We had a packed itinerary already when our first stop (The Tebay motorway services for breakfast) added on Bollocks to Alton Towers (BTAT) book with the weird and wonderful sights of Britain including the Tebay service station.

First stop was the beach at Crosby, Liverpool for the Anthony Gormley statues – there are hundreds of statues on the beach (and out to sea with waves washing over their heads) in what looks like a Doctor Who episode, and then the first BTAT item the wonderful Port Sunlight built by Lord Lever for his workers and a village reminiscent of The Avengers or a Prisoner episode with small white vans running around doing gardening in a gorgeous architectural gem. It has a great art gallery with Farquarson sheep, the Scapegoat and Norman Parkinson photos, and there were flower pot figures in many gardens, for a flower pot festival, which added to the Avengers episode feel.

Southbound I took the M6 toll road thinking this would speed things up (we were navigating using a 5 year old atlas with pages missing we found in the car) when we found out that we were heading in the wrong direction (whilst being told by our son that our other car’s fan had exploded and taken the radiator out with it). Whilst passing at speed past Bristol I spotted the SS Great Britain sign so careered across the motorway and ended up in a huge traffic jam – we saw the outside of the boat that the next door farmer’s mother’s brother had raised from the Falkland Islands and sailed back to Bristol (Brunel’s iron clad ship looked most impressive) and under the wonderful Clifton Suspension Bridge another Brunel triumph.

The start of our North Devon and Cornwall route was in the Somerset town of Minehead with Devon Cream Icecream on the beach, a look at the Yarn Market in the picturesque Dunster

The Coastal road there has great views with precipitous drops over cliffs and 1 in 4 roads (the tough gradients being as you are turning corners) leading through gorgeous thatched cottage villages all offering cream teas, through the coastal harbour of Lynmouth.

Dinner was at the BTAT recommended The Pack Of Cards Inn, which was built in 1690 because the owner won a lot of money at gambling so wanted to give something back – he did he built an inn based on a pack of cards (with 4 floors representing the suits, 13 rooms for the number of cards in a suit, 52 windows and stairs and built on an area measuring 52 feet square for the number of cards in a pack. The unusual shape is that of a house built of cards. The meals are ordered and you are given a playing card – then surreally a waitress comes out shouting ‘King Of Spades’ and you get people asking ‘When is My Jack of Hearts coming out?’ – we were the four of diamonds and it was delicious. Incidentally the Inn is in the town of Combe Martin which boasts the longest main street in Britain (if not the world, at 2 miles in its crooked length.

There is a Tarka Trail around here, based on the classic childrens book Tarka the otter, which is an interesting thing to base a trail on – it is a bit like having ‘Bambi’s mum was killed here’ trail since the tale of Tarka is one of relentless, cruel and bloody otter hunts. Perhaps people leap out on walkers and bash them over the head.

We watched the sunset over Ifracombe
before staying the night at the Royal and Fortescue hotel in Barnstaple where I was dreaming of Kim in a blue and white dress (possibly inspired from the Norman Parkinson photographs in the Port Sunlight gallery). And thus ended day one.

Setting off very early the next morning to the delightful village of Clovelly hanging off the hills around the picturesque harbour. The advantage of visiting at 7am is that there is no-one to charge you for parking or an entrance fee, there are no crowds and you get to see the working folk using sledges to transport beer barrels down the steep cobbles.

The highlight of the trip was a visit to Barometer World, where a jury of leeches in jars predict the weather, where Admiral Fitzroy is correctly revered as the creator of synoptic (pressure) charts by placing not leeches but barometers around the coast of Britain, he was captain of the Beagle – the all important Darwin voyage, and set up the Met Office – saving so many lives, with telegraphing weather forecasts, before taking his own by cutting his throat with a razor in his bath. We bought a barometer and marvelled at the Shark Liver Oil jar predicting the wind direction with its sediment shapes, correctly as it turned out a few hours later. Another BTAT success, although we had to pass on the British Cycling Museum as we didn’t have my cycling son, and we missed the National Bee Centre with its entertaining Bee Video due to a lapse in Kim’s otherwise great navigation (mistaking a similarly spelt town).

At Bideford I almost hit a car on the roundabout whilst trying to go over the medieval bridge, one of several near misses, but then misses are a bonus really.

Boscastle is the site hit by major flooding, which wasn’t predicated at all by the wonderful Witchcraft Museum, filled with black mirrors and crystal balls. We enjoyed cornish pasties and superb cream teas underneath a flood water mark (above our heads).

Tintagel is a ghastly tourist hellhole so we drove down to it initially mistaking the large hotel for the pitiful ruins of the castle before ‘As I was going to’ St Ives (with I must add only one wife) and the wonderful Tate gallery there (home to the Wallis naive art and the St Ives based abstract artist breakaway group – the Penwith Society), the lovely Harbour, surfers on the beach, a shower of rain enabling a quick rescue by the Lifeboat Inn.

Escaping people for a while it was a case of remote stone circling (and in the case of the Doughnut Stone Men-An-Tol is was very circular with a hole in the middle you had to go through for good luck (I just made it). Lanyon Quoit looks ready to fall down (it did in the past) and is now the same height as Kim but we sheltered from the driving rain under it for a short while before moving onto the tourism junket that is Lands End (yes we can confirm it is possibly worse than John O’Groats at the other end of the country) where the rain was really bad now (fortunately being around 6pm everything was shut and soaking cyclists celebrated by turning around and cycling off somewhere else.

There was however a very good model village of a mining town at Lands End giving us a good idea of how the mines operated. We left the begging seagulls in the rain to travel through Penzance and saw St Michaels Mount straining through the rain and mist looking magical. We decided to spend the night at the lovely Portleven harbour since light was fading fast, first trying the olde smugglers The Ship Inn which had no rooms, the Anchor Cottage (which Kim asked a bemused householder if they had any rooms – it was no longer a B & B) and finally settled into the Harbour Inn and worked my way through the produce of the St Austell Brewery (which used to have a swastika [in the correct orientation as designed by Hitler] on their bottle tops which had to be grinded off during the war). Marvelling that anyone could produce a show called Fools On Horses we slumped on the metal bed and set the alarm for an early wander along the sea wall. After all day three was beckoning and there was still a lot to do.

The Lizard is the most southernmost part of Britain and in contrast with Lands End is a frightfully nice spot. There is a cliff walk, a welcome marked absence of amusement arcades and multimedia offerings, just a rundown lifeboat station, collapsed sea cave and one of the loveliest places I have seen in the geologically interesting Kynance Cove with its serpentine rock and sandy cove (and cream teas at the cafe where a woman surrounded by gulls was emptying a bucket of slops out).

Cornwall is a telecommunications historical triumph – Marconi performed his first experiments here to radio the Americas, submarine cables were laid and come in at Lands End and Goonhilly Down has a huge Satellite array of the largest Satellite dishes in the world. The dishes are protected by fences, poisonous vipers and high tariff tours. A few miles away from this communications centre we tried to phone home and couldn’t get a signal.

We had meticulously researched this trip by watching the first series of Poldark so it was fitting to visit the Poldark Tin Mine (although the candlelit ghost tours at night sounded fun). Falmouth has the Pendennis castle which we ate more Cornish ice cream outside whilst watching the boats on Falmouth bay looking over to St Mawes and a similar castle. Truro was a lovely city with an excellent cathedral – I walked down the aisle to the strains of the organ wearing my ‘I am Looking For a Japanese Girlfriend’ in Japanese T shirt and received a smile from a Japanese tourist.

We thought we would be the only folk in Cornwall NOT visiting the Eden Project and opted instead for the Lost Gardens Of Heligan which were superb and the weather cleared beautifully to give us sunshine in the jungle with a cooling breeze through the Japanese banana leaves.

St Austell looked to be a dreary town but outside was the delightful port of Charlestown – we almost missed the turn off and I swung the car into a garage to turn only to have Kim screaming CHAINS in the middle of the manoeuvre and I narrowly avoided hitting the large chain guarding the entrance. There was a tall ship in at Charlestown which lent an air of charm to the port.

Never far from stones to visit we reached the three circles of the Hurlers with the Bodmin Moor Stones in the distance – we hadn’t realised how far in the distance until after about half an hour striding across the moor they were still in the distance. Another half an hour rewarded us with Mike falling into a barbed wire fence and impaling his hand (perhaps Masai Barefoot Technology and scrambing is not a sensible mix) as well as clambering around The Cheesewring. The Quoit of Trethevy is collapsed and looks like it will fall over killing someone at any moment so I let Kim check it out first by taking photographs of her beside the shakey walls. It is in the back garden of some houses and is exciting to get to down single track roads with no passing places and high hedges making the experience one of traversing a labyrinth.

We tried to get accommodation at the Ship Inn in Looe, however there was no room at the Inn and we enjoyed a drive around the restricted narrow streets running over tourists and squeezing through very narrow gates. So it was off to Polperro and a night in the eastern european staffed hotel, dinner in the delicious Cottage Restaurant with the owner keeping us all up to date with the World Cup whilst we dined (the French head butt was described eloquently whilst we supped our Pouilley Fume and munched on our Cornish scallops. I took to the pubs to revel in the atmosphere of rowdy English fans berating a drunk Italian supporter, bitten by a whistling parrot in the Noughts and Crosses pub and spent a late evening sampling ales with a scuba diving instructor, who had given up his computer business to dive, and a morose cornish pastie maker who was seeing his trade decline with the unfortunate combination of cheap flights and weightwatchers.

The Day Four Plan was going to be travelling all the way home via Brighton and the M1 but we rather got scuppered with fog – an early foggy walk around Polperro watching a suspect smuggler on his mobile phone saying ‘We can do that when there is no-one around’ was followed by a foggier walk around Plymouth Hoe with statues of Drake, lighthouses and an eerie ferris wheel appearing out of the fog as we walked around the place where Drake finished his bowls before finishing the Spanish Armada, discovering California and circumnavigating the globe (which must have been easier than finding the Golden Hinde in Plymouth harbour in the fog).

We travelled along hte edge of Dartmoor, home to the Hound Of The Baskervilles and an early version of geocaching called letterstamping – this has the rather charming notion of leterstampers identifying each other by marching up and asking ‘Are You a travelling stamp?’. Given the visibility this was unlikely to happen to us.

The World Of Marbles is an incredibly busy place – it is a shop with ensuite glass blowers on tea breaks, giant marbles cut from an enormous travelling marble maker (15 million marbles made on it) and hypnotic motion machines with marbles flying around like squirrels on speed and pool balls setting off bells and swirling down centrifuges. For those who claim I have lost my marbles I would like to point out that I have a box of 50 different sized ones now.

Past the Buckfast Abbey home of the alcoholic and teenage wannabe alkies tipple to ‘A La Ronde’ – a bonkers 16 sided house, possible designed by a 17 year old and decorated in shells by two spinster cousins with too much time on their hands. The shell gallery is remarkable, but inaccessible due to damage so there is a high quality video camera attached to a remote control unit – you can spin it round and zoom in on the wonderful shell pictures. The Parminter spinsters left the house to a gadget obsessed reverend who installed huge pipes as a radiator, a dumb waiter lift and a speaking tube system, replacing the fire risk thatch with slates and a gas lighting system. The spinsters were very talented and way ahead of their times working with a wide variety of crafts in feathers, shells and paper to produce a unique entity.

All that was left was a visit to a farm shop to stock up on pasties and clotted cream, a long long drive back to Liverpool to find the underground maze of Williamson tunnels, built for an unknown reason, were closed on a Monday, returned via Tebay to fill up with Cumbrian fare and back home to find the house suspiciously totally clean and the boys working through Stuarts complementary Virgin wine case and playing Monopoly.

Thermidor meaning warm, is the eleventh month in the bonkers French Republican calendar (July 19th-August 17th) – but warm it certainly is here, uncomfortably warm – I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with the asteroid that is going to have a near miss (bit like England penalty shots). We are at Aphelion and don’t we know it (phew wot a scorcher).

We were supposed to be in Cornwall but with my son falling off his bike we decided to bring Cornwall to us – in the shape of Cornish Yarg, pasties, delicious brie, cider and west country cheesecakes, Cornish icecream, clotted cream and Devon drinks. Only thing missing is the crowds.

A day out (pretending to be touring Cornwall) for Stuart and I to Warkworth saw us paddling on its great beach, rowing on the Coquet racing with a housewife in her boat, saw a dead badger and eighteen honda sport cars (from some rally or other), parked the wrong way up a one way street, and saw loads of England flags still flying proud.

My first impressions of the Scottish Parliament was that it reminded me of Hitler’s Bunker with embellishment and with Arabic and Urdu guidebooks (which I guess Hitler didn’t provide). We didn’t visit the part with the roof falling down. Still it held a reception given by the President of Lithuania, Valdas Adamkus, to open the photographic exhibition of the brilliant Sutkus – along with a Lithuanian version of the Reverend skating on Duddingston Loch (it is John Paul Sartre in Lithuania in the snow).

Our Cornwall tour ended up as a west of England tour taking in beaches of Liverpool, Port Sunlight, Bristol and the complete South West of England before heading back up the M6 on a 1,600 mile long weekend. It is verbosely documented here. When we returned Alasdair’s face was almost healed and the surgeon he saw reckoned he always had a squint nose and that he had been very lucky.

The temperature started to make people irritable so we retired to the swimming pool – where the irritable folk had headed too. From one end of the pool came the refrain ‘Out of my way you F****G BITCH’ and the surprise that it came from the white haired gent addressing a shocked little old lady – not that little old ladies can be overlooked. We went down to find the pool had its lanes all cordoned off with signs for clockwise and anti-clockwise because of ‘World War Three’ breaking out in the pool (bit of an inappropriate phrase since Israel and Lebonese Hezbollah are busy throwing missiles at each other) – I asked one old little lady, in jest whilst performing my widdershins breaststroke, if she was responsible for this and got a filthy look – then found out that she was actually one of the gang of three that had an enormous blow up in the pool the other day accused of bullying and lane grabbing.

Hot hot hot – the hottest day of the year for a century and folk rushing to see An Inconvenient Truth with Al Gore or filling the local swimming pool. Too hot to do anything but lie in the sun with wine and read a book on Angels or go to a sweaty Guns and Roses concert – I chose the former, Kim the latter.

It might be the heat, but flushed with my success on exploring myspace I joined flirtomatic, whilst my wife was moshing it with geriatric Guns and Roses. At least I wasn’t going to be approached by paedophiles on flirtomatic (its 18’s only), a 2 year Java development that promises supersnogs and foxes who hunt. How could I resist. I reckoned I wouldn’t get far without a photo, especially since my attempts to send photos of myself to flirtomatic resulted in various knockbacks – perhaps I was too ugly to join – I tried a variety of different versions including a silhouette and a picture of my dog and cow – still no joy. Eventually a picture of me drunk was accepted and since a drunken old man seems to be what the flirtomatic babes are after I had messages upon messages. Before resigning in search of a richer life, I had offers of sex from Northern Irish 19 year old babes which seemed a lot more promising than myspace (where pictures of my eldest son’s friends mother in her underwear was the high spot, although I do have Lily Allen as a myspace friend which is cool as she rocks and sends me personal romantic emails saying ‘buy my new album’ or ’see me in concert’ – I don’t understand people who say this is just a marketing ploy), approaches from indian djs, a self harming born again christian, randy shopkeepers, an eskimo in Alaska, a half breed cherokee widow, a young russian bride, a foxy chick writing erotic literature asking me to edit it, philosophers of all kinds, a psychologist (probably looking for research material), nigerian 419 scam artists and newcastle grannies – yes all life is here, and its hot. I don’t know why people come to me for advice I know I would be the last person to ask for advice – but they do, the best so far was some lass whose boyfriend had a smelly penis which rendered fellatio unpleasant – not too sure why she was asking me perhaps my smelly penis reputation is widespread. Encouraged by my success I set up two other free accounts so I now had Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (no-one spotted this) and Sister Hyde (my female lesbian persona) – Mr Hyde would say nasty things, Dr Jekyll would be sweetness and light – yes you guessed it Mr Hyde was Mr popular, although Sister Hyde was doing very well as a lesbian magnet (I was the masturbatory fantasy of a lesbian schoolteacher, new york secretary and a lesbian on an oil rig who I introduced to each other before letting my feminie side go back to her husband in a tearjerking farewell). And at the same time the news broke that intelligent men are unfaithful – citing Einstein and Bertrand Russell (who masterfully delegated difficult mathematics to his chum and then slipped into his wife’s bed), history doesn’t report if either of the geniuses penises were whiffy.

From infideltiy to paradise – not a big step I hear you say. But Paradise the word comes from the Babylonians and means field of pigs – probably because paradise was an easy hunting ground fenced off with the livestock in it. I hope you are not reading this on a boat though as the word ‘pee aye gee’ should never be spoken aloud as it is frightful bad luck. Paradise to the muslim is huri which can be translated as nymph or white raisen (I think I would be pushing their translators to sort out which it is as there is a pig of a difference).

Looking for something to do with a large block of sodium and a private water supply – perfect match

At a loose end, and sporitng my new Rohan shorts, I was looking at a trip to Alnwick but read the humourous website instead, Alasdair had cycled to Berwick and reported that it was fog bound thus the seaside was out so we ended up at the Percy Arms Hotel for dinner after roaming around Chillingham Castle grounds and the folly of Hurlstone Tower outside Wooler.

The Sunday was clear and hot so we headed for the coast, Kelso square was littered with broken glass, rubbish and gardeners clearing their flower beds after the Civic Week parades. We lunched at the Cross Inn at Paxton where Kangaroo was on the menu (a cross between steak and venison with neither of their taste – perhaps a dark chocolate sauce would enliven it).

Driving down the Northumberland coast the Bomb Squad with all sirens and lights going raced past us on the way to Berwick – we were glad that we were heading in the opposite direction. We stopped off at Budle Bay to watch Kitesurfers trying to kill each other – it is a lovely spot that. Craster is a decaying harbour village with the fatal attraction of Dunstanburgh Castle on the cliffs, it reminds me of the village in Dagon so we left before it got dark. We watched as a helicopter circled and then rescued someone from the seas, before we headed to the seedy delights of Seahouses and delicious Jumbo haddock and chips.

My dentist has moved from Wooler to her base in Belford which is only another 9 miles through delightful countryside narrowly missing lots of cyclists, so the annual inspection took place in Belford. I sat in a queue consisting of two boys and a chap in shorts – when a blood curdling scream rang out from the door marked Dentist. The boys looked concerned and mumbled ‘is that mum?’ whilst the chap in shorts mumbled to the receptionist that she suffers from stress and has a sore jaw. Another scream rang out and eventually emerged the screamee clutching her jaw and nodding when asked did she have a tooth pulled out. The dentist appeared smiling took one look at me and said “you are next once I have cleaned up the room”. Reception certainly didn’t even smile when I confidently said that I had been trained in interrogation techniques but I was a sucker for the gentle touch.

It is so hot here that the front door has warped and the wooden gates can’t be closed – we are rather hoping for rain as are the yellow fields and croquet lawn.

The East Fortune air show was on and included impressive displays from the Scot Airways Dornier passenger plane doing a loop, a russian stunt plane that was simply awesome tumbling out the sky and then back in control and the Angel of Death – the Eurofighter Typhoon had to be seen to be believed – cutting a square through the sky showing off its turning circle and then a vertical climb through the clouds to exit – amazing noise and power and the best fighter aircraft in the world. We also saw an awesome display of falconry from the folks at Braco with a dog/hawk controlled attack on a rubber duck.

The month ends with welcome rain (mainly when we were walking back from the airshow) and a cold breeze to make air conditioning redundant until the August heatwave hits. Thermidor was well named.