Midsummer

So I went to visit my friends on the other side of the county the other day. There are two sides to Gloucestershire, my side with run down towns and villages, old industrial and mining areas and dark forbidding woods. Then there's the side where P and B live. This is the Cotswolds and a more picturesque and chocolate boxy place is hard to imagine. Just crossing the Severn makes a huge difference. It's all mellow, golden stone cottages and houses; little, narrow, sun dappled lames and roads and a load of bloody middle class hippies.

This was made abundantly clear to me when entering town and reading the proudly displayed sign declaring "Nailsworth is a Fairtrade town". So no slave labour picking the cocoa beans in Nailsworth then. The guardianreaderness continues in the village store (built by the community of sustainable products and run by volunteers) where ALL the detergents are green and environmentally friendly. No Persil in sight.

Don't get me wrong it is a beautiful place and has a real sense of community but Its like visiting the set of Midsummer Murders or the Archers. Which isn't surprising as one of the producers of the venerable Radio 4 country soap lives here. So when Horsley got a community village store, so did Ambridge. That really is art imitating life. I assume The simple folk of Ambridge are also unable to purchase biological washing powder.

It was great to see P and B and the kids but it makes me realise how little I want any kids of my own. Don't get me wrong their's are great, very bright and very happy, but I'd be dead at 50 if I had to run round after them and break up the water fights and try and stop them stripping off and running down the main road and fighting over whether to take the soccer ball or the rugby ball to the pub on the common and get them all in and out of the car and get them to go to bed. I'm knackered just typing it all.

Saying that I was tempted to keep their little girl, last time she was only two and a bit wary of me, this time I was almost hugged to death. I suppose there are many many benefits to kids that I just can't really see by turning up and getting them all hopped up on icy poles and sour strips.

After I'd recovered from the kids we have come up to London for my dad's birthday. I'll never understand the traffic here, I was in a traffic queue for almost an hour at the roundabout outside Oxford, millions of cars in front of me, but as soon as I went past the junction there was no traffic? Where did it all go? I don't get it. It's like here in London yesterday morning, I was expecting a massive traffic jam to get to where the folks are staying from where I'm staying but nothing, at all, I just whizzed the two miles up the road in about two minutes.

In fact even central London was quite quiet but it still took three hours to get from Northolt in west London to Woolwich in the east. This was because my dad and his mate decided that we'd go on the bus to "see more than the tube". This is incontestably true as there ain't much view from a tube train but busses are so slow. That three hours was to cover 24 miles. That's 8 miles per hour. We were on the express bus for a bit but that doesn't work very well when it's following the regular service and still has to stop every time the bus in front stops. Genius.

But to be fair we did see a lot. A lot of it was not really worth seeing. The change from murderville to loadedville in London can be a matter of only a mile down the road. A good example is Greenwich. It is pretty nice, with beautiful houses round the park and on Blackheath but it's surrounded by god awful places like the Old Kent Road and Woolwich. It's quite confronting to be honest. It pays to know where you're going so you don't get off at the wrong stop and end up somewhere pretty nasty. This is made easier by the useful, and very British trick, of using pubs to navigate. Even the bus stops are named after the local boozer. Sadly I noticed that some of the stops are named after now boarded up boozers. That's what happens when you can buy four cans of lager in the supermarket for 99p.

We were heading for the Royal Artillery Museum (called Firepower, how tacky) for dad to catch up. With some old mates from his National Service days. It's interesting to see that the rightwing media is always on about bringing back national service to sort out the "thugs and hooligans", I.e. anyone under 40, but the people who did it seemed to spend their entire time trying to skive off and making tea instead of being on guard. The thought that this bunch of conscripts was all that stood between Britain and a million Red Army soldiers is a bit of a joke really. I don't think today's youth would get much benefit from learning how to peel potatoes and stand still for periods in the rain. The museum was good though and includes one of the most dangerous military posting in the British army; showing groups of kids how to fire a field gun. The two squaddies on duty yesterday looked like they'd rather be back facing the Taliban than year 5 from the local primary school.

So today is dads birthday and I have no idea what were doing, I'm just about to go up there and find out. I'll let you know what happens.