About to leave the little village of Evershot, near Dorchester, in Dorset, after a weekend saturating myself in Mr Thomas Hardy. I'm much more fond of the old scribe after this visit and much taken with the fact that he used to cycle prodigiously even in his old age - he lived to 88 which was seriously ancient in those days. He's the only iconic writer I've ever come across who was mad for cycling and would peddle to Southampton and back from his home, Max Gate, just outside Dorchester, in a day. That's eighty flipping miles. Maybe if Charlie Dickens had done the same his novels wouldn't have been so, erm, long.
Fittingly, my next stop is Bristol, where I've asked to go cycling along the Bristol to Bath cycle path. The modest forty mile return journey is due to take place this arvo, when the BBC weather forecast shows belting rain and a big black cloud.
Visiting the cottage where Hardy was born and brought up - in tiny Bockhampton - and the house he designed and wrote in for the latter decades of his life has really got me into the old fella again. At school and uni I liked his dramatic, flowery and somewhat morose accounts of country life under threat from modernisation and I'm definitely keen to revisit books like Tess, Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure.
What a wonderful job I have - there is such variety and I am always learning, although I confess I often forget about it soon after (like all the stuff I knew just before my exams as a yoof). But I guess what I'm saying is that I'm so lucky to be enriched by my travels, garnering more and more knowledge, experiencing more and more adventures, meeting an enormous range of people from traditional tribespeople and indigenous elders to royalty and government ministers. I've rarely met anybody I thought had no redeeming features, even if they were right of Baroness Thatcher (who's distant family were no doubt responsible for repairing many of the rooves here in picturesque Dorset).
We finally saw the sun yesterday and it shone for at least three hours. It made our Hardy walk, a visit to the extraordinary Maiden Castle - a huge Iron Age fortress just outside Dorchester which is thousands of year old - and our drive to the Crown Inn in Marnhull, immortalised as the Pure Drop Inn in Tess of the D'urbervilles, all the more enjoyable.
Right, better move on, an Everest-sized breakfast awaits us downstairs here at the Acorn Inn and then it's a two hour drive to Bristol, a city I haven't been to since I taught there many moons ago.
By the way, sorry for the lack of photos breaking up Daddy T's rambles. That will be rectified as soon as I have more than a second to post stuff. Thanks Mike for joining the ranks of my followers. I'm going to make a concerted effort to get people behind the blog so if you'd be kind enough to follow, I'll reward you with sex, lies and maybe some videotape...
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