Tourist in your own county

When I was away, I heard the same comments. “I would love to visit some day and visit all the historic things like castles and buildings”. For a minute I would pause. Yes it would be nice to see all those castles and old buildings. After all, they are down the road. Literally.

So why don’t I just pop down to the castle on a weekend? Well, it’s a castle. It’s been sitting there all my life. To my knowledge, the castle hasn’t changed since then. If it was built to stop lots of French people with nasty long swords and armour invading in 1066, I doubt it would be troubled by adolescent thirteen year olds using it to skin up on.

And another thing. Suggest a day out to see a seventeenth century listed building in the little village of Gorge on river, and your friends, if they haven’t already, will think you are in the middle stages of a midlife crisis. Of course, that would never happen. I would be doing the crossword that weekend anyway.

This weekend I got the chance. Well it helps when people from foreign countries are visiting. Apparently, sixty miles up the road from me, is a collection of rocks sitting in a field that someone carelessly dumped there five thousand years ago. They talk about the youth of today having no respect yet they seemed to be able to get away with it back then. And what’s more, people are actually paying five pounds a go to walk around this dumping site.

The car park was full of foreign number plates, standard hire cars, German coaches and mini buses with “Stonehenge Tours Ltd”. Amazingly the layout had not changed in twenty years, they were even selling the same flavoured ice cream. I remembered that bit. I did after all drop a double scoop of toffee and Strawberry ice cream over a French woman in 1985 much to her distain. There was however one addition. They were handing out an incredibly sophisticated looking wireless commentary system (they bore a striking resembleance to my could try harder and looks like shit 'C- Technology project in 1992) that allowed you to stroll around and listen to the facts at your leisure.

As I walked around with the black, larger than two sets of your parents unnecessarily large but need to have big keys to operate mobile phones, something quickly became apparent. People were mistaking the black listening devices for cameras. As you stood there and learned how it would have taken a hundred men to move one stone, a queue would form in front of you. It was only when you made the “It’s the same black thing you are holding, stupid” face at them that they realised it wasn’t a camera, but, in fact, the same black thing that they were listening to, that they could walk past without disrupting the imaginary picture I was meant to be taking.
I noticed another strange thing in day full of amazing, ground breaking observations. As I walked around the circle of stones, they weren’t changing in size or shape. Maybe it was just me, but I didn’t feel the need to bend down, arch my back or turn my head sideways like most of the other tourists around me. But just to conform I stepped back and refocused. No, to my dismay, they still looked the same.

Of course, as posh sounding commentator said on the neck hanging sophisticated commentary system said, it was one of the world wonders how these stones got here, why they got here, and what they were there for. Of course there was a sense of history, quickly followed by a sense of what the fuck. They must have been on some good weed back then, well and truly stoned.

The historic tour of England continues……………