My dad has been down in Lyme Regis on the south coast of England for the past few months having a midlife crisis fulfilling a lifelong dream by taking a boat building course. So before we left England we took a trip down to see him.
Jo drove. I navigated. I am generally quite good at navigating these days. I have got past the stage where I assume that the landscape knows which way up I am holding the map and arranges itself according to my needs, realising that it is generally simpler for me to turn the map around to match the landscape. And I was on board with the fact that North or South does not equal front and back (i.e. what's in front of you isn't necessarily North. I mean, I've always known that in a theoretical sense. Just not in a practical, or useful sense). But I always had a problem with left and right, which is known in the cartographic world as port and seaboard. No, that's not right. I meant West and East*. So car trips where I was required to navigate often involved fun detours in the opposite direction from where we wanted to be.
Not anymore. I am now a champion map reader, and have an instinctive grasp of the location of North, or indeed any other cardinal point without reference to moss on trees or the location of the sun or any of that stuff.
My new, grown-up map reading skills leave me a lot more time free in the car, and I sometimes think Jo longs for the days when I'd spend twenty minutes trying to figure out what road we're on because free time in the car in England gives me a chance (apropos of Bill Bryson, though in my defence, I think I came up with it first) to play my favourite travel game; What is the Most Ridiculous Town Name in England? I have a few contenders; Bishop's Itchington. Wootton Fitzpaine. Tooting Bec. Upper Weedon (what about Lower Weedon, I hear you ask? Probably better that we don't discuss it. Though I do feel honour bound to tell you that there is also somewhere called Weedon Lois). Pratt's Bottom. Wham (yep, just 'Wham'). Keeps me entertained for hours. Jo loves it when I sit there reading them all out to him. I'm sure when he starts to weep and bang his head repeatedly on the steering wheel it's about something else entirely.
We debated making a detour to Stonehenge, but decided it that we didn't really have time, thinking that it would be too far out of our way. When what should loom over the horizon...
Well, maybe not 'loom' as such. If you squint, you can just about see it there in the background. Drive-by touristing. Awesome.
Eventually we got to Lyme Regis, and we were extremely pleased to be there as it is a very sweet little sea-side town. We had a pie and a cider in the pub and then had a look at the local scenery. Which was beautiful in a bleak, windswept sort of way;
Then we visited dad in the Boat Building Academy. It was like Santa's workshop, if Santa's elves were a bunch of slightly unkempt looking men (and a couple of more kempt women) with nautical glints in their eyes. To be fair, the unkempt look had more to do with the fact that they were all elbow deep in resins and woodshavings and other bits of workshop detritus than any lack of personal hygiene.
I liked this half-finished boat because he looks like a grumpy old man smoking a cigar;
Mostly what we did while we were in Lyme Regis was potter about. We went to the pub. We pottered about. Went to the pub again. Pottered again. Which was exactly what we'd wanted. Lyme Regis has an excellent assortment of pubs, and I can recommend The Royal Standard, The Ship Inn and The Volunteer Inn (though that last one loses points for having a menu board up but no actual food available. It's our own fault for going to an English seaside town in January, but when I tried to order some sandwiches the woman behind the bar looked at me as if I was crazy, and told me that the kitchen doesn't open til February. Of course. Good selection of ciders, though).
We also went fossil hunting. You can wander down to the beach and just pick fossils off the ground. The coastline is constantly being eroded, and the more of the Dorset coast that falls into the sea, the more fossils there are to be found. It was a lot of fun, though Jo eventually had to plant an ammonite for me to find because I was getting stroppy about not finding anything (I blame my crappy glasses - it was raining and my glasses got all fogged up and kept sliding off my nose, and I couldn't see a damn thing), after which I perked up and had a lovely time.
We found about a dozen ammonites, a fossilised shell of some sort, and what I think might be part of a fish, all of which I assume will represent major breakthroughs for science when I eventually get around to showing them to a paleontologist.
All in all, a lovely break away from our main holiday.
But I'm not finished yet. Oh, no.
On our way home, we went to Monkey World. Monkey World is sort of a cross between a zoo and an animal rescue centre, and sadly, a lot of the animals there have suffered physical and mental trauma, but they are treated and rehabilitated at the centre and they all seemed pretty content when we saw them. Again, January in a tourist attraction in England is pretty quiet and there were more staff than customers the day we went (thought there was a family there with a little girl who pointed at the tamarinds and shouted gleefully 'look at those cheeky rascals!', which has become a bit of a catchphrase of mine).
It was quite wonderful (though it was a little bizarre to see gibbons swinging through the oak trees), and the place is doing a bang up job. These are some of the older chimps, who were all curled up with blankets;
And this is me with a chimpanzee. I'm the one on the left. This is not the closest I've ever been to a monkey - when we lived in Thailand I was savaged by a temple monkey - but this is the closest I've ever been to a non-rabid monkey, which was nice.
This has all gone on a bit longer than I'd planned, so I'll just finish with a few of my wannabe-artsy pictures of Lyme Regis harbour, because I'm not good at wrapping things up coherently.
FIN
*Though I still have to go over in my head Never Eat Soggy Weet-bix to get that much right.
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