I’m back in London.

My attempt to blog from my mobile seemed to go a bit awry and there was a double posting. I managed to remove the doubler through some fiddling on IE but my 3g HTC seems to be getting old and senile – hopefully it will hang together for a little longer as I don’t really want to replace it until the summer. Of course, I wouldn’t have had to use it at all if Travel lodge weren’t so mercenary with their wireless pricing (£5 for an hour or £10 for 24 hours). Anyway: onto the weekend.

We managed to crawl from bed early enough that we got to Stonehenge a short time after sunrise. It was the first time we’d really used the sat nav and I was a bit skeptical as to whether it had sent us the right way because you can’t see the site at all on approach. The thing was blinking we were practically on top of the place and all we could see were steep banks and trees. Then we came over the ridge. The thing was built in such a way that the stones look larger from a distance and, although the road does not pass over the same place as the prehistoric “avenue”, it’s still pretty impressive. It also gives an angle from which the Henge looks most complete.

On the first draft of Forever I’d worked pretty much from google maps and so I was quite nervous as to whether I was going to find what I’d written wouldn’t work at all. Surprisingly, the majority of the sequence does not require heavy lifting but I did find that a couple of character positions need shifting for the sake of at least some shred of plausibility. The Henge itself is kind of weird. As I said, from the distance it looks more complete than it actually is. On the standard circuit you can see the site has had a lot of wear and you can almost understand why they keep people at a distance but ultimately I wanted to stand amongst the stones. I’m going to see if there’s a way I can sort this out sometime in the future. Still: I got what I needed as well as some useful background material that can be used in the current draft.

We spent rather more time at the Henge than originally intended and so didn’t get to Glastonbury until after lunch. Again, the Tor made a pretty impressive landmark on the approach into town but by this time the weather was beginning to turn and so we decided to climb the Tor on Sunday. This pleased me because it meant I got to trawl the bookshops and look at lots of expensive out-of-print books I couldn’t afford and drink copious amounts of tea in the many cafes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite so many Wicca shops in one place. It was fun.

The one thing I really noticed is how pleasant people were. Coming from London it made a bit of a change for people to say “Hello” for no other reason than they were passing you in the street and this pleasant custom continued as we made our way up the Tor this morning. Last night the weather was pretty much as bad as it could be: furious wind and lashing rain that left you soaked in like thirty seconds. We weren’t hopeful for today. Yet, somehow the rain cleared and we had blue skies as far as the eye could see. Although it was windy, the views on the way up more than made up from it. Indeed it was so clear that we suspect – perhaps erroneously – that we could see Stonehenge on the horizon.

And then it was time to come home. I had some other things I wanted to see but we just couldn’t fit them in. That’s the way it goes sometimes. I’m not to worried, it was a fun way to spend the weekend and I’m pretty sure I’ll be going back to that neck of the woods.

Now, I have a novel to be getting on with.