I can hardly believe how warm it is down here.
I have not needed a coat since we arrived and have even left off my thermal vest.
We have spent the whole day milling around the south of England, because this evening we are going to call in in a place called Bath. You are not supposed to pronounce this with our northern flat A vowel. It is called Bahth.
I can’t manage this, despite several attempts. It makes me sound exactly like somebody who has started their life on a sink housing estate in somewhere like Barnsley, pretending to be middle class in a nineteen seventies situation comedy.
I am just trying not to say it any more than I must. I do not wish to invite ridicule.
We are going to Bath in order to spend the evening visiting my cousin, whom I have not seen for many years. We used to see a great deal of one another when we were children, but vanished from one another’s adult lives as thoroughly as acne and crushes on Donny Osmond.
I think that hers was David Cassidy, actually.
I am, at the time of writing, looking forward to this. Probably by the time of reading I will have done it, and be able to tell you how it went.
In the meantime we chugged out of Plymouth and thought that we would investigate the countryside. It is very beautiful down here, with red soil and the occasional thatched cottage. King Arthur lived here somewhere, although I am not exactly sure where, I kept my eyes open for a blue plaque, but perhaps he was a bit further off the A38.
We went to see Glastonbury. I have not been here since I once attended the festival, many years ago, and I have never been into the town centre.
We needed to visit a post office, and so we trundled into the town. There was a post office, but it was shut. What was open was dozens and dozens of shops selling absolutely intriguing hippie junk.
Really. I have never seen so much enticing garbage in one place in my entire life.
Every single retail enterprise was called something like Avalon Organic Goddess Car Repairs, or Lancelot’s Holistic Electrical Goods. You could buy absolutely anything you wanted as long as it was made of crystals and had some leaves sticking out of it.
I could quite cheerfully have wandered around it for ages, but we did not have the time. We thought that we might go and look at the Tor, but could not find anywhere at all which offered parking facilities, although we did spot a camper van with an even more astounding paint job than ours, being bright pink and covered in roses.
We turned out of Glastonbury and through some gentle farming country towards Bath. There was even a grapevine farm, it is a lot warmer down here
* * *
It is now very much later, and we are in the camper van, outside my cousin’s wonderful Bath town house, stuffed to the gills with fish and chips and an excess of wine. It is not true that they do fish and chips better in the north. Bath has wonderfully middle class fish and chips with sprigs of parsley and slices of lemon. The lights were dim whilst we were eating and I very nearly had the sort of misfortune where one spears a quarter of lemon on one’s fork, mistaking it for a chip, several times over. I managed to avoid this by a hair’s breadth, and felt very pleased with myself. It would have been terrible to have made the sort of bad impression that comes with spluttering and spitting one’s dinner out.
Especially when it shows one up as being the sort of peasant who isn’t expecting to find a of slice lemon in one’s fish.
It was truly lovely to see my cousin. I remember her as being very much prettier than me, and she still is, although we are both in our fifties now. Their house is filled with beautiful furniture and tastefully muted colours, and I admired it very much. I like my orange walls and plastic stick-on flowers, but I know that they are not very sophisticated.
This house was lovely, built of golden Bath stone and painted inside in gentle hues of greys and greens.
We exchanged stories about the ways we had occupied the missing forty years, and I could have carried on all night, except for misfortunately being both drunk and very sleepy, and so we have come away to our camper van bed, where Mark is already asleep next to me even though the dogs are having a fight underneath us.
I am going to go and dispense some violence and then go to sleep.
It has been a busy day.
