Ancient UK

Wednesday in the UK, Deb and I had to get up very early indeed! We had to be in some place called Knightsbridge, famous for some store called Harrods, to get picked up by a tour bus. We had to be there at 8AM, which meant we had to leave Blackheath pretty damn early. Even so, we got there with at least half an hour to spare.

We'd booked a tour all over the UK - well, in fact, mostly in Salisbury - to see lots and lots of Old Stuff. I mean, the UK is littered with Old Stuff, walls and random ancient buildings and what have you, but it also has some really, really Old Stuff if you know where to look. And the chirpy driver of our tour bus knew were to find said places. And boy did we pack in a lot in one day!

We hopped on a little bus with an American couple, a couple from Israel, a woman with three kids from the states, and another pair of random Americans (I think).

I'm writing this offline, on a flight from Cologne-Bonn to Zurich, so my spelling of place names will be entirely from memory, and hence probably vague indeed!

First stop, a hill top fort called Old Sarun. It had been a Roman fort, or even something pre-dating that, and then had had a castle on it, as well as a big cathedral. As usual with these things, the place had more or less been allowed to fall down, after the stone had been scavenged for other buildings, and the ruins were only really uncovered early in the twentieth century. But it commanded quite a bit of ground, and William the Conqueror (I think) had spent a number of years there after taking over the country. But eventually the cathedral was replaced, or indeed recycled, into one down on the plane - Salisbury cathedral in fact - and the castle abandoned.

Sarun is on a circular hill, with a large ditch around the top area. I can't remember now if the hill was man made or just happened to be handy, it was certainly a commanding spot!

Next, we popped in on Salisbury Cathedral itself. An old old cathedral in it's own right, from something like 1200. It's also huge and tall and historic. The spire is the tallest one standing, there were taller one's back in the day, but they all fell down! The interior is suitably gothic - I overheard a guide saying "This is Gothic, and I don't mean people who dress entirely in black and wear white make-up..."

There are also heaps of tombs in the church, kings and significant personages of one sort or another. And notably a recent one, in the floor, of a certain Edward Heath, former prime minister o' the UK. Looks like he spent his retirement in Salisbury.

Salisbury cathedral also has a copy, one of four originals, of the Magna Carta, a founding document of common law and human rights and so forth. Apparently it was forced on a reluctant king at the time, who immediately started trying to undermine it!

From Salisbury we went to the Kennet Long Barrow, which is near Silsby Hill. The Long Barrow is an ancient burial chamber, with an entrance bordered by very large stones. The found lots of skeletons there from several centuries, possibly from the same family.

Silsby Hill is an interesting one, one of the stranger things I have seen. It's an almost perfectly conical hill, which once upon a time was entirely white chalk. It's quite large, and must have taken a great deal of work to build. And of course no one is sure what it's for. The whole area was forested at the time, and so the peak of it must have projected above the tree line. It looks like later someone popped a fort on top of it, and there may have been a Roman village at its base - but that was some thousand years after it was built... Talk about ancient... And yet another thing which will send me scurrying to the internets to read up on these things.

Next stop on the tour... Stonehenge! Another ancient and strange little place. Lots of work must have gone into that place - the smaller outer stone circle was made from stone brought all the way from Wales, the inner, larger circle of very large stones were brought from closer by. And then beat into shape with other stones! Lots of work. Although I don't have that "oh my goodness how on earth did they do it?" response some have - they were resourceful humans as smart and organised as we are. That these four thousand year old monuments are there implies that they did somehow move and erect these bigs stones, probably with wooden structures which have long since dissolved back into the landscape.

What is interesting is what motivated them, and exactly how much organisation there must have been. It would have taken decades of effort by the equivalent of a small nation to make these things happen. And I can't imagine we'll ever know - to look into the minds of our ancestors and try and figure what was important to them will always be impossible.

Next we went past a horse, carved into a hillside, although not an ancient one - this one was more like two hundred years old, so its a baby really! We also stopped outside Sting's house and gave him a wave - our tour driver had some kind of gripe about him, so he made a point of stopping every time he went past and waving at his security camera...

Then we went on to another stone circle, at a place called Avebury. I'd never heard of it - I'd like to thank my tour company for taking me to places I'd never have thought to go otherwise. It's actually bigger than Stonehenge, but differs from it in a number of important ways, notably because it has a town built in the middle of it. It's also made from less sculpted stones, the rocks are more or less in their natural state. And finally, a large number of them are missing (more on that).

Avebury is big indeed, two circles of earthen ridges around a ditch, around a circle of stones, with some central stones place in an a pattern in the centre. The significance of the central stones is unclear, like just about everything else to do with these sites. There is some theorising that the two main stones line up with one of the solstices.

As I mentioned, a lot of the stones at Avebury are missing, their places marked with cement markers. What amazed me was as recently as a few centuries ago, people were actively destroying the stones! They were regarded as pagan symbols, so certain puritans took delight in lighting fires around a stone, then throwing water on it, in order to break it up! Clearly this is well before ideas of national heritage etc. came into being! Ignorant bastards.

Our tour guide also told us some interesting titbits about the history of the area. That there are a number of very old monuments close to together, the theory goes that they are linked in some way. Back in the day, these places would mostly have been surrounded by forest. They have also unearthed trails leading from the entrance of Stonehenge. And intriguingly, it's possible that from the top of the hill called Silsby it was possible to see Stonehenge and Avebury and at least one other significant site. It does make you wonder what they were thinking, as if it was some kind of very sacred area.

This Megolythic thing seems to have gone on all over Europe. There are other sites from Turkey all the way to Ireland. There are also some in Brittany. It seems likely that there were once upon a time far more all across continental Europe, but time and later civilisations have erased all traces of them. Until relatively recent times, the areas we know as the United Kingdom and Ireland were backwaters, off the edge of Europe, which is probably why these things have survived more there than in other locations. Pity really, it would be amazing to see other sites like this and maybe learn a little more about what our hard working, bearded, rock moving ancestors were thinking.

Would You Like To See Inside My Tardis?

What do you think of when you think of the UK? Dr. Who of course! At least, that's how my girlfriend's brain works. So when we decided to travel to the UK together, high on her list of things to do was to visit a Dr. Who museum. Now, there is no such thing as a Dr. Who museum as such, but there is more than one travelling exhibition on the subject.

There is also a building in Cardiff in Wales which apparently features in Dr. Who and Torchwood, a newish centre for something or rather, which is apparently also the secret headquarters of Torchwood. Deb wanted to go visit it, but I drew the line at travelling all the way to Wales! I did however allow myself to be talked in to visiting the Dr. Who exhibition which was in.... Coventry. (For those of you who don't know the UK, Coventry is a fair way out of London, sort of north east, and is mostly known for being a rusting industrial area. Well, not sure about rusting, but it is the centre of British car manufacturing, which will give you some idea of how thriving and prosperous it is at the moment!)

So we book seats on a train, and took the hour and a bit train ride out to Coventry, then went looking for the famed Coventry Transport Museum, where, for reasons unknown, they'd plonked a whole bunch of Dr. Who stuff.

Now, it's not a show that I have watched much since the early Eighties - I mean, THE Doctor is Tom Baker, and I will broach no arguments on the subjects - aside from the episodes Deb has been showing me lately. The revival certain benefits from advances in special effects and possibly budgets, I mean, there's only so much you can do with a bunch of balloons with a spray-painted sheet over them... But the baddies for the most part are still the same, Daleks and the like. A certain segment of the population, most of it female and some of it Deb, think that David Tenent is a hotty. Personally I think he's kind of funny looking, but I am a heterosexual man so my opinions on the subject are therefore suspect...

The exhibition was actually quite good, there was all the things one might expect to see, Daleks and Cybermen and what have you. K9 was also there, which was a nice throwback to the last Dr. Who Golden Age. And a Tardis, which strictly speaking should be written TARDIS, it's some awful acronym... Some of the exhibits were animated, which I wasn't quite ready for, so when Deb pushed the button which got the Cybermen moving I was a bit freaked out.

There was also a great Dalek display, with moving, talking, laser firing Daleks. We ran that one at least three times, and then filmed it, complete with Deb screaming. Two Daleks wave their sensors around and talk about detecting live forms, which they identify as human, and then they started shooting green lasers at the ceiling (and not at the visitors eyes), then Davros turns up and makes some random statements about his plans coming together.

And... That was about it... It wasn't a really huge exhibition, we'd looked through it in about forty minutes. And so there we were in Coventry, a town not unlike Geelong, apart from having been bombed to buggery in the second world war, with some hours to wait before our train back to London...

I killed some time wandering through the transport museum proper. Lots of funny old push bikes, two large jet powered speed-record setting cars (Thrust II and Thrust SSC, I think) and a Delorian, and that was about all I found of interest in the place.

We amused ourselves by sitting in a park next to a church, where we were befriended by a couple of squirrels - much to Deb's delight. We went to a pub which miraculously had a range of gluten-free dishes that Deb could eat. She also had a large bottle of Cider which made her go very silly indeed. And eventually we made our way back to the station, where our train was cancelled. But somehow we caught the one before it which was, instead, majorly delayed...

And that was how we spent our Thursday in the UK!

Lego Tragics

Before I left on this trip, I did some research into... Legolands around the world. Actually, initially it started as an attempt to work out how to get to Legoland Deutschland... Which turned out to be in an obscure southern area of Germany. So far from Berlin, where I was staying, that in fact original Lgoland in Denmark is closer to Berlin by about 150 kilometres.

But as luck would have it, there are no less than four Legolands - Denmark, Germany, California and Windsor in the UK. Windsor is a short train ride out of London, so I suggested to Deb that maybe we should do a little side expedition to visit it. She thought that an excellent idea!

With our wad of tickets from Waterloo station (Train, seat on specific train, bus ticket to Legoland which doubled as admission ticket) we headed out West to Windsor. There is also a major castle there, which I ashamed to say I have now only seen from the outside... from a bus... a bus heading to Legoland...

Legoland must be the only theme park I've ever actually been to, as far as I can remember - childhood visits to Wobby's World not counting. We were the only adults there, as far as I could tell, without children in tow, which made me feel a bit perverted! It's basically a series of kinda lame rides with vaguely lego themes, plus some other bits and pieces, like remote controlled trucks and boats.

We really only went on one ride, a roller coaster. We were actually sitting in the ride before Deb saw fit to inform me that what she does on roller coasters is... scream like a banshee the entire ride. So besides being flung about very quickly on a twisting turning vehicle of sorts, I was also slightly deafened in one ear by a continually screaming girlfriend! Well, next time I'll know not to sit next to her :-)

Actually, we did go on one more ride, the lego train which does a figure of eight around some of the park, past some lego animals of various sizes. Lego animals are rendered in old-style lego bricks, so they look like they're pixilated, except the pixels are three dimensional...

The best bit of the park is the lego "lands" themselves, towns and countries rendered in Lego. So there's a Lego Denmark, a Lego Netherlands, even a lego Stone Henge. And of course a lego London, complete with working London Eye and moving cars and buses. And a Lego Carnary Wharf, complete with Lego Dalek half way up one building! See the Dr Who episode featuring the Battle of Canary Wharf, between the Daleks and the Cybermen... Yes, pop culture brain overload.

I almost spazzed out when we went to the obligatory Lego store on the way out. It had whole pile of Lego stuff I'd never seen before, although unfortunately not a lego T-shirt in my size. I did however score retro Lego men in little packs complete with the year they were from, various Lego key rings, and a whole big box of Duplo for the two year old we were staying with. The most amazing part, which I kinda regret not taking advantage of, was a wall of pick-and-mix lego bricks. Basic, old-style bricks, the kind they used to make before going off on weird Star Wars lego tangents. There was at least three walls of the things, little bins of different sized and colored lego blocks. One went about with a scoop and paid by weight! I sorely regret not getting a kilo of assorted lego to take home :-)

Waiting for the bus on the way home, our huge newly acquired collection of Lego caused some consternation amongst the other kids (other kids???) waiting for the bus. One little boy looked at us for a moment with a puzzled look, then said to his parents "they have lego... Why don't we have lego?" I missed their no doubt difficult response!

Mind you, later we were telling an English friend about our trip to Legoland and the delightful emporium at its end. She'd been taken there as a kid - which now that I think about it must make her quite young, it's only been there some twelve years - and her parents had sworn blind that there wasn't a shop selling lego at Legoland! I suppose that's another strategy! She was a bit amusingly put out, realising her parents had lied to her. As parents are obliged to from time to time.

We took the Duplo back to Blackheath, and left it for our very tiny host Katherine. She was asleep by the time we go home, so we didn't get the chance to see her play with it. I personally believe that Lego is a basic human right, and should be written into the UN charter. Every child should be issued with a cubic metre of Duplo at age two, to be exchanged for several cubic metres of "grown up" lego when they're old enough to know not to swallow it - somewhere between five and thirty two. And then possibly exchanged again for technical lego if you're expected to grow up to be an engineer or a nerd of some sort :-)

There were actually some areas of the park we didn't really make it to, which I would have liked to have seen in retrospect. There's an area where you can build Lego Mindstorms robots. And another area where you can watch the lego modellers at work, making large things from little plastic bricks. Now that'd be a fulfilling job! I'll just have to go back one day...

Tooting

London has some places with really funny names. Cockfosters being a personal favourite. Deb and I were on a tube train which had that as its final destination. We giggled a great deal every time the destination was announced. Not to mention places whose names have been plagiarised for Australian locations - Camberwell, Eltham, Camden and even St Kilda - which is an island off the north east coast of the UK. And then the plane strange places, like Marble Arch, where there is a marble arch, and Swiss Cottage where there is, you guessed it, a Swiss cottage.

Deb has an Australian friend, an ex-boyfriend in fact, who lives in the delightfully named Tooting. We left our lodgings in lovely quiet Blackheath, and headed out to a station called Tooting Broadway. Man, you couldn't make this stuff up... Anyway, we went to stay with him (Mikey) and his wife (Cecily).

Tooting is more like the "Real" London according to Deb, who found Blackheath a smidgen clean and suburban. Having seen some of the scruffy parts of London, I can't say that's a bad thing... And indeed, staying in Tooting was far more of a London as a broke itinerant Australian might experience it. Mikey, an Aussie, is married to a Londoner, Cecily (she of he lack of Lego at Legoland). They live in a falling down house in the aforementioned Tooting, a house in which every single floorboard creaks, where one of the showers works some of the time, until the hot water goes haywire. And they share it with three blokes from New Zealand... And Deb and I crashed on the living room floor on an inflatable mattress we took turns inflating with only our lungs! So all in all, a very London experience.

We shifted all our crap from Zoya's place to Mikey's place, after getting back from Legoland. We blew up our mattress (literally) and then headed out for Curry! Whatever else you might say about Tooting, it does have good curry. We ordered far to much of it and had a great old feast. And finally got some sleep....