Nasty, brutish and long

Eighty minutes watching rugby is too big an ask for me - even ten is a trial. So I certainly won't be glued to a screen tonight at any point of the game; though I will be keen to find out the final score. NZ v Australia: it's going to be a needle match, the biggest one of the whole tournament, quite possibly even more keenly followed than the actual final. (Either us or them against France, alas: shame the Welsh got knocked out last night.)

We have this thing about the Aussies and, to a lesser extent, them about us. They're loud, cocky, brash and, what's worse, have good reason to be confident: they do tend to succeed. We always feel smaller, on the hind foot, having to try harder, and get touchy about being teased. I don't think I've ever been on a mixed-nationality group tour where the Kiwis haven't been singled out for some special put-downs. For some reason, the jokes are mainly to do with unsavoury relationships with sheep - as if the Aussies don't have a bigger flock than we do. A former Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, once said that the stream of New Zealanders emigrating across the Tasman raised the average national IQ of both countries, which was the only positive thing I remember him for.

And I really like Australia, as a destination: it has fabulous scenery quite unlike anything we have, the distances are mind-blowing, the wildlife is endlessly bizarre and appealing, the crocs and sharks and jellyfish and snakes and spiders definitely add some excitement to being outdoors, there's great food and wine and history, the shopping, even for a -phobe like me, is enticing, there's all sorts of fun to be had there, and the people are, jibes apart, friendly and welcoming. I really can't take too much of the accent, though - after about a week of it, my ears get tired. And they make fun of our accent! "Fush and chups" they reckon - they, who say "feesh and cheeps".

I read about some graffiti near Sydney airport written by a disgruntled Aussie: 'New Zealand sucks'. Shortly afterwards, an inspired Kiwi added: 'Australia nil'. That will do nicely, tonight.

Spreading the joy

As I waited, yet again, for my old dog to catch me up on our walk back from the dairy, I stood and watched a couple of council workers in hi-vis vests trimming the grass verge along the footpath past the park, one of them buzzing along the edge with a weedeater while the other used a long-handled gripper to pick up bits of rubbish out of the gutter. What a dispiriting job, I thought, cleaning up cigarette butts and other unpleasantness thrown down by ratbags. The wind was blowing the grass clippings about, the sky was grey and it was cool enough for me to have put on a jacket; so when the dog finally dawdled up to me and we wandered past the men, I was surprised when the rubbish-picker turned to me with a broad grin and said, "What a great day!"

And then he continued, "Go the All Blacks!" and turned back to his work, clearly light of heart and convinced that all was right with the world, leaving me to walk home with a smile on my face. I'd already heard the men building a new deck next door having a long and detailed discussion about last night's game against Argentina as they hammered and sawed, thoroughly enjoying their serious analysis. So that's why I've decided to come off the fence and say that I want the All Blacks to win the Rugby World Cup: personally, I don't give a fig, but if it means so much to other people, and makes them so cheerful that it improves my daily life, then I'm prepared to put up with the inevitable after-party rabbiting on in the media. That's going to happen anyway: better it's positive than the negative wrist-slitting mourning and recrimination that would occupy exactly the same number of column-inches.

So, France: I love your little villages, your boules players, the pavement tables, your grand buildings, the narrow tree-lined roads, your hyper-markets, your stylishly squiggly Metro signs, crazy traffic, silly little cars, fondness for mongrels, shocking handwriting and hopeless attempts to cram too many words into your song lyrics;

Wales: you have so many great castles, beetling bare rocky hills with ancient history, ridiculously long and unpronounceable place-names, leeks and daffodils, such a lovely accent, stern stone no-nonsense towns, beautiful hills and woods and moors, and your choirs are second to none;

Australia: I've had so much fun every time I've come, you have fabulous native wildlife and pandas too, the Outback is truly glorious and one of my favourite places on the planet, the Reef is amazing, there's so much dramatic history to learn about, the little stone towns are so pretty, I'm very fond of your gum trees, the Opera House is a wonderful sight and Uluru is mind-blowing:

but I'm sorry, I want you all to lose.

Till next time

It was a perfect day to leave England: fixed in the memory on a warm summer's day, driving across the Cotswolds where the rolling fields of corn are golden and ready for harvesting, the trees are green and stately, and the butter-yellow stone of the houses in the villages was set off by the sweet peas, hollyhocks and lavender growing in the borders and flower-boxes.

We've been away for about four weeks. It seems ages, looking back over where we've been, the things we've done and seen, the people we've caught up with. Paris, London, rural England, Oxford, Stratford, Wales, Ireland... Punting, a West End show, a jaunting car, a progressive supper, a game fair, palaces and cathedrals, pubs and restaurants, gardens and galleries. Horses, dogs, goats, cattle, camels, donkeys and ducks. Pork pies, cider, Eccles cakes and cream teas. Boats, buses, cars, carts, trains and planes.

It's been fun. But it will be good to get home. (Especially on Air NZ business, thanks to airpoints and an upgrade, yay.)

UPDATE: Air NZ Business? Bit of a disappointment: looked good with the pods and all, and the service as always was excellent, but when it came to bedtime, instead of the seats reclining all the way back, what happens is that you stand up to allow the back-rest to fold forward to join up with the foot-stool. The resultant bed is perfectly flat, but the padding is minimal and it's like sleeping on an ironing board. It's a clever idea that doesn't work.

Araf* boyo

Well, it's all over, even the shouting, and it went beautifully, hooray. Elegant dress, smart uniform (though Harry's was showier), lots of splendidly silly hats, no hiccups over names, cute choirboys, and the trees in the Abbey grew on me. Bit too much religion for my taste, but there you go, hard to avoid in the circs, I suppose.

The Brits give good pageantry, it must be said: most impressive maybe, apart from the precision timing throughout the entire day, was the crowd control in the Mall afterwards - though, of course, the crowd was mainly Brits too, so the police were on a winner from the start.

Soon they'll be off on their honeymoon - and after that it will be back to earth with a bump after all the hoop-la: a cottage near Valley in Anglesey. Now, the royal idea of a cottage probably stretches the term as understood by the rest of us, but even so, it's still in Anglesey. Which is a lovely place - but it's very quiet and rural and there's not much going on there outside the pub. They've had a lot of shipwrecks over the years, so that will keep William busy with his Search and Rescue role (though - shhh - the real heroes are the Lifeboat crews). But what on earth is Kate going to do with her time? Maybe she could learn how to roll this local placename off her tongue:

(I love how they've gone to the trouble of breaking the name into bits to make it easier to pronounce. Gee, thanks, guys.)
*Araf? Go here.

It ruled an empire, once...

Year 9 student: What does 'le Pays de Galles' mean?
Teacher (me): Wales. Do you know where that is?
Student: Isn't it in that island above France?

Mine of Harlech

Despite the credit to Lonely Planet, this is unmistakeably (the flags caught mid-flap are the giveaway) my photo on this cover: fourth time this year, yay. Inside is a story about Wales. The castle is the one at Harlech, almost a cliche castle, and very impressive, especially the fact that in 1294 it was successfully defended against the entire Welsh army by just 37 Englishmen. There were five seiges here, one of them lasting 5 long years.

We almost got castled out in Wales, we went to so many in such a short time - but still only a tiny fraction of the hundred-plus still standing. I do remember them individually, though - Raglan with the cat on the lawn and a commanding view of the A40; Abergavenny, in ruins and still bearing a grudge of betrayal from the thirteenth century; rotted-tooth castle stumps on hills around Llandovery; Harlech; stately Caernarfon where Prince Charles was invested, "the best castle in the world" according to the caretaker; and stripey Beaumaris on Anglesey, a triumph of design, the last and cleverest of Edward I's castles but not quite finished and never actually used.

It still demands respect, though, as a dangerous place - according to this amusingly graphic sign:

A little of what you fancy

A friend sent me to this YouTube link which I can't imagine anyone not enjoying, so go there for some fun.

I was in Wales last year and didn't - strangely - go to Newport. Well, not that one, anyway - we did pass through a smaller one, north of Fishguard on the west coast. There are some lovely towns along that road, starting right down on the corner with St David's, which is the smallest city in Britain: the population is only 2000, but it has a cathedral, and that's the main qualification. The four Good Food Guide entries are just, er, icing on the cake; in fact, it has more eateries per head of population than anywhere else in Britain. Perversely, we ate nothing there, but we did visit the cathedral and the Bishop's Palace, the latter picturesquely ruined and set about with ravens and pigeons. They're both hidden in a valley so they weren't visible to raiders sailing past.

Where we did eat was at our hotel Llys Meddyg, which was one of a series called 'Restaurants with Rooms': what an excellent idea. We had pork belly with salty caramel onions and crackling, with a glass or two of organic cider, and afterwards lemon posset with berries. Yum! It was so good (the chef has worked with Peter Gordon - ooh, famous father of fusion food, where's he from again? Oh yes, New Zealand).

Because that trip was partly a private holiday, we didn't overdo the dinners: I hate to complain (and I know there'll be no sympathy forthcoming) but when you're doing an official famil, there's so much good eating provided that it all becomes a bit much. It's such a shame not to be able to do it all justice. Next week's trip to Mauritius was going to involve lunches as well as dinners until we excused ourselves politely. All that French cuisine plus local seafood and fusion with Indian, Chinese and Creole is going to be fantastic - but less is more, I'm afraid.

Croeso y Cymru, boyo

Much happier today, after going to the doctor and getting the good drugs, yeah!

Now that I'm able to concentrate, I'm writing a story about northern Wales, specifically Harlech Castle and Portmeirion - architectural opposites within sight of each other in Cardigan Bay (which only sounds like a nerdy name to those who don't remember the excitement of watching the famous 1960s NZ race-horse who was so successful and adored that he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show).

The castle, despite the whiny complaints of an anoraked Brummie ("I'm disappointed, Wilma, I thought it was going to be a real castle, and instead it's a ruin"), is a classic: growing out of a cliff, serious grey stone with turrets and crenellations, an imposing gatehouse with murder holes and arrow loops, walls within walls, ranks of mournfully cawing crows along the battlements, and wide views over Snowdonia. Its very lively 700-year long history includes record-breaking seiges, the dashing Owain Glyndwr, a secret staircase and a link to the stirring song Men of Harlech which no-one who lived in England through the seventies can fail to hear without thinking of Christmas Day and Michael Caine, thanks to the ritual annual screening of Zulu*. Even though we trailed over, under and through more castles in Wales than you could shake a stick at, I remember Harlech clearly as one of the best. Well worth a visit.

And along the coast a bit, across the estuary, is Portmeirion, again with TV connections, this time The Prisoner, a mysterious series filmed there in 1967 starring Patrick McGoohan that not only beat Lost to that whole 'keep the viewers guessing' thing, but also made men's polo necks sexy.

The whole place is a folly of the highest order, a faux-Italian village cobbled together out of rescued buildings, and bits of buildings, from all over the place by Clough Williams-Ellis, pre- and post-WW2. What else could you expect from an eccentric toff who favoured tweed plus-fours and yellow socks, than a pastel-painted hotch-potch of arches, colonnades, towers and domes in a manicured garden of palms, pools and topiary? And yet, twee though it sounds, it's lovely - very pretty, quaint and appealing: a little treasure tucked unexpectedly into a hidden valley on the edge of Snowdonia's vast and glowering landscape.
* Inspiring James's deathless joke: "For fk's sake, Ivor, sing them something they like."

Morepork Through the Windscreen (nearly)

A long dull day at school in the company of dull Travel & Tourism girls who see no point in learning anything that won't earn them NCEA credits (Chile? Haiti? What have they got to do with me? Why should I know where Greece is?) and would prefer to just waste time rather than say, look into an atlas and discover something - very depressing. Lumpen Epsilons.

But then it got much better, with High Tea at the Langham in the city as a guest of VisitBritain, all of us wearing silly (or elegant) hats in honour of the Mad Hatter. Yummy coloured sandwiches, little fancies, scones and cream, with bubbles before and excellent tea with (albeit in bags - but then so they do at the Savoy, tch). It was a splendid way to get us sugared up for the hi-saturation 3D colour of 'Alice in Wonderland' at Imax, the Cheshire Cat hovering in our faces, the Bandersnatch looming with excessive numbers of teeth.

Good fun, if rather silly - so such a shame that the evening ended with probable tragedy on the high road, when on the way home an owl swooped across the road and whumped into the car - or vice versa. Poor little thing, it's a morepork, named for its call, small and brown with huge eyes, and very cute. It's tucked up in a shoe box full of holes, and if it's alive in the morning, I'll take it to the Bird Lady in Brown's Bay; and if it's not, I won't.

We saw a display of owls in Abergavenny, one of them very like the morepork, in the middle of a pedestrian shopping street: unexpected, but charming. It's being so serious that makes them so sweet.

UPDATED: This lovely bird too has joined the choir invisible, alas.

Hooray for CaCO3

I'm not ignoring the disaster in Haiti, but there's nothing I can add to what's been said. I haven't been there or anywhere in the Caribbean, but I've seen poor people living in shanties in South America, India, South-East Asia, even Australia, and I can imagine only too well how it is for them, already amongst the world's unluckiest, to have such devastation visited on them. I've donated what I can, and I hope you have too.

Moving on.

Today's post celebrates the pleasure that calcium carbonate gave me last year: specifically in the form of limestone karst. This is because I'm writing a story about The Burren in western Ireland, where the hills look as though they've been spread with silver icing. It's actually a layer of limestone, combed through by deep parallel grooves, that has been exposed by glacial action. In European geological terms, it's young, but the human history there is ancient, with standing stones erected five thousand years ago - that's older than the Pyramids. In spring, the rock bursts with flowers, 650 species, but when I was there in autumn, it was bare, gleaming pewter against the rust of the heather.

It was lovely to see the limestone in its natural form, having already enjoyed it made into the drystone walls that edge the green-as fields; and processed into the building blocks of the many child's-book castles we traipsed over in Wales; gloriously carved on the soaring cathedrals of Gloucester and Lincoln: and, on a domestic scale, made into the beautiful honey-coloured cottages of the Cotswolds.

But it was most spectacular in Thailand, in Phang Nga Bay off Phuket, where the turquoise sea lapped an astonishing sight.

>>> ...Limestone always puts on a good show, but what Phang Nga Bay has over, say, Castle Hill in Canterbury, is the drama of 40-plus water-sculpted islands rising high and sheer out of an opal-coloured sea. Hung with trails of vegetation and undercut by wave action, these craggy karsts seem to teeter precariously; and when our boat moored close to one, we were shown that some are even less solid than they appear.

Transferring into inflatable dinghies, we were rowed beneath the overhang where we found hidden tunnels scoured through the stone by the waves. The tide was high, making the roof so low that we had to lie flat in the boat as it squeezed into the dark, where our torches picked out tiny bats dropping from the ceiling to fly ahead of us. It was like travelling through a funnel: as the roof came down, the sides pressed in so that we had to fit our fingers into the pock-marked rock to pull the dinghy along. The surface felt rough, and just as the thought was forming that sharp edges and inflatable boats are not a happy combination, we heard a sudden hiss. Alarmed shrieks were followed by loud sighs of relief as we realised the air-letting was deliberate so that, slightly slimmer, the boat could slip through the tunnel to the secret lagoon in the centre formed by the collapse of the cave roof.

Called ‘hongs’ or rooms, these doughnut holes are magical places: as we emerged from the dark, a snowy white egret lifted from the gnarled roots of a leggy mangrove growing in the middle and flew up into the circle of blue sky where a sea-eagle was already soaring high above us. Primitive-looking amphibians, mud-hoppers, crept out of the still, quiet water onto the tree roots and it felt like the beginning of the world...

[Pub. Press 13/7/09]

The movie's real stars

Last night I squandered a couple of hours of my life that I'll never get back watching the movie 'Stardust', a silly although honestly-intentioned fairy story about witches and princes, simply because I wanted to spot the locations it was filmed at. It did look pretty spectacular - or, pretty and spectacular - as scenery in England, Wales and Scotland panned past behind the actors.

My greatest triumph was spotting the Quiraing, on the Isle of Skye, above, where Michelle Pfeiffer as a wrinked crone frowned into the distance. Skye isn't a huge place, but it has some deeply impressive moors and mountains, down the side of one of which I watched my Canon DSLR cartwheel in slow-motion after someone sneakily dialled up the gravity and my bag suddenly slid away from where it had been lying for 10 minutes at my feet. It was only when it reached the scree slope that the camera flew out of the open top, sigh.

So this was one of the last photos I took with it: it was a sorry sight when we scrambled down the slope to retrieve it.

Another location was Pen y Fan, a steep, bare peak of over 800 metres in the Brecon Beacons, the highest in South Wales and the big expedition on the annual camp for third-years at Newent Community School where I taught for a while. I was astonished at how some of these country girls collapsed by the path in the early stages, crying and frightened by how their legs were hurting - apparently, they'd never tackled anything more challenging than a flight of stairs, and had never felt the burn before - and this back when Jane Fonda was aerobics queen! (But my scorn came back to bite me on the descent, when I copped wind-blown grit under both contact lenses and ended up frozen to the spot, both eyes clamped shut.)

And then there was this place, Arlington Row in Bibury, in the Cotswolds, where I last went just a few months ago: perfectly pretty and, so the sign claims, England's most-photographed view. No surprises there.

This blue planet should be greener

There's nothing like a neatly-raked, freshly-planted vegetable garden for promoting smuggery: the hard digging done, the plants full of promise, the whole Good Life self-sufficiency scenario. Plus, the eco-halo from the recycling involved: the home-made compost from household scraps and the free-range hens' manure; the plastic pots filched from the return bin at the garden centre, bottoms cut off and then screwed into the soil around each tender little tomato plant, ready to contain the water when they've got big and thirsty. And the re-used bamboo canes topped with drilled champagne corks so I don't put my eye out when bending down to pick myself a sun-warmed cherry tomato.

But the old canes are fragile and likely to snap, so I've invested in steel-cored plastic-coated ones that should last much longer. They're made in China, and I hope the plastic is recycled - who knows, possibly from our own milk bottles and hummus containers that, outrageously, are sent all the way to China to be processed.

Clean, green New Zealand - yeah, right. The 100% Pure image that the tourist people are so pleased with (and that makes their Aussie equivalents so, er, green with envy) is not as accurate as it should be: quite apart from pockets of pollution from industrial processes around the country, it's a scandal that we send our used plastic halfway around the world for recycling because despite the cost, both financial and carbon, of sending it so far, the Chinese can still do it more cheaply than we can here.

It's also kind of ironic that China imports waste plastic when they have so much of their own, blowing about the streets and flapping from the branches of trees. Despite armies of people like this man? woman? here - one of the better-equipped of the cleaners we saw, compared with the guy sweeping up McDonalds wrappers with a bamboo besom - there's still a lot of litter around the cities, which is grieving to see. In Santiago I watched in horror as a street vendor threw a carton of plastic waste over the railing into the river running through the city - a tumbling, rocky mountain river straight out of the Andes, edged with plastic detritus. In the Yasawa Islands of Fiji, the warm water of the South Pacific is so clear you can see through it to the tin cans and bottles wedged into the sand on the bottom. On top of Mt Snowdon in Wales, ramblers who had spent three hours climbing up through dramatic scenery of sheep-nibbled hillsides, distant lakes and rocky summits thought nothing of dropping banana peel and drink bottles.

And my English in-laws, who live just outside a rubbish-recycling zone (although within SUV-range of bottle-banks, etc) blithely throw plastic, wine bottles and paper into the same bag as their food scraps, without a second thought - although when I recoiled in shock, some residual guilt led to a sudden spat of blame-throwing between them. It didn't, alas, lead to a change in behaviour.

The more I travel around it, the more aware I am of how lucky we are to live on such a beautiful planet. I wish everyone would try harder to keep it clean and tidy.

Cheers!

Purely in the interests of research, we've visited a pub or two on our journey around these islands, and I have to say it's been a pleasure, whether jammed around a table of friends in The Glasshouse on the side of May Hill, eating Welsh lamb shanks in Y Brennan tucked beneath Harlech Castle, or sitting by an open peat fire in Sean's in Athlone, allegedly Ireland's oldest pub.

In Ireland live music was a constant: original guitar ballads, keyboard comic songs, traditional diddly-dee on fiddle and bodhrin, or unaccompanied singing. I was pleased not to leave Ireland without hearing Black Velvet Ribbon and Wild Rover played apparently without irony; but best of all, and hilariously unexpected, was one old man's alternative version of Flowers of the Forest. It was an absolute joy: Google it.

Only connect

No-one can come to Anglesey and not learn the meaning of Araf: it's before every corner, at the brow of every hill, the entrance to every village and hamlet. It means 'slow', and it's what Anglesey is all about. Meandering around the lanes, finding an old-fashioned windmill here, a little fishing port there, we really didn't need this constant reminder written across the road. It would be madness to rush anywhere here: old men (perhaps the same old man) are blackberrying along the lanes, there are dazzlingly white fluffy sheep with long tails scattered over bright green fields, the rowan berries are bright in the hedgerows and there's new-made hay scenting the air.

It's a relief to slow down: we've been rushing a bit and seen possibly too many castles. Seven, maybe eight in four days: that's a lot of arrow loops and spiral stairs. But the connections have been satisfying: it's fun to join the dots. Harlech, Caernarfon, Beaumaris: Edward I built them and his son, Eddie II, was born at Caernarfon - but buried in Gloucester Cathedral, after being murdered (in the most painful and vicious manner possible - Google it, why don't you) at Berkeley Castle where my great aunt was a guide and my grandmother's family farmed. In the Welch Fusiliers museum in the castle is a reproduction of the tapestries and portrait we saw at Blenheim Palace, because they fought at the battles where the gorgeous John Churchill made his name ('that was a man' said someone of him, and it's hard to disagree). Everything we see is another piece in the puzzle: it's very satisfying.

And tomorrow we move on: another country, another history, another set of grievances against the English. I shall be wearing my New Zealand t-shirt.

Mountain high

I could have posted a picture of myself standing on the top of Snowdon (1085m) this afternoon, grinning cheesily as if I had actually walked up there under my own steam, but I think this photo is much nicer. It's a ptarmigan. Or a partridge. Possibly a grouse.* Anyway, it was on the top too.

The steam I actually got to the summit under was courtesy of the Snowdon Mountain Railway, just one of a bunch of little railways to be found in Wales, this one purely a pleasure ride built in 1896 by the Victorians, who enjoyed an engineering challenge. "Ooh look," they said, "here's the highest peak in England and Wales: what shall we do with this feat of nature, raw and magnificent? Let's build a railway up it!"

It's a rack and pinion railway, the only one in Britain, and the only way to cope with the 1 in 5 gradient near the top. We had a perfect view of the track, and the insoucient sheep grazing on it until the guard set about them with whistle and hooter, as we were travelling in his compartment at the front of the carriage, thanks to VisitWales's letter of introduction.

The path to the top was often clearly visible from the train, and was busy with walkers enjoying what one young man described up at the cairn as 'a decent walk' - it certainly looked very civilised, wide and gravelled all the way. His phobic girlfriend was clinging to the cairn and carefully not noticing the spectacular views: it was a peculiar choice of activity for someone who doesn't like heights, I couldn't help thinking.

Even higher were a couple of jets screaming around the sky having fun in the name of training. Someone told me they were from the airfield in Anglesey. Wanting, in best reporter tradition, to get my facts right, I asked her what the planes were. "British," she said.

*Red-legged partridge. You really wanted to know that, I can tell, so I looked it up.

War and peace

It must be the English in me that makes me enjoy so much stories that discredit the French.

The last invasion of Britain was in February 1797 when 1400 Frenchmen came storming ashore in Fishguard, having mistaken it for the Bristol Channel, and routed the locals. All was going swimmingly until they came across a hoard of Portuguese wine liberated by the Welsh from an earlier shipwreck, which they appropriated until roaring drunk. The locals were then able to turn the tables on the invaders. The heroine of the hour was Jemima Nicholas, a sturdy and determined woman who rounded up no fewer than 12 Frenchmen, with the help of her trusty pitchfork. The Frogs surrendered two days after arriving, signing a treaty in the pretty Royal Oak pub in the town centre; and nothing much has happened there since.

Things were pretty quiet at the top of Constitution Hill in Aberystwyth this afternoon, too, when we hummed up on the Clifftop Railway, an old electric cable car that in its day was standing-room only. Today we were the only passengers, able to hear the robin singing on the bridge over the line which was scattered with windfall apples.

At the top of the hill is the Camera Obscura, a quaint Victorian novelty that still has appeal: there's something fascinating about watching the waves breaking on the beach below, and people walking along the Promenade in real time, sort of through a glass darkly, with no sound: beats CCTV hands down, even if the controls are all mirror-image. I was the only person there, too, enjoying the splendid view on a warm and sunny afternoon; and the girl in the shop would clearly have welcomed some rampaging French sailors. When I left she was untangling a plastic Slinky from the display. I suspect she'd tangled it up herself, deliberately.

The gentle green hills of South Wales have disappeared: now it's all muscly, looming highlands with rocky outcrops fringed with heather. Ahead we've already glimpsed the peaks of Snowdonia, and tomorrow we'll make our own assault on the highest peak in Britain. By train.

The end of the road

This evening I reached the end of the road - the A40, that is, that I thought ran from Marble Arch to Fishguard and found actually starts at St Paul's Cathedral and finishes with a titchy little roundabout at Goodwick where the wind was hurtling in from the sea and snatching at the paper wrappings of the fish suppers being consumed in cars parked along the front (if I had a pound for every package of fish and chips I've seen being eaten today, I could, well, have bought one of my own). Also, its narrowest point isn't at the Market Hall in Ross, either, before the one-way system diverted it - it's in front of The Bear at Crickhowell, where we watched an articulated lorry edging around the corner and near as dammit taking part of the pub with it to Lithuania or wherever it was headed.

The end of the journey was a bit of a whimper, to be honest - I felt it really should have involved more personal effort, like pedalling its length on a bike, or driving a horse and cart like the couple and dog I saw calling in at the Speech House in the Forest of Dean yesterday. Maybe a Vespa.

Anyway, the A40 goes through many lovely places, but its prettiest section has to be from Ross to the end: rolling hills, woods, rivers with stone bridges, and castles, lots of castles (beginning today with a bit of stalking at Bollitree which of course isn't a real castle at all, but the Hamster lives there and that's good enough for me). Also through rather too many attractive small towns that after sucking you in turn out to have such fiendish one-way systems combined with randomly closed roads that not only is the SatNav lady completely foxed, marriages that have lasted longer than a murder sentence are also threatened.

But Wales is looking very promising and tomorrow will no doubt reveal its full share of delights.