Apology
I’ve got to apologise really for not writing for almost a month. I’ve been on holiday the last couple of weeks and Somerset is particularly devoid of WiFi connections this time of year. I only used my laptop to copy photos from my digital camera (over 360 of ‘em!) and to play Sim City once when it was too wet to even make a dash for the car. You see, being a Brit, I have already mentioned the weather by line 3, and I also holidayed (is that a word?) in my home country. Every single other nation in the world has the majority of people holidaying elsewhere (apart from perhaps people in the Caribbean, but even they must get sick of it sometimes?), but the majority of Brits stay in their own country for some obscure reason.
Now, I have nothing against Britain I have a lot of things against Britain, one of which being the roads. If you holiday here, you don’t have the luxury Americans have of going to the other side of the country and it being completely different, and of course, flying that distance. In the UK, you have to drive and wherever you go, it’s mostly the same. Firstly it’s speed limits. The M4, for example, is mostly limited to 50MPH due to traffic. Personally, I really envied the thousands of people the police claim speed on the M4, as we would have been quicker unpacking the car and walking the 161 mile journey. Then we have the roads themselves. (The dictionary says that “holidayed” and “holidaying” are words, but only in British English, not US, by the way.) Most countries look like Milton Keynes on a road map, lots of straight, grid-like roads. Well, we only have Milton Keynes like that, which is a dismal place with too many roundabouts. We have lanes and B-roads snaking their way across the country leading you to some village you’ve never heard of, that has declared itself a soverign state which worships a 92-year-old female collector of Edwardian waistcoat buttons as the messiah. Then again, I did find a wonderful place called Bibury this way, but that also involved the intervention of an overheating H-reg Sierra estate. These roads are fine if you know where you are going, but if you are near Oxford with the possibility of ending up in the city centre or in roadworks on the M40 with only directions created by Multimap, the AA, RAC and Google (all being different, of course) to guide you on your quest to avoid the cat-loving saviour, they are best avoided.
The final problem on the journey occurs when you actually arrive. I had the advantage of having already visited the apartment we were staying in. However, if you are not of this advantage then you have a problem. Directions and maps generally do not give precise directions to a front door (especially when ours was 8 feet in the air), and GPS tends to lead coaches down those little lanes, trapping the 92-year-old, her priceless collection and 60-odd of her deciples. We still had the problem of not really knowing where we were going outside of the very small community we were staying in, but we managed to locate a Tescos, a Butlins, a pitch-and-putt that was permanently closed, a few beaches and a nice bar/pub/restaurant/theatre/cinema that had quite a decent pool table, but very expensive drinks.
I’ll write a little more about my adventures later, but unfortunately I have an essay to write 
I shall leave you with the words of a great philosopher: “Never knock a nail in with a duck” ~ Clive