feels like home....

I'm just back from spending a couple of days working in our York store.  The store was fine: the work was hard as always, but this time I went with a couple of my colleagues and we had a pretty good time together, I think.

It's good to go out and help the stores when they're at their busiest, but I had an ulterior motive, of course: I did my Masters degree at the King's Manor (part of the University of York), and I lived in the city for a year or so after that as I worked at HMV and looked for a 'proper' job.  Nottingham is a great city to live in, no question, but I don't think that anyone has ever accused it of being as stunningly beautiful a city to look at as York.  Nottingham's medieval town centre was bombed or bulldozed in the last century, and is now the site of a spectularly ugly ring road; Nottingham castle is a not-very-impressive manor house on a hill; the old lace markets are nice enough, I suppose, and there is some other decent Georgian or Edwardian architecture, but Nottingham does not have much to look at that really soothes the soul.  York, on the other hand.... the Minster, the city walls, the old gatehouses, the 'lesser' churches, the pubs..... I could go on, but above all else, I love the feel of being in an ancient city, with old, timber-framed buildings and ramshackle, narrow little streets.

It wasn't an entirely brilliant place to live, I must admit, as at least 50% of the shops in the town centre are really there to service tourists and not locals - something that still looks to be the case - but there is no doubt that York is a beautiful city.  We were in a hotel right on the banks of the River Ouse, and it was great to just spend some time wandering around the old streets, popping into pubs and generally checking out somewhere I spent a very formative part of my life.

Best of all was a visit to the Hole in the Wall pub on High Petergate, a very short stroll from the Minster and right by Bootham Bar.  This was the pub where I spent many happy hours when I was a student at the King's Manor, just outside the city Gates and about 50m from the pub.  It was my local.  It even gets a mention in the acknowledgements to my Masters dissertation.  The last time I was here, I was horrified to see that it had been given a makeover that featured vast amounts of neon and that the character of the old pub had been entirely ruined.  You know what, someone has converted it back.

This makes me very happy.

That said, it is nice to be home.  Home home, I mean.

I hate to wake you up to say goodbye....

For the last seven days, C and I have been playing host to the most delightful Austrian family. These are the same guys who pretty much single-handedly organised our wedding in Vienna a couple of years ago, so it's really been the very least that we can do to put them up for a few days and to spend some time showing them around our country. Actually, it's been a real pleasure having them around - it's hard not to have a ten year old boy and an (almost) twelve year old girl around the place and not have it brighten your day. Not ones as well behaved and charming as these two, anyway....

They arrived 11 days ago, but spent the first few days of their holiday in London, doing stuff like looking at the Tower of London, riding around on an open-topped bus and things like that. I went down to join them on Thursday last week, and we spent the afternoon in the Science Museum at the Wallace and Gromit exhibition they've got on at the moment (the highlight of which was when we spent a good half an hour making plasticine models of a Frankengromit and a punk rock guitar playing pinocchio). We then all got the train back to Nottingham and spent a couple of days doing things like pottering around town (Susie and Lilli were very taken with the shopping in town, which is apparently quite different to the kind of thing that they get in Vienna), trying out archery at the Robin Hood Festival in Sherwood Forest and learning some circus skills and watching the fireworks at the Riverside Festival.



I spent the weekend in Birmingham watching the Edgbaston Test Match, but Pauli is very keen on sport generally and was very keen to learn as much about cricket as he possibly could. On Friday morning, I spent the hour or so before play started trying to explain the basics of the game, and then when England took two wickets with the first two balls of the day, I spent much of the rest of the day trying to explain that it wasn't always like this, and usually you have to wait a lot longer to see anything happen. There's not much cricket in Austria, I shouldn't think (actually, it seems that there is), but I think the bug took hold and I did everything I could to help it take hold by sending Pauli home with a real cricket ball, which he thought was the coolest thing in the world ever.

On Tuesday morning, the six of us piled into my dad's stylish Hyundai Trajet and drove up to York. We'd borrowed it for this very purpose, so that we could all travel together in the one car. I spent much of my childhood sitting in the back of a Fiat Strada, shoulder-to-shoulder with my two brothers, being driven the long miles to visit my grandparents in South Wales or in Plymouth. Quite why my dad waited until we'd all left home before he buys a people-carrier, I really have no idea. Still, it was undeniably useful. In York we walked along the walls, had a quick look at the King's Manor where I studied for my Masters degree, and wandered around York Minster. There is a lot of monumental architecture in Vienna, of course, but much of it is from the Baroque period. York Minster is in the gothic style and as a Protestant Church is quite a lot more austere.



I regret the fact that the Church have felt the need to put in turnstiles and to charge £6 per person for admission... as I looked at the people in their baseball caps and eating their ice creams, I couldn't help but worry that the admission fee encourages people to treat this magnificent building in the same way as they do any other tourist attraction... but it remains the most splendid, light and airy building, and it always manages to lift my spirits. I'm not in the slightest bit religious, but I am a historian, and I am always moved by the thought of the sheer effort involved in putting these buildings together. I hate that Nottingham has nothing like it.



After admiring the street theatre next to the Shambles, we hopped back into the Trajet and headed up to Durham. As well as being a charming town with another magnificent cathedral, our trump card here was that we were going to be spending the night in an actual, honest-to-goodness Castle. The rooms of University College Durham might not be much to write home about, but the building itself, especially when seen through the eyes of a ten year old, is splendid: all crenelations, wonky staircases and creaky doors.



I prefer York Minster, but even I had to admit that Durham Cathedral isn't too bad - and has the enormous benefit of not being as overrun with tourists as York.



Those Prince-Bishops really knew where to build a church, eh?

A short stop at the seaside to have a paddle in the North Sea, and we were back to Nottingham and then on to Luton airport this morning to send them home.



I'll miss them. Of all the things we've done together over the last week, I think the ones that the kids will remember the most will be the simplest: playing football in the park, leaving their bedroom doors ajar in the hope that the cat will pay them a visit in the night, teaching me German, learning English tongue-twisters ("Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper...."), playing Guitar Hero (they're from a very musical family, so it wasn't long before Pauli was playing "Strutter" on hard with his eyes shut.... literally) and having a ride in my mini. The two kids think we're the coolest people they know, which perhaps tells you a lot more about Vienna than it does about how cool we are, but it's a lovely thought. It's been a great week and, whilst it's nice to have the house back to ourselves, it definitely feels a touch empty tonight.



It was a touch like living with the von Trapp family at times though, and they serenaded us at dinner last night with a version of "Leaving on a Jet Plane", led by 12 year-old Lilli on guitar. Not a dry eye in the house.

Come back soon please.

we'll have the life we knew we would....

So, anyway. Where was I?

Ah yes, Bath.


The Angels climb Jacob's Ladder on the front of Bath Abbey

We spent Friday night at the wedding venue. The place itself was nice enough, nestled alongside a pretty river and basking in the autumnal sunshine, but the room was little more than something you might find at a university hall of residence, with a posh sink built on. For £90, I was expecting something a little nicer, to be honest. Still, I tried to make up some of our losses for the night by making damn sure that we took both packets of rolos, all of the shortbread biscuits, the mini packet of fruit pastilles and all of the teabags and sachets of coffee. That little haul probably recouped - what - a couple of quid back? Way to stick it to The Man, eh?

We said our farewells to the wedding party (with an unusually warm hug from my dad, showing that that rioja the night before had been an excellent investment) and headed off into Bath and the rather more luxurious accommodation that would be lying in wait for us there. First things first, though, and we made a small detour to Shepton Mallet to pay our respects to the Mulberry Factory Outlet. Now, I can generally take or leave these things. I had an idle hope that I might finally find the decent leather belt that I have been seeking for the best part of two years, but I wasn't expecting to come out with hundred of pounds worth of leather goods..... and we didn't. C. already has a rather nice Mulberry bag, and she supplemented this with nice cardigan for the office, but otherwise I wasn't that impressed. The menswear in particular looked like an Italian designers interpretation of "Classic English Design", but had unwisely decided to add little extras like a real fur lined hood. Not good. I picked up a basic wallet, but otherwise spent the rest of our time there marvelling at the people shopping there. Now, as I was soon to discover, Bath is posh. In fact, I've rarely been to a town more full of toffs... many of them a little bit dirty and disheveled and driving the kind of antique Volvos that only the truly wealthy own. If the area is posh, imagine the kind of people that find their way to the Mulberry factory outlet. If Bath is posh, then the clientele at Mulberry are quintessence of posh. From the awful, floppy-haired public schoolboys with their Paris Hilton-alike girlfriends, to the more mature ladies with headscarves and their outsized designer sunglasses. Awful, and actually fairly rude. As I'm sure you know, posh people have no understanding of body space rules and will think nothing of pretty much walking through you on their way to a bargain handbag.

We stowed our meagre bag of purchases in the car, tickled the friendly cat in the car park, and then made our merry way to our hotel just outside the town centre in Bath. Now, this was more like it. My initial search for a room had revealed that Bath was busy that weekend and that most of the mid-range, reasonable hotels were completely full. Essentially, we used this as a shameless excuse to book ourselves into a 5 star spa hotel just outside the town centre. It was a little more than I would usually pay for a room, but what the hell, C can afford it.....

It looked promising as we pulled through the gates and into the wooded driveway, and I wasn't at all surprised to see a concierge and several porters, all suited and booted and desperate to try and prise my bags from my hand. We were served by the Reception Manager at the check-in desk, and were looking forward to checking out our room.

"Oh, this seems to be a twin room."
The Reception Manager bit his lip for a moment before continuing. "No problem."
He continued tapping away on his computer for a moment and then rather apologetically informed us that he had found us another room, but it wouldn't be ready for us to use until 3pm. Not a problem for us, as we were popping into town anyway.
"I've put you in the Imperial Suites".

Whatever. I didn't think anything more of it until we returned to the hotel later on in the afternoon to make use of the spa facilities before dinner. We were shown to our rooms by one of the porters. Yes, rooms. The suite we had been put in was probably bigger than the entire ground floor plan of my house. We had two huge flatscreen tvs, a lounge, a massive bathroom and a comfortably spacious bedroom with an enormous bed.
"Would you like champagne and canapes?"
Er... yes?
"I'll have your butler bring them through for you."

Our butler?

Yes, that's right: we had a butler.

Now this is living.

Did I mention the butler?

To be honest, I had absolutely no idea of the etiquette involved here. Does one tip, or is that vulgar? What does he do, exactly? If it rains, would he walk beside me, holding an umbrella over my head?

As it turns out, what he mostly does is be available at our beck and call for the duration of our stay. If we should so desire to beck and call him... which as it turns out, we didn't really, although he did book us a cab.

I had a private education, but even that proved inadequate training for what to expect. That afternoon, I was sat in the jacuzzi at the hotel spa, just relaxing, when the butler came in with another member of staff, he was clearly a man on a mission, and he knocked at a closed door and patiently waited for it to open. He stood there for a while, and it suddenly dawned on me that he was trying to catch my eye. I looked up, and he sort of nodded/half-bowed to me. From my position, wearing only a pair of trunks and sitting up to my neck in warm, bubbling water, I could only really nod back. This seemed to satisfy him, and he went about his business.

What a job. He must spend almost every day of his working life trying to explain to idiots like me what a butler actually does and what we can ask him to do to make our stay more comfortable.

Bath itself is a beautiful town, in fact, it's a UNESCO world heritage site, and is stuffed to the gills with interesting things to look at: there's beautiful Georgian architecture everywhere, a beautiful airy Abbey, lovely parks, a couple of nice bridges, a top class rugby team and lots and lots of shops. You know you're in posh town when you see that almost all of the sports shops in the town centre sell things like hockey sticks, squash rackets and rugby shirts, and there's a distinct absence of those awful pile it high, sell it cheap polyester leisureware shops that have slowly taken over the rest of the country. Only to be expected in a town like this where the rugby club is very much the modern heartbeat of the city, with the ground right next to the river in the town centre. I celebrated this by buying myself a pair of proper cotton rugby shorts. The pair I have are now some ten years old and rather the worse for wear, but I hadn't been able to replace them. Proper town. Proper sport shops.

As you might expect from a town this splendid, the city centre thronged with tourists. Unlike other towns like this - York, for one - Bath has managed to stay just the right side of twee. They're clearly proud of all of their heritage, but not so much that they feel the need to sell lots of tea towels and doilies displaying it. Instead, alongside your normal high street shops, there's a pleasing selection of smaller boutiques and street stands. I didn't really buy anything (I'm not sure the new Kings of Leon album counts), but C. bought herself a nice basque style t-shirt (curses. it's a man's t-shirt and I was rather hoping it would fit me...) and also a rather natty Luis Trenker Gatsby cap. Actually, I was quite struck by how much of a Swiss / Austrian alpine connection Bath seemed to have: as well as a Luis Trenker boutique (with a very boozy and cheerfully over-familiar lady behind the counter), there was a strudel cafe and a shop where you could buy lederhosen and cuckoo clocks and things like that. Weird, and not the first thing that springs to mind when I think of Bath.



I know that my love of monumental architecture probably renders this a redundant statement, but I was quite taken with the Abbey. It's not the most beautiful building to look at on the outside, but it has the most enormous windows that mean that the interior is extremely airy. Perhaps it needed to be: in the middle ages, the Abbey was famous for not having enough burial space for all of the dead, and graves that should have been left sealed for longer were frequently opened to squeeze more bodies in. The result? A distinct and lingering smell of decaying flesh. Nice, eh? One legacy of this is that almost every available surface in the Abbey interior is covered by a memorial plaque of one kind or another. Well, I find this kind of thing interesting anyway.



Beautiful vaulting too.

The one thing that will stay with me above all the others about the Abbey is the sculpture of Jacob's ladder that adorns the facade on the West End. As you can see from the pictures above, this consists of a ladder (one on either side of the main door), with angels climbing up and down. The thing that absolutely makes this for me is the fact that the angels descending are coming down head first, and they look incredibly sinister, bringing to mind Bram Stoker's description of Dracula scuttling head first down the walls of his castle.... not the image that the sculptor had in mind, I shouldn't wonder. I marvelled at it all the way through the delicious bagel that I had for my lunch on sunday. I've never had a better bagel, actually, and it was perhaps even a little tiny bit better than the delicious traditional pasty I had for my lunch in more or less the same spot on Saturday. I do like my food, you know. I never quite got round to a Sally Lunn though, although the fudge isn't much to write home about.... and I could also have comfortably done without those tone-deaf posh idiots with the out-of-tune guitars whining along to "Hey There Delilah" and "Scar Tissue" as I tried to enjoy a coffee in the beautiful sunshine. Pah! (actually, they were so dreadful that they were almost entertaining... every note they missed brought those of us sat outside Ben's Cookies closer together as we winced at each other).

There seemed to be lots of nice looking restaurants, but a spot of internet searching a couple of weeks before had led us to try an Italian place called Aqua. Mmm. Simple and delicious. I started with a beef carpaccio, moved onto some linguine with clams, mussels and chili, and finished with some ice cream and a fragrant dessert wine. All very reasonably priced and expertly served... although I do think that perhaps I should have tipped the girl on the table just next to ours, as she provided such good entertainment value throughout the meal.

"Did you have a scallop in that starter?"
"No?"
"Neither did I. That's not a prawn either, it's a langoustine."
"So what?"
"Get me a menu. The menu says it's prawn with scallops. That was definitely white fish, and white fish is cheaper than scallops."
"Right"
"We should say something, except we've undermined our position by eating the whole lot. Maybe we should still let them know that we're onto them... Order another bottle of wine will you, and get me a menu..."

....and so on, for the entire meal. She was absolutely determined to complain, or at least to not enjoy herself on her meal out with her poor, poor boyfriend. I thought she was hysterical.

So, a nice comfortable night's sleep, a run alongside the canal through the rolling mist, and then back home... although not before C. insisted that we wait at the main reception desk after checking out so that she could have a word with the Reception Manager. As we'd been checking out, we'd seen a couple of people complaining. Both had the demeanor or people who were moaning without much cause, and one appeared to be agitated because he had made a mistake over his ability to pay the bill with -- oh the shame! -- Tescos Clubcard Vouchers. This man rudely insisted that the reception manager, who had done absolutely nothing wrong, write him a letter so that he could try and claim his money back. We waited until this letter had been produced, before C. was able to tell this man how much she had enjoyed her stay and how the hotel staff had done absolutely everything they could to make our stay as comfortable as possible. Apparently she's stayed in three other hotels in this chain, one in Moscow and one somewhere else glamorous sounding (tough life, eh? This was my first), but in her opinion, this one had been by far the best. I think she made the poor man's day. That's my girl. Lovely hotel though. You'd need £600 to stay in our suite (apparently! I know!), but if luxury is what you're after.... A good weekend.

Enough about Bath already. What is this? Some kind of personal journal?

lazing on a sunny afternoon....

I've got a few pictures for you today.



Following on from yesterday's visit to Lincoln Cathedral, this is the view we got from a balcony fairly high up on the west end, just next to the big stained glass window there. From this vantage point you can see all the way down the nave, over the choir screen and down to the east end extension. As you can see, we were really lucky to visit on a day when all of the chairs and pews that usually clutter up the nave of a big church like this had been taken out for some reason. This is how it would have looked in the middle ages, when your average, common-or-garden peasant would have had to stand in the nave looking up at the choir screen towards the altar. There are always three steps up from the nave past the choir screen, and this was supposed to symbolise that the clergy literally existed on a higher plane than their flock. If you look closely at the vaulting on the roof, you might notice that it doesn't quite line up. Our tour guide was convinced that this must have been done deliberately, but I think she's somewhat overestimating the prowess of the builders from about 1000 years ago. York Minster is built on a slight wonk too, and nothing wrong with that. From here, we went up another few flights of narrow stone steps and entered the roof space above the nave itself.

Enough monumental architecture already.



Today I have mostly been watching Nottinghamshire playing Yorkshire in the county championship at Trent Bridge. This competition is pretty poorly attended at the best of times, and a big Test ground like the Bridge is always going to look mostly empty on a day like today, but there were a few hundred people there enjoying the sunshine and watching Notts turn the screw on the Tykes.



...including me.

Let me tell you that three pints, a copy of today's Guardian and a beautiful warm day is a great way to spend a Thursday afternoon. I'm not in the least bit looking forward to going back to work on Monday, I know that much....

Now, look away if you're a bit squeemish, but here's the latest on my eye:



It looks a bit gross at the moment, I know (and if you look really closely, you'll see that the pupil in my right eye is actually a bit oval shaped at the moment). It's not as bad as it looks, I promise you. When I came out of surgery on Monday, the eye was really bloodshot just above the line of my eyelid, where I assume they must have made the incision. Over the last couple of days, this blood has sort of rolled down around my eye to the point where I'm now a little self-conscious when out and about in the street and I'm more than happy to wear a pair of sunglasses. It doesn't hurt or anything, and it should fade over the next couple of days.... but nice, isn't it?

Anyway. C's away tonight with work, so I'm going to put my feet up and catch up on a bit of telly, I think.

"A Mighty Wind" perhaps....?

and a cleaner in the distance finds a cobweb on a face....

Calke Abbey - the ornamental gardens are some way off to the left

As my eyesight has been okay, because I have the time off and because the weather has been nice, C. and I have taken the opportunity over the last couple of days to get out and about. On Tuesday we went to Calke Abbey. Calke Abbey is owned by the National Trust and is a Baroque Manor House set in a beautiful country park that the trust have elected to preserve in the state they found it in rather than attempt to restore it. We didn’t have time to wander around the house, but we did spend a couple of hours in the beautiful walled gardens, looking at the sweet peas, vegetables and the interesting selection of outbuildings with underfloor heating (an orangery, a mushroom house, an ice house… that kind of thing). To be honest, the other thing that kept me interested whilst we were there were the other people who were there. People watching is always fun, but there’s something special about the kind of person who goes to visit a National Trust garden: they all seem so worthy somehow, from the lady of a certain age who was overly excited about entering the kitchen garden, through to the middle-aged guys pretending they knew what every plant they walked past was, when the labels on the plants proved them wrong every single time. There’s also something almost unbearably insufferable about the staff too. They’re probably all volunteers and lovely people, but they seem to wield that extra worthiness as a weapon on everyone who comes across their path. We arrived at about 16:15, and the lady who sold us our ticket made a special point of looking at us mildly disapprovingly and saying:

“You are going directly to the gardens, aren’t you? Last entrance is at 16:30”
Er. Thanks, but what else did you think we were going to do? How long did you think it was going to take us to walk through that door and into the gardens? Gah.


Lincoln Cathedral

Today we made the trip up to Lincoln to have a wander around the beautiful old town and to spend some quality time amongst some monumental architecture. Nottingham has many virtues, but it has an almost complete lack of any buildings more than a couple of hundred years old. I like monumental architecture, and although I’m not in the least bit religious, I find it incredibly soothing to spend time wandering around cathedrals. I have no interest in their God, but I do love to think about the devotion that led to the construction of these buildings, and I love to examine the art and the architecture they contain. Today we went on a tour of the roof of Lincoln Cathedral. This involved a 90 minute trip up the old Norman towers and into the roof space above the nave. It might not sound like much, but it was genuinely thrilling to be standing on dusty, 1000 year old oak timbers and looking at the humps made of mortar that form the inside of the vaulting on the roof of the nave. Those vaults were originally created some 900-odd years ago by packing bricks against a wooden frame and packing the frame and the bricks with a mortar that takes some 6-8 months to dry. Once it was dry, the frame is moved and the vault is supported purely by the mortar and the weight of the bricks. Not much has changed in the last 900 years, except that the weight of the roof and the vaults slowly but surely pushes the whole building off to one side, and to counteract this, the cathedral architects have, over the centuries, added more and more timber support to bolster the whole building. Like I say, fascinating. Well, once a medieval historian, always a historian….


The vaulting in the nave - we were standing just above here

Again, almost as fascinating as the cathedral itself were the people it contained. There were the worthier-than-thou people staffing the entry desk where you were forced to pay £4 for entry. Now, I know that these buildings are not cheap to maintain, but surely their whole purpose is for worship. Is it right and proper that the church, one of the richest institutions in the whole country, should charge people to enter this place of worship? Or are they saying that we are visiting this as a secular building? If we’re entering it as a secular building, then why is the only guidebook that we’re given on entry full of prayers we might like to say and the “pilgrim path” that we might choose to follow to help with our worship and to give thanks for our lives. Rubbish. I’d quite like the people taking my money to wipe their holy smiles off their faces, thanks very much. I also had to stifle a smile when I walked past one of the tour guides in the cathedral telling her rapt audience as they stood around the tomb of Katherine Swynford that John of Gaunt, "wasn't the king of England, but he was a very important man". Well, that's one way of describing a member of the house of Plantagenet, the first Duke of Lancaster and an enormous influence on English history, not least as the de-facto regent for Richard II... but why worry about the details? Maybe "very important man" is all you really need to know from your expert tour guide. Anyway. Our guide for the roof tour, Pru, seemed nice enough, but she was a bell-ringer in the cathedral, and she could barely keep her zeal for that under wraps, and kept trying to tell us all about the size of the bells and how complex it was to ring them in the right way. Perhaps I shouldn’t even get started on the other 11 people on the tour… suffice it to say that they were very much cut from the same cloth as those in your average National Trust garden, with their lovely sandals and socks and pointless questions.

And yes, I am fully aware of the irony in me clambering on my high horse to mock the kind of person who visits National Trust gardens and Cathedrals when I have just visited both on successive days. I’m apparently that kind of person, but not that kind of person, if you follow me…..

Right, glad that’s cleared up.

The garden's coming along nicely too. More tea, vicar?

high upon the altar, high...

Nottingham is a pretty good place to live. It's a big enough city to have a wide variety of shops and bars and music venues, but it's small enough that a cab into the town centre costs less than a fiver. One of things that Nottingham does conspicuously lack though is monumental architecture. Partly this is down to the bombing the city endured during the Second World War, but it has to be said that a large part of it is also down to some lamentable town planning decisions (bulldoze the medieval centre of the town to install a concrete inner ring road? why not?). Every summer is marked by gaggles of disappointed tourists hanging around the castle desperately trying to imagine the Sheriff of Nottingham in a seventeenth century mansion house.

Perhaps I was spoiled by living in York for a few years, but I really miss having old buildings around me. I'm not in the least bit religious, but I find cathedrals in particular breathtaking. I love the way that they dominate the skyline of a town as they reach up to heaven, I love the way the interior feels, and I love the incredible details in the sculpture and in the stained glass windows.

So when we visited some friends in their new house in Lichfield, I jumped at the chance of a stroll up to the cathedral to work off our splendid lunch (it's the only English Cathedral with three spires, fact fans...)



Much of the original church was damaged during the Civil War, and there is an unmistakeably modern feel about the restoration work, but it was still a very satisfying visit.... particularly as the choir were rehearsing for evensong, and those beautiful voices were softly raised up into the roof by the marvellous acoustics.

A very restful way to spend a few minutes on a Sunday afternoon.



...Now, in most towns you tend to get a lot of gift shoppes and tea rooms around cathedrals... and Lichfield has plenty of these, but it also has other shops....this one being my absolute favourite. What a brilliant business idea!

Sadly, it was shut.

Then it was back to Nottingham to watch Sean Lock at the Playhouse. He recycled a little bit too much material from "15 Stories High" for my liking, but he was still very funny. (Hm. I think I need to work on my stand-up comedy reviews. Perhaps another day, eh?)

I check out passport photos...

and.... breathe.

It turns out that the dash down to Peterborough to get a new passport wasn't all that stressful at all. I'd spent much of Friday worrying about whether I had all the relevant bits and pieces. I couldn't imagine anything worse than driving down to Peterborough and being turned away without my passport. I discovered to my horror that in the photos I was planning to use, the ones I had taken for my Glastonbury pre-registration thing the other day, I was wearing a hoodie. I ummed and ahhed for a bit, and then had some more taken. It wasn't just that I was worried that they would reject the photos because the hood was partially obscuring my neck or something... did I really want that as the photo that will follow me around for the next ten years? Probably not.... Also to be on the safe side, I got that upstanding pillar of the local community, Lord Bargain, to witness that it was indeed me in the photos. You only have to do this if you have significantly changed from the photo in your current passport... but I've lost a lot of weight and a fair bit of hair in the last ten years, so I thought it was probably better to be safe than sorry.

My appointment was at ten and I arrived early enough to scout out the Passport Agency and to head back into the market to buy a paper and to have a breakfast baguette and an expresso from the greasy spoon. It was delicious too - all greasy and smothered in brown sauce. I gobbled it down and headed over to the big glass-fronted building over the road from the market. As you might expect, there are quite a lot of quietly desperate looking people hanging around at the Passport Office on a Saturday morning. The first thing that you have to do is to join the queue to be processed by reception, where they check that you have an appointment and they make sure that your passport photos are of the required standard. The guy just in front of me walked up to the desk and handed over four pictures of his kid. The receptionist put them into some sort of "ready reckoner" type affair and looked back up at the guy:

"The eyes aren't in the band"
"What do you mean?"
"I can't accept these photos as the child is sitting too low and the eyes aren't in the middle of the picture. You'll need to get some more photos done."
"But I've driven down from Burton"
"Have you not brought your child with you?"
"No, I brought the photos. Are they definitely not good enough?"
"No. We can't accept them. Were you wanting the passport today?"
"Yes. We're leaving tomorrow."
"If you want the passport today, it needs to be processed before 11am."

Burton is at least an hour away from Peterborough. There was no way this guy was going to be able to do it, and he walked away a defeated man to see if he could work miracles with his phone. Before you feel too sorry for him though, apparently the reason he was in Peterborough today was that he had tried to get the passport done at the London office on Friday and had been rejected because his photos weren't right. Nothing like learning from your mistakes, eh?

Ten minutes later, I had been processed and was just queuing up at the cashier's desk to pay. There were two guys just in front of me and we were on the home straight now. The first guy turns back and says to us:
"Until I have that thing in my hand, I'm not going to believe that everything has worked out"
I smiled, but the other guy shrugged. "You've done the difficult bit. The only way I won't be walking out of here with my passport is if a bomb goes off or something".
At this point he was called up to the cashier and he swaggered over to the counter.
"Can I pay by cheque?"
"Yes. Have you got your cheque guarantee card?"
"Do I need it.....?"

It's not really a happy place, and the air is permeated by the faintest smell of desperation. Mind you, it turns out that the other bloke in the cashier's queue was there for the same reason as me - his passport expires in less than six months and he's travelling on Thursday. I told him that I had found myself in the same boat.
"Oh yes? Are you going anywhere nice?"
"Ecuador"
"Oh really? My wife is from Ecuador!"
We then had a quick conversation about what a lovely country it is and how I really needed to do this and to do that and to eat this and to drink that.... small world, eh? (he was also from Nottingham).

I had been completely processed by 10:15 and set out into the town to kill the four hours before my passport was ready to be picked up. I wandered around browsing camping shops and looking at rucksacks and gaiters and the like, as well as discovering that the local MINI garage had a display model in the shopping centre that I killed 15 minutes having a little play around in before wandering up to have a look at the cathedral. I don't really know why, but I'd never really thought of Peterborough as being the kind of town to have a cathedral at all. Well, they do, and it's a really nice one.

It can date its foundation back as far as 655 AD, is probably the finest Norman cathedral in Britain and can boast things as splendid as a painted wooden ceiling in the nave that dates back to 1230, a thirteenth century west front that has been described as "The most magnificent portico in Europe" and also houses the tomb of Catherine of Aragon and the original resting place of Mary Queen of Scots.

It was quietly and modestly very impressive indeed, and I was reminded all over again how calming I find monumental architecture like this (Nottingham has none). I was in the cathedral when I received the call to go and pick up my passport. I actually stayed on for another 15 minutes just enjoying my surroundings before heading off to collect my passport.

When I picked up my new passport, I saw it had this symbol on the front



It's a biometric passport - it has a little RFID chip in it, and as I discovered from the little machine you can have a play with in the Passport Agency, when it is scanned, it calls up my photo and details from some kind of central database. I understand that when I pass through the USA on my way to Ecuador in March, I will have my fingerprints taken and my retina scanned. I can only assume that this information will probably be added to my database entry, and *pop*, there go my civil liberties.

I don't remember being asked about this.

Anyway. At least I had my passport. I got back to the car, let out a big sigh of relief and started the engine. As I looked into the rearview mirror before reversing, I noticed that my face was covered in odd blotches. I had a closer look.

Ah. Dried brown sauce.

I'm so smooth.