John Buchan can’t stop thinking about ham. Alfred Hitchcock is frightened of eggs. Charles Dickens is hungry all the time. In Broadstairs I eat British chips and wonder where the seventy eight steps are now.
Goldcliff
I search for mesolithic footprints in the mudflats of the Severn Estuary, avoid a tsunami, then call upon Amy Adams, expert in alien linguistics, to decipher a chilling message.
Hereford
Scrumping back to Paradise: apples, wassailing and the history of cider.
Bosworth Field
An octopus searches for the location of a battle that took place in August, 1485. Facts are disputed. Five hundred years later the body of King Richard the Third is discovered in a social services car park in Leicester. The octopus studies the menu in the battlefield visitors’ centre and notices an absence of Welsh dishes.
Papa Westray
Westray and Papa Westray, far northern outposts of the British Isles, once a Viking colony, where the plaintive call of the curlew sounds over white beaches of the most extraordinary beauty.
Haverfordwest
Batman meets Gwen John in the home of my maternal ancestors. I eat some local cheese then experience megalithophobia with the supreme exponents of psych-sludge, Neolithic Axe Factory. (With thanks to the hallucinogenic imagination of Alexander Velky and the nuclear guitar of Tim Mortimer.)
York Walls
A pint of beer in Guy Fawke’s birthplace leads to a rumination on war and peace, life and death and a piece of cake.
Tebay Services
A waxed paper sauce pot paradise.
Bass Rock
An island off the east coast of Scotland, where gannets live within a stabbing circumference of each other.
Chesterfield
Apollo 8, the first colour TVs, asbestos, plague and Chesterfield’s twisted spire.
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