London - Stonehenge

It´s been an action packed few days so I haven´t updated the blog fora bit, sorry about that folks. I haven´t been knifed in an alleyway in Soho and left for dead, I´ve just been busy. Am currently in Barcelona. Anyway, on with the show...

Mon 5th Sept

Major hangover today - on a scale of 1 to 10 this was about a 5.5. It meant that I didn´t get up early as planned and head down to Salisbury by train: I went shopping instead. Purchases included a DVD of the classic film noir Double Indemnity, and a Roman coin from the reign of the Emperor Claudius, circa the invasion of Britain, from a cool little antiques dealer located opposite the British Museum.

I also wandered around Bloomsbury a little more, discovering beautiful Bedford Square (built in 1775 - 80, and the only complete Georgian square in London) entirely by accident, and the house where the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848. If I´m not very much mistaken, Wilde´s Dorian Grey lived on Bedford Square... which reminds me, I also picked up a very cheap copy of that very same novel today, to read by St Oscar´s grave in Paris as I drink champagne in his honour.

I also discovered Soho Square Garden, where a statue of Charles II carved in 1681 stands virtually ignored by the many Londoners lounging in the park, but not totally: someone had blackened his face with paint...

That night I arranged to meet up with Carl Pates at the Round Table pub, from which we later moved on to Leicester Square for dinner. Top bloke Carl, we´ve known each other for years but never actually met. We talked about role-playing games (one of my great loves), films, music (and discovered we both used to love the spagetti-western goth band The Fields of the Nephilim), and much more. A great night, and if it wasn´t for my beastly hangover in the morning it would never have happened. Thanks, hangover!

Tues 6th Sept

Up early, booked Easyjet ticket to Barcelona, then caught the train down to Salisbury, a pleasent and easy one and a half hour trip. Through a small forest of birch and larch trees, the ground carpeted in bracken, through Woking and Basingstoke; over peaceful fields disected by hedgerows, and so to Salisbury itself - a glimpse of the caethdral spire before entering a tunnel, and a pro-fox hunting sign the first thing I saw when we emerged on the other side.

Wandering the streets of the old medieval town at the heart of the city in wonderment, passing therough the market which has run every Tuesday since 1361, crossing a stone bridge beneath which ducks quack on a narrow stream...

Then on the bus to Stonehenge.

Stonehenge. Wow. This is a place I´ve wanted to see since I was 10 or 12, so you can understand the excitement and tension I was feeling as the bus rattled along the narrow country road, past a piggery outside Salisbury to Amesbury, the closest town to the site. Had I had the time I would have returned to Amesbury, and from here caught another bus to Avebury, another megalithic site an hour north.

As it happened, Stonehenge was the only megalithic site I got to see and god, it was fantastic. As we first saw the stones in the distance, my heart leapt. I´d been warned that some find Stonehenge underwhelming: by the time I´d paid my entrance fee and crossed under the road to emerge on the other side of the chainlink fence that keeps vandals out, I was almost in tears of joy and awe. With Hilmar Orn Hilmarson´s Angels of the Universe providing a highly appropriate soundtrack (Hilmarson is the head of Iceland´s pagan church, and the score itself is magestic, evocative and moving), I walked slowly and reverentually around the site, and soon I really was in tears. These ancient, lichen-encrusted stones... It´s hard to do justice to how they made me feel; a sense of palpable age, of awe... It´s the most ancient spiritual site I´ve explored, and it made me feel amazing. I also felt some anger and disdain to those tourists for whom this was just another quick stop, another landmark for them to cross of their list of places to see in Britain. I hadn´t expected such a strong emotional response at all, and was humbled and moved by the whole experience.

Then it was back on the bus to Salisbury, where I had to make the hard decision of touring Old Sarum (an iron-age hillfort which later became the site of the original Salisbury) and then walking into town to catch my train; or going back into town and instead spending an hour at Salisbury Cathedral. I did the later. A sweet symphony in stone raised to honour God. The cathedral was also beautiful, and while it didn´t move me as Stonehenge did, I still thought it was a marvellous building, that I sadly didn´t have time to explore properly before getting back on the London train. If you visit Salisbury, give yourself at least a couple of days to see the place and its surrounding landmarks properly.

Finally it was back to London on the train, where that night I caught up with Nat Clark, another old Express Media hand who´d also been a guest at Bec and Bob´s wedding. Not a huge night out, but a very comfortable one; Thai dinner and a short spot of bar-hopping, including a great little bar in a sidestreet in Soho... Then back to Rick´s for my last night in London!