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2005-05-25

The Random Cathedral Town of choice last weekend was Salisbury. The Salisbury Cathedral is one of the finest extant specimens of Early English Gothic architecture, typified by pointed arches and flying buttresses. (You can imagine the excitement when those buttresses really get going.) It also houses the world�s oldest operational clock, and so, literally speaking, it is the place to go for non-stop action. Very spiff cathedral, all told � everything I�d dreamed of and more � but I�m getting to the point now where all English towns are starting to look alike. You�ve got your medieval cathedral; you�ve got your Roman cross streets; you�ve got your restored Tudor shopfronts; you�ve got your overblown neoclassical town hall�ho hum. When I get off the train these days I don�t feel like I�ve gone anywhere.

So! I decided to get a real dose of history and take the bus up to Avebury. Not the coach, mind you � the bus. Travelling by local bus is a pretty ingenious way to see a lot of England for very little money. However, it is not the most expedient means of travel. I was treated to a winding, jolting, two-and-a-half-hour scenic tour of rural Wiltshire. Barring the lack of on-board facilities, I didn�t really mind, since it gave me a chance to sit back, look out the window and do nothing at all; and as I�ve stated in the past, I am a very big fan of all kinds of inactivity (don�t even get me started on molecular inactivity! Boy howdy!). But when I got to Avebury, I was left with exactly one hour to jump off the bus, pop into the local pub to use the toilets and gawk at a group of Morris dancers (never having seen a live one before), wander breathless and starry-eyed amongst the mysterious pre-historical megaliths, get soaked in a sudden monsoon and fall on my ass in the mud, squelch back to the main road and hop on the last bus back to Salisbury. And then it was another two and a half hours of bum-bruising back roads, followed by an hour and a half on the train back to Portsmouth. What can I say? I�m the world�s most crap travel planner. It was worth it, though. Those rocks were some old.

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