readable, with just a hint of "if you like that sort of thing" attached. I will also add, as a final thought, that if you were to be in a position of being stuck in the same hotel for thirty years or more, "AMOR TOWLES" is the sort of thing you might find yourself bellowing down the phone to room service fairly regularly.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I was struck, on reading through the various obituaries and tributes for music industry mogul and Arista label founder Clive Davis, by his resemblance to actor, comedian and gravelly-voiced professional Londoner Mike Reid.

Reid (who died back in 2007) got a mention (the only one, as far as I can tell) on this blog almost exactly a year ago in a musical context. Reid's voice, general look and mannerisms were, I'd assume, largely the inspiration for the Fast Show's Dave Angel character. Davis, on the other hand, sounds (or sounded, anyway) pretty much exactly like you would expect him to sound. 

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. 

nurse! the curse has got worse

Time passes, fashions change, civilisations come and go, the cosmic ballet goes on, but the Curse of Electric Halibut grinds on in its relentless way regardless of all this, biding its time, pruning an author here, a novelist there, occasionally capriciously annihilating a few in quick succession, but never stopping.

The latest victim (a month or so ago) and - unless I've missed one, which is perfectly possible - the first of 2026, is Australian novelist David Malouf, two of whose novels (according to Wikipedia he only wrote nine) have featured here: The Conversations At Curlow Creek in early 2010 and his most famous novel Remembering Babylon in late 2013. That means that the curse length of 16 years 99 days slots Malouf in in a solid fourth place behind Mario Vargas Llosa, David Lodge and Kinky Friedman, and just ahead of Milan Kundera. Malouf was a pretty respectable 92 years old; the leader there remains Jennifer Johnston at 95. 

Author	Date of first book	Date of death	Age	Curse length
Michael Dibdin	31st January 2007	30th March 2007	60	0y 59d
José Saramago	9th May 2009	18th June 2010	87	1y 40d
Beryl Bainbridge	14th May 2008	2nd July 2010	77	2y 50d
Russell Hoban	23rd August 2010	13th December 2011	86	1y 113d
Richard Matheson	7th September 2011	23rd June 2013	87	1y 291d
Iain Banks	6th November 2006	9th June 2013	59	6y 218d
Elmore Leonard	April 16th 2009	20th August 2013	87	4y 128d
Doris Lessing	8th May 2007	17th November 2013	94	6y 196d
Gabriel García Márquez	10th July 2007	17th April 2014	87	6y 284d
Ruth Rendell	23rd December 2009	2nd May 2015	85	5y 132d
James Salter	4th February 2014	19th June 2015	90	1y 136d
David Cook	24th February 2009	16th September 2015	74	6y 205d
Henning Mankell	6th May 2013	5th October 2015	67	2y 152d
William McIlvanney	7th September 2010	5th December 2015	79	5y 90d
Umberto Eco	30th June 2012	19th February 2016	84	3y 234d
Anita Brookner	15th July 2011	10th March 2016	87	4y 240d
William Trevor	29th May 2010	20th November 2016	88	6y 177d
John Berger	10th November 2009	2nd January 2017	90	7y 55d
Nicholas Mosley	24th September 2011	28th February 2017	93	5y 159d
Helen Dunmore	10th March 2008	5th June 2017	64	9y 89d
JP Donleavy	21st May 2015	11th September 2017	91	2y 114d
Ursula Le Guin	6th December 2015	22nd January 2018	88	2y 49d
Anita Shreve	2nd September 2006	29th March 2018	71	11y 211d
Philip Roth	23rd December 2017	22nd May 2018	85	0y 150d
Justin Cartwright	7th September 2008	3rd December 2018	75	10y 89d
Toni Morrison	18th July 2010	5th August 2019	88	9y 20d
Charles Portis	3rd April 2018	17th February 2020	86	1y 320d
Alison Lurie	24th March 2007	3rd December 2020	94	13y 254d
John le Carré	21st February 2008	12th December 2020	89	12y 295d
Joan Didion	14th December 2010	23rd December 2021	87	11y 12d
Hilary Mantel	22nd October 2010	22nd September 2022	70	11y 338d
Greg Bear	4th October 2021	19th November 2022	71	1y 48d
Russell Banks	4th December 2018	7th January 2023	82	4y 35d
Isabel Colegate	24th October 2009	12th March 2023	91	13y 140d
Cormac McCarthy	22nd September 2009	13th June 2023	89	13y 265d
Milan Kundera	27th March 2008	11th July 2023	94	15y 105d
Christopher Priest	6th January 2015	4th February 2024	80	9y 26d
Paul Auster	22nd April 2012	30th April 2024	77	12y 8d
Kinky Friedman	19th December 2007	27th June 2024	79	16y 191d
David Lodge	4th March 2008	1st January 2025	89	16y 301d
Jennifer Johnston	23rd July 2012	25th February 2025	95	12y 215d
Mario Vargas Llosa	12th April 2007	13th April 2025	89	18y 1d
Frederick Forsyth	8th November 2021	9th June 2025	86	3y 214d
Daniel Woodrell	12th January 2016	28th November 2025	72	9y 320d
David Malouf	14th January 2010	22nd April 2026	92	16y 99d