Wimbledon Common

I half-thought of praising 'Vexed', but apart from being a silly title, it veers rather maddeningly between being likeably bonkers and irredeemably crap. The acting likewise.

On the plus side, the last episode spent a lot of time on Wimbledon Common, which was nice and nostalgic, as we spent many happy years running round the place. Bobby would have loved it there. Though it's rather lacking in pheasants, and my boy made his first kill on Saturday and now has a taste for them..

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The Great British Plum Glut

I know some of you have been enjoying the August weather in your tents and vans - and what a great month you had for it. Indeed it's been the last leg of a perfect spring and summer. For plums.

It's been a perfect growing storm for them. Anne's parents have branches hanging down to the ground groaning with fruit. Their damsons have joined in.

And not to be left out I harvested my own tree yesterday. Succulent, sweet plums. All seven of them...


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Robert Perry

Birmingham may have scrubbed itself up over the last twenty years, but I still struggled to find much to do on a wander round there the other day.

I did spend quite a long time counting up all the places there are to eat and drink in the centre. Man, no wonder we is fat. Remember when all you could hope for on a high street was a Wimpy?

By the time I'd re-visited Queen Victoria's Willy twice it had begun to rain so I took refuge in the Museum and Art Gallery, and stumbled across the painting "Nightfall in the Black Country" by Robert Perry, which is terrific. The picture link doesn't do it any justice - not least in size and texture - so if you find yourself bored in Birmingham the gallery is just a spit away from Queen Vic's cock...

Mumford & Sons

A particularly fine South London Removals Firm, who apparently also play a few folksy tunes. Barefoot. Nice.

From my perusal of digital coverage of the various festivals they seem to be the stars of the summer. Confirmed by being the music for every BBC trailer that isn't Florence and the Machine.

I feel a bit sorry for all the bona fide folk festivals around the country though, as the first maintsream crossover folk band since Fairground Attraction have chosen to ply their trade at corporate Glastonbury and football-crowd Reading leaving the patchouli-stained fields of Shrewsbury, Cambridge and Sidmouth with their usual collection of Panamanian nose flutes, one-legged kicking contests, and dreadlocked twelve string bores.

Striking up conversation with perfect strangers

In her excellent book “Watching the English”, Kate Fox suggests two places where men can innocently start conversations with women. The first is when queuing for drinks at a bar, and the second when looking at horses parading at a racecourse. (I offer this snippet to any single men out there who want cover for their rutting ruses).

I'm betting Kate isn't a dog owner, because dog walking is a much more obvious situation, and even I am able to chat to complete strangers when out with the dog. Bobby, of course, ignores all etiquette and just gets stuck in (it's much like being back at college with Mick Bass).

Striking up conversations with strangers is something I've never done before. Seriously. Well, once on the last tube home I did connect telepathically with a young Glaswegian trainee pensions actuary in such a familiar way that she could only have been my love in a parallel universe, but who left me at Clapham South in this one, and who led me to ponder for years on the existence of 'soul circles', at least until I finally managed to transfer my affections onto a slightly slutty dress-shop mannequin, who is pleasingly soulless, but slightly aloof. And headless.

Anyway, I was walking the dog the other day and fell into step with the owner of a labradoodle, and found that she was from Kemberton. Wondering whether she knew Anne I asked if she went to Kemberton WI. For the next mile she regaled me with her disregard for the people of Kemberton in general, and its WI in particular. It was a pleasing tirade, and I laughed out loud several times, whilst encouraging her to tell me more. Twenty minutes in, she stopped, took a breath, looked at me and said: “Oh, your wife's a member isn't she?”.

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Fantasy Fuckwit Football

www.fantasyfwit.com

I've never bothered with Fantasy Football - never found any need what with the gambling and the betleague.

But this has tickled my fancy. You get points for the failure of your team's players - be it losing, missing penalties, getting sent off, or shagging a granny.

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Grandma's House

Don't have time to do the one I was going to do, so this will do.

It seemed to find its feet in the third episode - there's been a sad lack of North London Jewish life on telly since the great Jack Rosenthal died - and for all the supposed similarities to Curb Your Enthusiasm and post, post modern sitcom comedy, it still seems pleasingly old fashioned to me, not that Jack would have put these words into the mouth of a thirteen year old.

"I didn't have sex wiv her. I wanked into her purse."

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Effort Inflation

In 1983 I went for a job, working the night shift at Dennys on a strip in the Seattle suburbs. Minimum wage, 10pm to 8am, clearing tables and stuff. No tips. No opportunity. No future.

I was interviewed by a besuited self-important twat all of a year older than me, who asked me his key question: "If I employ you, out of ten, how much effort are you gonna give me?" I considered this question seriously for a while, added a few marks to make myself look keen, and said "About 7 out of 10".

Kids, you may want to find a better mentor when it comes to passing interviews, but it did at least maintain my dignity, and saved myself from a lifetime of pancakes and eggs sunnyfuckingsideup.

Of course, those were simpler times, and England had yet to catch the American passion for over-inflated effort. And when it did drift across the Atlantic, we would all raise our eyebrows in contempt, or use our quotient of effort ironically.

But somewhere along the way, 110% became the minimum effort any sportsman could give, and frankly if that's all you've got to offer you might as well haul your sorry ass over to an all-day breakfast emporium and tuck in..

And much like with football transfer fees once we broke the million pound ceiling, once 110% was no longer sufficient things began to spiral out of control. I look back with nostalgia on the first time I heard someone giving it a 1000% per cent. What a piss-poor effort that seems today.

So, it's lucky we still have Simon Cowell, our last great pioneer, a frontiersman capable of breaking through the effort barrier. On Saturday he gave it a million percent. Now I don't know these days if that is even enough to work the graveyard shift at Denny's, but it's leaving me looking pretty unemployable at 7 out of 10.

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The Premiership

OK, so it's a bloated, all-consuming, entirely mercenary and uncaring money laundering business for some of the most unsavoury glory hunters of the world, peopled by some of the most overpaid, self-regarding, fuck-wits ever to pull on a shirt...

I still would have liked to have been at The Cottage yesterday - that was a great game of football:- The little ground heaving in the sun; the game flowing from end to end; over 30 shots on goal; penalty appeals turned down; a Paul Scholes' masterclass; desperate late own goal; missed penalty; and last-gasp redemption.

Also, certainly, the first time Fulham can be said to have had better centre-backs than Man Utd.

I watched the game again later on Match of the Day 2, and to say that they failed to give any idea as to quite what a terrific game it was, is a massive understatement. I'm with Andy Gray's "I watched every game of the World Cup, and not one came close to this one".

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Anchorman; The Legend of Ron Burgundy

I've been at a pretty low ebb all week and was flicking through channels last night trying to find something to make me laugh of a Saturday night, when I stumbled upon this.

I don't go to the cinema much any more, and stopped reading reviews years ago - at least until after I've seen the film (I am currently reading Pauline Kael's film reviews 1965 to 1967, but I digress). This means that I can come across some films many years old as though they've only just been released.

Anyway, I'd never heard of this before. And I barely know Will Farrell or anyone else in it, though I see one of them is on the front page of the Observer Magazine this morning!

If you have similarly been living in monastic conditions vis-a-vis oddball American movies of the noughties, I should tell you this is absolutely bonkers, in an Airplane kind of way, and cheered me up considerably...

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Sporting Victory Celebrations

I have touched on this before, but there was a particularly good one at York races this week that seems to have escaped general notice.

Personally, I prefer the celebrations to be natural rather than pre-planned. I don't much care for those choreographed shows of which footballers are so fond. I don't mind the ones where they are answering to the media in some way - Gascoigne's dentist chair; Robbie Fowler snorting the touchline; Bellamy swinging the golf club, and Jimmy Bullard lecturing the players on the pitch - but save me from Romario and Lampard and their family messages; Cahill's flag-punching, not to mention Robbie Keane's ridiculous roly poly. I also can't stand the goal celebrations that started off as natural but become trademark - I'm thinking Alan Shearer's arm, and before him Stuart Pearson's clenched fist, and throw in Frankie Dettori's flying dismount.

Tennis players are useless at them. I can't remember a good cricket one since the days when Botham et al would run down and grab a stump before being engulfed by an onrushing crowd. Athletes are better, not that I can think of any great ones.

Anyway, my top three.
3. Ruby Walsh winning the Betfair Chase on Kauto Star. He actually does nothing extravagant. What he does is smile. And such a smile it is that you can read into it exactly what Ruby was thinking - which was "Oh my god - this horse is good. he's gonna win me a couple of Gold Cups a few King Georges and a whole sideboard of Group 1s".

2. Ballesteros winning the Open at St Andrews and giving it the full childlike fist-pump, before getting the crowd to join in. God, we miss you Sevvy - to update the great lyric: "Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you".

1. Unequivocally, Marco Tardelli scoring effectively the winner in the 1982 World Cup Final. Now, it is true that it was the camera that made this great, but even so, the camera manages to catch something akin to the opposite of Munch's Scream - the suppuration of tension and explosion of fulfilment, which at that moment would have been mirrored by an entire nation.

Somewhat more mundanely Jamie Spencer rode the winner of the Ebor on Wednesday and as he passed the post stood up in his stirrups and gave a great big punch in the air. Jockeys don't do this often - The Cheltenham Festival aside - and it showed here, as Jamie very successfully managed to punch himself plum in the face...

"Way to go Paula..."

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Fucking up your A-Levels

If today is your day of destiny - a still moment in time that crystallises your life's dreams up to this moment; that distills every conceivable destination board of your future onto one piece of paper: I say to you with the benefit of wisdom beyond my weight: Don't worry. Be happy.

It was thirty years ago today that I opened my envelope and cried an ululation I've only been able to repeat twice since. Once when saying goodbye to my dad and once when the most perfect cat I'll ever own died.

The cause of my tears? A "C" and two "E"s. (Do such humble grades even exist any more?) Or more accurately, two years of congenital laziness, thinking staring at my shoes, bunking off lessons, and devouring the NME would somehow compensate for not being able to place the English Civil War in the right century.

A place on a prestigious course at Warwick was now closed to me, and even my second choice was beyond me - at Essex of all places - proof if ever it was needed that 18 year olds set their hearts on getting to places they haven't a fucking clue about.

Like it mattered a shit. Of my two closest friends, one went to Notttingham, as was his burning ambition, and dropped out two years later, before becoming a squillionaire Ad Man. The other turned his back on education and successfully pursued a musical life instead.

And my own failure proved a serendipitous one, as I hitch-hiked my sad-assed soul into a much better life in deepest Wales, a three year pupation from child to adult which, if nothing else, gave me a deeper appreciation of the construct called luck.

I've looked at life from all sides now, and I can safely say, no matter what sliding doors I'd have chosen, the odds are I'd still be a fat, alcoholic, failed gambler. Them's the cards, folks, play 'em as they lie.

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Fat Cooks

The first commandment in my book:
Thou shalt never trust a thin cook.

Anne's Tea-Loaf

There's usually some Soreen Malt Loaf hanging around the place - whenever it's three for 99p down the Co-Op I pick up some. It says it keeps for a month on the packet, but as it's actually half a hockey puck it's good for a year or so.

Anne's always been a fan. She thinks of it as a healthy snack, which I suppose it is, compared to profiteroles say, though she slathers half a pack of butter on each slice to make up for it. Personally, I like the way it sticks to your teeth so that you can enjoy picking it out for the next couple of hours.

Anyway, Anne's tea loaf is nothing like Soreen malt loaf. It's light, non sticky, packed with fruit, and not even made of malt. And it only lasts a couple of days in the larder...

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Ferries

I was on the Hampton Loade ferry yesterday, looking for the all-day cafeteria and amusement arcade, and I was reminded of how much I like ferries. And although I prefer the ones that exist for local use I don't mind the tourist ones either.

When we go to a new city one of the first things we do is find the waterfront and get on a boat. It comes right after finding a tower to look at the view and get our bearings. And, much like when we go to a dog-track or racecourse, we're not interested in staying indoors, we want to get out into the weather, elemental and connected, although, to be fair, this didn't last long on the way to Skye.

Personal favourites:
The last ferry from Manley into Sydney, where you get to see the bay in all its glory under a great Southern sky.
The Seattle/Ballard Locks circle, where you can see how Seattle nestles into almost complete wilderness.
The New York Circle Line (purists would probably prefer the Staten Island ferry)
Westminster Bridge to Tower Bridge - preferably with a cheesey mockney cockney guide.
The ferry to The Orkneys which is only a few miles but may as well be to a different continent.
The Traghetti in Venice, which are gondolas that work as ferries across the city, which only cost about 50p - saving you a fortune if losing you romantic credibility, and you can pretend to be Venetian and stand up for the entire 3 minute journey.
The ferry from Stromboli to Lippari late at night where you can see the volcanic eruptions, and then the millions of jellyfish illuminated in the waves, and where I had an epiphany that my life wouldn't get any better than this, (and it hasn't!).
And, of course, my personal favourite, The Star Ferry, Kowloon to Hong Kong, which is the world's greatest monument to efficiency.

Hampton Loade may be just a piece of wood, tied to a wire, crossing the River Severn, but it's not entirely out of place on that list. On the other hand I've never been on any of the others with a dog that's just rolled in fox pooh...


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Rectangular Straw Bales

Since we've been up here it's been huge circular straw-bales, or as I prefer to think of them, combine harvester pooh.

But this year for some reason all the farmers have gone for satisfyingly rectangular bales, stacked on top of each other to make pleasing towers around the fields. They're not the smaller rectangular bales of my childhood memories, but ones big enough to sail to America on - still, it's a nice improvement.

Bonus thought for the day:
Jonathan Raban is obsessed with the different attitudes English and Americans have towards history and landscape. We like to think we are looking out over an unchanged landscape, and the Americans are in love with our supposed history, and yet in reality everything we see is man-made. Whereas the Americans think of their history as stretching back only a few centuries, when in reality huge swathes of their landscape remain essentially untouched by man.

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Lisa Faulkner

If you haven't fallen in love with Lisa Faulkner over the last few weeks you presumably have more interesting things to do with your life than watch Celebrity Masterchef. Then again, you find the time to waste on Facebook so we all know that can't be true.

The rest of us may well only have one more day to enjoy her charms, if her lemon meringue pie is anything to go by. I know I'm not alone in this, as all the usual internet forums I frequent looking for betting information have found time to praise her charms. Which makes a change from the afternoon rush to praise whatever short skirt Carole Vorderman's replacement is wearing on Countdown.

It's only a shame it's not a betting event, with a public vote. With the best chef (Neil Stukes) probably bottom of any public vote, and the worst chef at the top, we'd be in Darren Gough, Strictly Come Dancing, betting-heaven.

Of course, what's all the more extraordinary about Lisa's "journey" is that it's only a few years ago she had that horrific accident. That one where she lost her face in the deep-fat fryer. Must take real guts to make her comeback in a kitchen environment...


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Shropshire Fidget Pie

Here's a story I've always liked. When supermarkets introduced loyalty cards they couldn't wait to get all the data and work out what types of people bought what and when. On first sight, something really puzzled them. The reward card data showed the stores were selling hardly any pork pies, whereas the stores themselves reported normal sales of gazillions every week.

On investigating this, they decided as follows. Normally, it's women who are the keepers of the loyalty card, and doers of the weekly shop, and they appear to avoid those perfect little cupcakes of lard and gristle in favour of things more wholesome. Chocolate presumably. Whereas it seems working men spend their lunchtimes popping into Tesco, cash-purchasing half a dozen Melton Mowbray mini pork pies, and scoffing the lot in their cars, vans and offices before patting their tummies, burping contentedly and hiding the evidence.

This has seemed even more realistic to me since leaving the guacamole south for the mushy peas north. The butchers around here groan with pies. Hardly a customer leaves without half a round of poachers pie in their bag. Pork is king. Lunchtimes people queue out of the door of the butchers in Shifnal for roast pork baps - with stuffing, crackling and gravy. If you want a business idea I suggest you open sandwich shops in Holborn, The City, and Canary Wharf, specialising in pork products, fat and gristle, and I guarantee you success beyond your wildest dreams. Name them "Porkers". The shops that is, not the customers.

Anyway, after our solitary ramble over Wenlock Edge the other day we stopped off at the Craven Arms specialist butcher/slaughterhouse and picked up a couple of Shopshire's very own contribution to cancer and obesity - miniature "Fidget" pies. Like a mini pork pie, but the filling is more bacony, (ie - it actually looks like it may have come from an animal), and instead of a pastry-top there's some wholesome slices of apple. Frankly, they were bloody fantastic. I suggest, as the new proprietors of Porkers, you get a barrel-load in, and offer them as the healthy option.


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Shropshire Tourist Board

No doubt some of you have been off enjoying the summer - headed off somewhere nice for a quiet break from it all - and have since spent your time variously stuck in traffic; herded through airport security like lambs to the slaughter; fighting the Germans for pool-side beds; listening to the campers next door farting (and worse); searching for the last square foot of beach in which to hammer your windbreak; tramping up somewhere like Skiddaw in a never-ending, jabbering crocodile of anoraks; and surrounded everywhere by bored teenagers texting each other about how bored they are. Money well spent to get away from it all, I'm sure you'll agree.

We went walking on Wenlock Edge yesterday. Four hours. Didn't see another person. Not a single soul. Shropshire Tourist Board working its magic as ever.

My cat watching my dog at play

We spent Christmas in a posh hotel in Florence about ten years ago. Our fellow guests were either our age or older, mature, successful very middle-class couples. A small group of us bonded as the drinkers of the assemblage and would gather post-prandially in the small hotel bar for a glass or two of brandy and prosecco.

One night we returned to find what appeared to be an Italian "singles" night in full flow, complete with cheesey keyboard player and tiny dance-floor. The Italians were all turned out as you'd imagine; the men strutting around in smart suits, the women sat elegant in their fineries. If they actually had a drink it sat on the table in front of them, untouched. And the men and the women were separate from each other, much like at the start of the early teenage parties of my childhood, before the cheap cider and hormones kicked in. It was like a beautiful but entirely dead tableau.

Into this decorous scene spilled ten unfailingly polite and well-behaved, but entirely drunk bunch of Brits - joshing with the barman, calling out for some Abba, laughing and teasing, joking and smiling, and taking over the dance-floor for some bad dad dancing. The Italian women looked on. I think I would describe their look as being 95% undisguised disgust. However, if you looked closely enough, you could also catch occasional glimpses of something else - glimmers of envy - for our fun, our enjoyment, our unbuttonedness.

I've been reminded of this lately, ever since Bobby has had to share his house with our cat. I've never seen a dog and cat live together before and I've found it fascinating. In particular whenever the dog is playing ball or frisbee, or tag round the kitchen island, or mock fight or anything else that gets him besides himself with excitement I notice the cat looking on.

Sat there, quite beautifully, quite still, looking at Bobby with exactly the same look as those Italian women. Utter contempt mixed with a well-hidden and deeply suppressed desire to join in.

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Special little moments in songs

Where the lyric seems to hit the music at just the right angle with the voice stretched into an emotion far grander than the actual lyric itself requires. In fact, the lyric is often nothing at all - as the previously mentioned "I'm going to Wichita...." proves.

I was thinking of this last night,and jumped onto Spotify to have a rummage whilst running in my new £20 speakers (it's important to splash out on state-of-the-art technology in these troubled times). So here's some examples that pleased me yesterday.

"You give me road rage" - Catatonia (all Welsh)
"There's a black cat lying in the shadow of a gate-post" - Hothouse Flowers (all Irish)
"The closest thing to heaven is rock and roll" - Aztec Camera (all Scottish)
"Just a thin clean layer of Mr Sheen looking back at me" - The Jam (all suburban angst)
"Anyone who had a heart would love me too" - Cilla Black (all Scouse)
"Leroy says send a picture, Leroy says hallo, Leroy says..." - Michelle Shocked (all jilted lesbian)
"Lily had already taken all of the dye out of her hair" - Dylan
(all, um, Dylan - Blood on the Tracks has about 30 such moments)
"When I go, I'm going like Elsie" Liza Minnelli - (all pink-sequinned campervan)

Obviously I was blotto by the time I was searching through old musicals.

More please...


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Bruschetta

Italy is the only place I've ever been where I've gone "Oh my god, so that's what a tomato is supposed to taste like".

So, it's obviously an over-priced disaster ever to order bruschetta in this country - say in a Pizza Express, or worse - where you'll get a couple of under-ripe hydroponic excuses for tomatoes mashed up on some leftover scrag-end of baguette for £5.95.

And don't get me started on heirloom tomatoes, suffice to say Anne coughed-up a snob's tithe for a small tray of multi-coloured cherry tomatoes at the Newport Show the other week, and a glass of water had more taste.

However, last night, home-made bread; home-grown cherry tomatoes; home-grown garlic; home-grown basil; a slug of olive oil, and arriverderci Shifnal, buon giorno Firenze...

Prego.


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American Place Names

This was going to be on Jonathan Raban, but I'll keep him in reserve.

I've always loved place names. The shipping forecast, train station announcements, little snatches of songs - "I'm going to Wichita" and so on.

WH Auden talks of names as being proto-poetry, and it's an insight worth tracking down and reading. He's talking about peoples' names, but I think it applies equally to place names. And thanks to Jonathan Raban for reminding me of the great names of America.

(And I'm glad it was Jonathan Raban, because he belongs on my list of writers whom I admire greatly but don't mention very often because I don't know how to pronounce their name. Primo Levi is another. This all started when I first discovered L'Etranger, aged 16, and went to school bubbling with enthusiasm for existentialism and one AlberT CamuS. Andrew Sullivan, an annoying little twot, fully two years younger than me - a dead ringer in looks and views to the twelve year old William Hague - put me in my place, not just on how to pronounce Albert but also threw in a pretty impressive deconstruction of the absurdist position - well, at least he did before I hit him. He is now apparently the "foremost political blogger in the States" - and seemingly still a twat - but I digress.)

I like British names - Potter Heigham; Bracklesham Bay; Newport Pagnell; Cader Idris; Fife four, Forfar five. But I truly love American place names. The frontier names. The ones (as Raban points out) that sound like they come from Pilgrim's Progress. The ones that describe what they see. The ones that are ice-box not refrigerator.

Damnation Peak; Mount Despair; Lucky Canyon; Starvation Point; Big Rock; Little Rock; Thunder Gulch; Golgotha Butte; Sand Ridge; Poverty Ridge; Sage; Dead Canyon; Bend; Lonetree Pine; Long Beach.

What's your favourite place name?

The Great Outdoors

Which luckily we watched prior to the last episode of Rev - it may not have stood up so well the other way round.

It's certainly nicely bonkers - get on i-player if you missed it. It doesn't seem remotely realistic though - the ramblers near us are all over 60 - Bobby thinks of them as skittles.

Some cracking lines though, and Mark Heap giving it the full Green Wing.

"Our conversation topic for the next mile - Morse or Gadget, who's the best Inspector?"

"Sandwich, crisps and apple - the guitar, drum and bass of packed lunches."





‎"Let's get rrready to ramble...."

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Culinary cock-ups

Having enjoyed the luscious Lisa Faulkner's hopeless poached egg the other day, yesterday it was my turn to, hit the hurdle, drop the ball, curdle the hollandaise.

I was preparing a simple "pasta bake" supper to greet my wife home from the cold forbidding hills of corporate mismanagement. Not just any pasta bake, of course. The tomato sauce was a thing of great beauty - home grown tomatoes and garlic, sweating down in a few secret ingredients no cheeky TV celebrity chef could ever get me to divulge. The courgetttes were sweet and firm, yellow and homegrown. The mince was handrolled on the thigh of a Shropshire farmer's lusty daughter. Rustle up a white sauce, finely grate some finest mature cheddar, eh voila.

Of course, when it comes to serving up food in our home, frankly nothing gets tougher than that, with my very own Anne Turode-Fortt-Leith, not to mention the three wicked witches of the WI. She smelt, prodded, nibbled, chewed, rolled my succulence round her mouth, and finally declared: "Mmm, lovely. I think there's something missing though."

And she was right. There was.




Pasta.



Should have called it "bake".


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Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

Two pleasing coincidences this weekend. Firstly, Catherine and I were unable to spell Chattanooga and hence made solving the Observer crossword significantly harder than it deserved to be - then that evening perchance I was taken on a stroll with Jonathan Raban through the pages of said town.

The other concerns Augustus Pit Rivers. No sooner had I finished reading all about him in Bill Bryson did I find John suggesting we go to the museum full of all the bric-a-brac he'd "liberated" in that warm, cuddly, imperial way of the beloved Victorians.

Bill paints a cracking picture of Pitt Rivers: "Notoriously mean-spirited" - his wife once threw a party for the villagers from her large estate and was broken-hearted when not a single soul turned up. What she didn't know was that hubby had sent a servant to lock the gates. Add in a bit of loinfruit banishment and flagellation, and the large scale eviction of elderly tenants and you have one of the fathers of archaeology in all his glory.

On the plus side he seems to have invented typology and his labels are still attached to all the items of his in the museum which is rather fun. He also was the first to arrange protection of ancient monuments, without which we wouldn't have wasted half of our younger years wandering around stately homes bored out of our fucking brains.

("In the early 1870s the London and South Western Railway announced plans to run a line right through the heart of the Stonehenge site. When people complained a railway official countered that Stonehenge was 'entirely out of repair and not the slightest use to anyone now'." - see how compulsive it is reading Bryson ?).

Anyway, we didn't have nearly enough time to do the place justice, especially as his original 20,000 pieces have swelled to half a million, but it was an enjoyable swish through time and place.

However, it wasn't a patch on the greatest Victorian museum, the much-missed Potter museum of stuffed animals at Arundel...

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