ENGLAND : August 5-13, 2006
David Drake

England 2006 Travel Photos

Our flight was out in the afternoon of Saturday the 5th. I slept very badly the night before. In part that was a result of the hot night, but I felt extremely nervous. It'd been a hell of a summer already and travel is very stressful to me. Not coincidentally, when I got off the plane returning me from Oakland (following the long flight back from Bien Hoa) on January 15, 1971, I said, "I'll never get on another plane!" I've flown many times since, of course; but the impulse remains.

There was no difficulty getting to the airport or through security. I packed mostly clothes in what could've been a carry-on bag but which I checked. On the flight I carried a limp leather attaché case with my computer and books to read. I carried my clipboard and plot outline, but I didn't expect to do real work (nor in fact did I, to get ahead of myself by a bit). The books included both of CJ Sansom's mysteries set in the reign of Henry VIII, good books and an extremely good choice for this particular trip.

The plane was an American Airlines Boeing 777, direct from Raleigh-Durham to Gatwick. There's plenty of headroom and carry-on space. Seating (in tourist) was nine-abreast with two aisles: 2-5-2; the pitch between rows of seats was very short. I had an aisle seat in a right-hand pair.

A seven-hour eastward flight at night is extremely uncomfortable for me. I mostly read but tried to doze some also. Without any success, I would've said, but in fact I must've gotten a little sleep. I hadn't expected it to be a good time, so I wasn't disappointed.

We landed at Gatwick a trifle early and found our luggage without incident. I was feeling surprisingly perky (there may've been a degree of relief at simply not being on a plane for a while involved in that).

We then waited for John Lambshead, who was a bit delayed. My only concern about that was that we might be in the wrong place. (I have a tendency to be in the wrong place.) I stood by the luggage reading while Jo moved from one possible entrance to another in a large, crowded, two-level hall. After not too long she came back with John, who'd been doing fine till he ran into a traffic jam right at the airport. There was an unusual number of armed security people and they were stopping cars. (This became significant a few days later.)

The three of us walked around Rochester till the time we hoped the room would be ready. I took more pictures of the castle (we'd gone into it in 2004) and we looked again at Dickens' sites before heading for our hotel, the Bridgewood Manor. It's the highest-rated hotel in the area, but the fact makes me wonder if somebody'd been paid off (I'll get to that). That the room still wasn't ready wasn't their fault.

Wireless internet (which worked in the lobby but not, as claimed in the rooms) was overpriced, but I bought time because I was really concerned that the wheels had come off something. Besides, I'd decided that it simply didn't make sense to skimp. The total cost of the trip was so much higher than any incidentals that it'd have been foolish to worry about another ten bucks.

All was fine back home, at least so far as anybody was telling me. Like I said, though, it's been a hell of a summer and my concerns weren't wholly unreasonable.

While we were sitting out in the hotel's courtyard (a consistent feature of the British hotels I've been in, and one I much appreciate), a propeller-driven plane flew over and I looked up as always. It was a Spitfire, which definitely was not as always. During the next hour I saw two more Spitfires (or maybe the same Spitfire twice more) and a Merlin-engined Me-109. (For those of you who care, the Spanish under Franco built Me-109s but powered them with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine instead of the German Daimler-Benz. These (now in private hands) are the only Me-109s still flying.)

It turned out there was a Battle of Britain celebration going on. The local man sitting at a nearby table having a lager while his wife used the hotel's spa (it was their anniversary) explained that Biggin Hill (the regional command center) was only five miles from where we were. You really can't stumble over a rock in England without uncovering history.

We got into the room and took quickie showers before John returned at 1 pm. I got out my socket adaptor in order to recharge my laptop. The adaptor fit the British socket perfectly--but the laptop cord had a three-wire grounded plug which wouldn't fit the two-wire female side of the adaptor, which I had been too dimwitted to check before we left the US.

John ran us back to his house, where we met his wife Val (again) and their elder daughter Kim for the first time. He had a variety of plug adaptors himself (since he travels a good deal for the Natural History Museum and for the UN), but none of them took me forwarder.

It suddenly struck me that the cord from the wall to the converter was separate--and the female (converter) end was identical in all units. John had a laptop. I could borrow his cord to recharge my laptop until I could buy one at a computer store. This sounds very silly--it was a trivial thing, after all; there's no end of internet cafes in Britain --but it lifted my mood to a remarkable degree. Stress, of which this summer had a sufficiency, has a tendency to intensify my emotional spikes. Having my spirits rocket for a change was a very good thing.

We--Jo and I aren't heavy and Kim is decidedly slim, so the three of us fit fine in the back of a Vauxhall Astra--then went to Doddington House to visit the gardens. They were having some sort of an affair in the house proper; when John finally found a member of the household to pay, she told him not to worry about it.

The gardens were attractive, with a rockery that was being rebuilt, an aisle of coastal redwoods (I didn't see any last year in Yosemite , but I now have rectified that gap in my experience) and an unusual sundial whose gnomon is a mirrored pyramid. Jo got a nice picture of me reflected in it as I chatted with John.

We all had dinner at the White Rabbit, a Medway pub where we'd eaten very well on the previous trip. I had the lamb shank, which was delicious, and everybody was happy with their dinner. Good food, good ambiance (the building was original the HQ of a territorial regiment and has lots of military prints on the walls), and excellent company.

Thence back to the hotel. Jo crashed at once, but I deliberately stayed up till 8 pm to switch my biological clock. I finished the CJ Sansom novel I'd started on the plane, wrote up the day's notes, and only then went to bed. I was out as soon as my head hit the pillow.

Monday, August 7 : I slept for twelve hours and got up at 8 am , completely on schedule for the rest of the tour. This is John's plan (from a great deal of experience with international conferences and trips to the US more generally involving nematodes); it works perfectly for me.

I skipped breakfast (which came with the room) because I'd eaten a great deal the previous day. I've managed to break myself of the habit of eating things because I've paid for them already. There are more costs than simply monetary ones, and I find making money easier than I do taking inches off my waistline.

John picked us up at 9 am and we set off for Stonehenge . He was expecting traffic jams at one point or another, but we kept moving well though there was some congestion. The Vauxhall cruises very comfortably at 90 mph (the British, unlike the Canadians, post road speeds in English rather than metric form) and John's a very good driver. (We were rarely passed, but our speed wasn't at all out of line with the norm.)

One other comment on driving (in my case riding, of course) in England . When I left NC, gas was approximately $3/gallon. In England when I arrived, gas was approximately 3 pounds/liter. The pound was at $1.80 (according to my credit card conversion rate) and a liter is 21/20 of a quart. (Regular gas in Britain is 93 octane, however, and 99 is available for those who drive a Lotus or the like.)

We reached Stonehenge in late morning and parked. The lot was surfaced with a perforated rubber mat, and the buildings were 1960s prefabs. While this doesn't bother me in the least, the presentation for a site in all respects comparable to the Pyramids is less impressive than (for example) the Wright Memorial on Ocracoke Island .

John pointed out Iron Age barrows north of the parking lot. I photographed them. Throughout the trip I took pictures of anything vaguely interesting, whether or not the subject struck me as 'important.' I don't know what will seem important next week, next year, or for the next book. I do know that in most cases I won't be seeing the place or thing again. A digital camera (Canon A70) and several cards (1G, 256M, and 128M) were more than sufficient for my needs, but I'd have been wiser to carry more batteries. Live and learn.

We walked up the slope and I saw Stonehenge for the first time. It was 'fenced' shortly after our first visit to England in 1977. I expected high cyclone fencing between the stones and visitors. In fact there were only ring posts supporting a low nylon rope inside the asphalt walkways.

The site is unique. We walked around, chatted, and took many, many pictures. (One of them which Jo took is at present the home page for my website.)

John commented that current belief is that the site was for incubation (that is, receiving dream visions) by priests, probably including blood sacrifices; the astronomical correspondences which Gerald Hawkins found are chance. Both the night sky and Stonehenge are very complex structures, so that merging them will create random similarities. Another generation will probably find another truth. What won't change is the wonder of the site itself.

We then set off southward through farming country toward the Bovington Tank Museum . Not far along John's cell phone rang (his ring-tone is the Buffy theme, by the way) and when he winkled it out of his pocket (something of trick harnessed into the seat in a small car) it turned out to be John Treadaway, the graphics artist on the Slammers miniature game; he's also doing the interiors for Night Shade's Complete Hammer's Slammers volumes.

While I was chatting with JT, JL pointed an Iron Age hill fort out to Jo and they decided to pull over on a side road. There was a sheep path up the slope, and a proper stile (steps over a fence)--the first one I've ever seen in the flesh (well, wood) though the word is one I remember from the earliest children's books.

We hiked up the outer wall (I got some pictures of the combine harvester operating across the road; I'm from Iowa , after all). There were attractive wildflowers and I learned that sheep poop and rabbit poop are extremely similar. The pellets of former are larger, but not enough larger that I'd have been sure of the identification had they not both been present to compare.

There was a deep ditch inside the wall and then an even higher mound with a brush-covered barbed-wire fence at the top. The slope was steep, but the sheep path continued. John and I really wanted to get on and see the tanks, but Jo scrambled down and up; from the fence she could see parked cars, so we agreed to see if we could find a way in. We hopped back into the car, returned to the main road, and almost at once found the formal entrance to Old Sarum, a World Heritage Site. (Full marks to John for recognizing its significance from the back without signs or guidebook, and to Jo for persuading a couple of tank-obsessed males to swerve from their course.)

The earthen walls date from about 400 bc , but there's speculation that at a much earlier date the regional chief who controlled the site of Stonehenge had his base here. It became a major center of Norman control after the Conquest, with a castle and cathedral on the Iron Age mound, but when the water supply began to fail in the 13 th century the site was gradually abandoned. The buildings were largely destroyed so that the stone could be reused to build Salisbury (whose cathedral is clearly in view when one looks north from the mound). Old Sarum remained as a Rotten Borough, however, returning a member to Parliament until 1832 despite the fact it was virtually uninhabited by the 18th century.

I'd read about Rotten Boroughs, of course, but I'd never really put them into context until I stood within one. Yes, this was an 18th century abuse; but on Taiwan into the past decade seats in the assembly were held by members of the ruling party (the KMT) whose constituencies were on the mainland, providing an 'electoral' basis for the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek and his successors.

As a matter of much greater shame to me as an American, our government insisted the Khmer Rouge were the legitimate government of Cambodia after they'd been chased into the jungles and ruled nothing that they couldn't steal at gunpoint. The Khmer Rouge had murdered a million or so of their own people, but to accept their ouster would mean giving their UN seat to the real government--which was backed by the Vietnamese and was therefore unacceptable to the US State Department.

Putting our action in the context of normal human behavior rather than viewing it as some monstrous aberration which could only occur in Washington, DC, made it a little easier to fathom. Mind, it's still normal behavior only for pretty despicable humans.

After the unexpected and thoroughly worthwhile stop at Old Sarum, we raced off to Bovington which we found without difficulty. I was doing much of the navigation during the week, by the way. It was easier than I was used to because distances were so much shorter than those of the US . (To quote John from some while ago, "Americans think a hundred years is a long time. Englishmen think a hundred miles is a long distance.")

After driving through the base for a time (because Bovington is still the training base for the Royal Tank Corps) we found the museum. It's basically a hangar or at any rate a hangar-sized building, broken into halls with partition walls (and with a pair of Challenger tanks outside). We proceeded to the WW I hall.

But before we even got there I realized that the presentation was a long step beyond that of many museums. The entrance corridor takes a sharp bend and narrows; the lighting is dimmed. I realized there were manikins dressed in German uniforms cowering in the corridor beside me. Then I looked up and saw the nose and port sponson of a Mark I tank (a male with a pair of 6-pounder cannon instead of a female armed only with machine guns) sticking out over the parapet, dragging barbed wire with it: the corridor had become a trench, and I was seeing what would've been the last view many German soldiers had of the world in the latter half of WW I.

Bovington is amazing. The British invented the tank and by being on the winning side in WW II had their pick of German equipment as well. (You don't go to Germany if you want to see a Jagdtiger, for example) That much I knew and I wasn't disappointed: just inside the hall is Little Willie, the proof of concept demonstrator which showed to the British government that armored boxes running on treads developed by the Holt Tractor Company (which later became Caterpillar Corporation) were a practical possibility.

There were all manner of WW I tanks, though not the German A7V. I recall reading that the only existing one was melted for scrap iron at the beginning of WW II; typical chimp behavior, which like most such hurts the person doing it at least as much as the person being done to. (One may reasonably doubt that Hitler regretted invading Poland because he learned the British had destroyed a unique museum exhibit.)

There were also all manner of between-war tanks (and armored cars). It reminded me of pictures of Eocene mammals, all manner of extremely odd creatures which can only be explained as nature (or in this case, military tinkerers) experimenting wildly with a new concept. (Every European country seemed to have the equivalent of a Carden-Lloyd Tankette, a vehicle without any real military purpose so far as I can see.)

The most striking (if not the most important; that's Little Willie) exhibits were late-war German vehicles in the WW II hall. I've mentioned the Jadgtiger (of which only about 20 were built), but there were both variants of the King Tiger, an ordinary Tiger, a Jagdpanther, and a Panther. I took a hundred photos, trying to get explanatory signs with the vehicle itself (many of them were new to me). This had a negative result that I've noticed in other instances where I was taking pictures: I wasn't really seeing objects, I was framing them in my view finder (incidentally, I use the view finder, not the screen on the back of the camera). I was sure (and puzzled by the fact) that there wasn't a Panther on display... until I saw my pictures and saw that I'd gotten two good images of one.

The 38-cm rocket mortar that'd been fired from a Tiger chassis to reduce Sebastopol was there, but dismounted. I suspect that the Germans themselves have removed the tube as I believe the weapon was only used at Sebastopol .

Allied vehicles weren't really as well represented as the captured equipment. In part this is because we--particularly the US --rationalized production on a few standard models which were here. (The Sherman , the Grant, and the M10 Tank Destroyer.) The best US tank of the war (and arguably the best tank of the war, bar none), the M26 Pershing, isn't at Bovington. (It virtually wasn't in the war either, unfortunately, due to the culpable stupidity of the US Ordnance Department with the enthusiastic support of General Patton.)

The British had more models, in part because they didn't really get it right until the Comet appeared just too late for the Battle of the Bulge, but most of them aren't at Bovington. There was a good collection of the Funnies, the specialist vehicles developed for the Normandy Invasion, though: the Churchill Crocodile (a flame tank), flail conversions for mine clearance (the one on display is a Sherman but other chassis were also used), and a Dual-Drive Sherman and Valentine, both which used propellers and a canvas floatation hull to swim ashore on the beaches.

There was also an example of the most important conversion of all, the Sherman Firefly, a US tank fitted (with a great deal of difficulty) with the British 17-pounder gun which could knock out the heaviest German armor. The tank was still a deathtrap--the Sherman 's tendency to burn when hit gave it the nickname Zippo in American usage and Tommy Cooker for the British--but it was a deathtrap with teeth.

Later vehicles were less well represented, though the Israelis had obviously supplied a good number of Soviet models of the '50s and '60s, captured from Arab armies. There was a US M46 tank with the same hull and main gun as the M48s I rode in Viet Nam , and various later British tanks (including stages in the evolution of the excellent Centurion).

We finished going through the halls just before closing. I hit the gift shop but found it a bit of a disappointment. I'd hoped for a good catalogue of Bovington's holdings, but there was nothing of the sort. I picked up an interesting memoir (of a platoon leader of a flail tank unit), but most of what was on sale were Osprey guides and the like which can be bought in any hobby shop in the world.

We then headed southeast to North Poole, near Southampton and Portsmouth (our next day's target). We stopped at a pub on the way for a drink and some chips, but they weren't open for meals till 6 so we continued on to Wareham . Here at the Duke of Wellington (pub) we all had very good pork in mustard sauce, with potatoes and vegetables. We ate in the courtyard. As in 2004 I noted how attractive wallflowers (growing here in the brickwork) are and wondered why we don't see them in America

Incidentally, smoking indoors in restaurants is prohibited in England (as in much of America ). The degree to which this is enforced varies. The middle-aged man leaning on the bar smoking here was almost certainly the manager.

We were parked across the street from the house in which Mrs Craik wrote John Halifax, Gentleman , in 1857, and I have pictures to prove it. (I now have a vague urge to read the novel.)

John had a booklet giving directions to all the Premier Travel Inns in the UK . They're a chain of moderately-priced clean, comfortable places--far more to my taste than the Bridgestone Manor, as it turned out, and much better value as well (a completely different question). In this particular case the directions made a simple thing impossible until we ignored them and followed street signs. (There's an attractive flower box in a roundabout in North Poole ; we got a good chance to see it on the three or four circuits we made at intervals.)

Here I borrowed the wall-to-converter cord of John's laptop and found it does work on my Compaq. This relaxed me to an irrational degree. All was well at home, which also helped. We live in our heads, writers to perhaps a greater extent than the general population. Anything that makes my head a better place is greatly to be welcomed.

We sat at an outside table and chatted about WW II aircraft on a cool, pleasant evening; then to bed after an amazing day.

Tuesday, August 8 : Up betimes and ate an overpriced full breakfast in the hotel. (They didn't offer a continental breakfast here; restaurant arrangements vary within the Premier chain.)

We reached Portsmouth and found a parking deck with no difficulty, then walked to the Navy Yard. An M 29-class monitor from 1915 (two 6-inch guns) is near the entrance, waiting for restoration. The carrier Invincible is nearby also, awaiting scrapping. I will note without comment that the Invincible was pivotal to British victory in the Falklands war; and that the Warrior from 1860, the first display we came to inside, survives only because she was being used as a fueling barge during the decades. All other ships of her period were scrapped for a pittance.

And the Warrior is marvelous. She was the first modern warship: iron hull, breech-loading armament, armored belt, and steam engines driving screw propellers. The only thing she lacked was a rotating barbette turret. (Several of the heavy weapons--7-inch rifles--were pivot guns which could be warped by hand over bronze tracks inlaid on the deck to bear through a number of gunports each.)

Despite being so innovative, Jo correctly remarked that from the outside the Warrior looked very similar to Nelson's Victory , moored nearby. She had a full complement of masts and yards, a requirement for Imperial service at the time she was built. The steam engines of 1860 were neither efficient nor trustworthy, and Britain hadn't yet created the infrastructure of coaling stations necessary to support steam warships operating across the whole world.

There was a small-arms demonstration (given by a fellow who was obviously a retired RN petty officer) while we were there. One of his comments summed up the world of 1860 with the sort of brutal truth that academics often avoid: "We didn't get a great empire by being gentle and polite. We got it by being extremely aggressive."

No naval power of the day could challenge Britain. When heavy guns were used in action (and the Warrior 's were not), it was for shore bombardment (Chinese forts or the city of Alexandria , Egypt ) rather than against other warships. The Warrior 's crew of 680 were equipped for colonial policing duties, generally on shore. She carried 380 muskets and about a thousand cutlasses as well as swords and Colt revolvers for the officers.

In a way, I think visiting the Warrior was for me the high point of the whole wonderful trip. Hers is basically the world in which my RCN space operas are set, since my tastes and talents don't lie in fleet actions like Trafalgar and the Cape of St. Vincent. I took many, many photographs.

Then to the Victory . She was the most highly developed example of a sailing battleship from the period when sailing battleships were used in war, and of course she's the ship which Nelson died commanding on the most important naval action between Lepanto and Midway.

But the real workhorse of 18th century navies was the two-deck 74-gun ship, not massive three-deckers like the 100-gun Victory or the 120-gun L'Orient which Nelson's 74s destroyed in the Battle of the Nile. (Extra credit for readers who, without searching, can give the name and author of the poem beginning, "The boy stood on the burning deck....") I'm glad the Victory survives. I kind of wish the Captain or the Vanguard (74s serving as Nelson's flagships at St Vincent and the Nile ) were around also, though.

I didn't take as many pictures on the Victory as I would've had not the batteries in my camera pooped out. Jo loaned me her camera and I got some, but I was more sparing with borrowed equipment than I would've been with my own.

After leaving the Victory we adjourned to a coffee shop to snack. I found AA batteries as well. (The first shop I checked at was out of them; I--correctly--felt a complete fool for not bringing an 8-pack with me from the US .)

We then went to the Mary Rose , Henry VIII's flagship which capsized in 1545 and is being cleaned and preserved with enormous care and effort. She's in a huge sealed, heated, dimly-lit compartment and is being sprayed with preservative. An unfortunate side effect is that the double-glazed windows to the viewing gallery are fogged to bare translucence. I took away an impression of great height--and respect for the painstaking personnel working to prepare her.

A matter that puzzles me is that I've been told (second hand, but the original source was an archeologist involved in preserving the ship) that the low-grade PEG used since 1994 as a preservative is now known to dissolve the wood instead of preserving it. None of the materials (written and audiotour) at the site discuss this, though they do mention the change of preservative in 2003. I'm not sure whether I misinterpreted what I was told or if this is a case where people who made an honest (though serious) mistake are hoping to be quietly dead before the general public learns of their blunder.

We visited the RN Museum after the Mary Rose and found it sort of whimsically interesting (if that makes sense). Among things that amazed me were several of Geoff Hunt's original paintings from the covers of Patrick O'Brian's novels. They were simply there, hanging on a wall; apparently to encourage the purchase of prints. (One was The Reverse of the Medal; I recall them being about 18x30", but don't quote me on that.)

Associated with the museum was the best bookshop I found during the trip. Consistently I bought any written material I found that might be useful to me in my work. There was a lot of it here, including Destroyer Captain by Roger Hill, a memoir of his WW II service. This proved (when I read it after returning home) not only informative (his was one of the escorts pulled away from convoy PQ17 when the shore staff panicked in the belief the Tirpitz planned to attack. The escorts thought they were about to make a suicidal attack on a German battleship, and the crews of the merchant ships being left to die cheered them--in the same belief) but harrowing. Hill is unpretentiously frank about his problems with PTSD.

We relaxed in downtown Southampton after leaving the museum. There's a sky needle, but the wait to go up was 45 minutes and none of us had a lot of energy by then. I changed dollars to pounds at a very bad rate ($2.25/pound) at a kiosk, but at least Jo and I had pocket money. We headed back toward North Poole but stopped in Wimbourne Minster to dodge the evening rush hour. We were a bit early for supper, so we walked around the town viewing the cathedral and interesting old houses. John compared house prices with those of Rainham. (Nothing in Southern England is cheap, but Wimbourne Minster is a bit less outrageous than the Medway Towns.)

One large edifice had a variety of Tudor embellishments; it was now very upscale (judging from the cars) housing. We found a sign explaining that it'd been built as a grammar school in 1849... fake Tudor, but real early Victorian. It raises the question of what is historical. (I'm over sixty; the question has a certain amount of personal application.)

Parked beside us in the lot was a smARTcar, one of several I noticed on this trip. It's a stubby little thing (you can park several of them crosswise in a normal parking space) that reminds me of the BMW-Isetta bubblecars which I'd thought were extremely neat in the late '50s. John said he believed the company was Swiss owned but that the cars were built for them by one of the major manufacturers. They were efficient but expensive. I took a couple pictures.

It turns out (if you were wondering) that they were indeed developed for Swatch, though the manufacture is in Germany and Daimler-Chrysler owns the company now. The cars are very expensive and have lower gas mileage than a Toyota Prius; the venture has lost money every year of operation.

Having said that, smARTcars are awfully cute, and I saw one belting down the motorway between Rochester and London at the speed of other traffic. Roger Penske, a name I respect, is planning to import them into the US shortly. Still, I'll probably stick with my motorcycles.

A German TV production team was filming a Rosemary Pilcher novel in town; we saw crews with boom mikes as a woman in an upstairs room (1st floor in British parlance, I suppose) carried on a conversation with someone in the street. In a plaza not far away was a bookshop, which unfortunately was closed; the note on the door referenced the filming. I thought the owner was appearing as an extra. A red Morgan was parked in front of the building.

There was a cart of books by the door, though--the sort of low-priced stuff that bookshops leave on the honor system (as the contents aren't worth stealing). I found Five Plays by AA Milne, which I thought might be amusing. (I've read some of Milne's non-Pooh stuff, but you don't see it often in the US .) There wasn't a price marked, but I looked around for a can or a slot in the door to drop a pound or two in.

At this point I noticed the fellow in a turtleneck and dark glasses watching us. "Is this all part of the film set?" I asked. It was. I stuck Milne back in the tray. A little later a tractor blatted up to join the Morgan, but we didn't see the actual filming take place. I'll probably control my vague urge to read a Rosemary Pilcher book, but I may see if somebody on-line has the Milne volume.

Dinner, in the garden behind a pub, was for me an excellent chicken in cream sauce. The British system is to hold your credit card behind the bar till it's time to pay, by the way. It seems a reasonable way to prevent folks from stiffing the house.

Thence back to the hotel where we again sat outside and chatted. It was another remarkable day.

Wednesday, August 9: We got up bright and early--John's specifics against jet lag work extremely well--and set straight out for Sherborne Castle , figuring to get breakfast in the tea shop. Despite a couple wrong turnings and a large truck in front of us, we reached Sherborne right at 9 am --and learned that it didn't open until 11 am , by which time we needed to be heading south to meet Val.

I would cheerfully have paid somebody, but since that wasn't an option we simply wandered around outside. (I regret the discourtesy, but we'd come an awfully long way.) Though there's an interior tour during visiting hours, it's the grounds that we'd really come for.

The house had been built by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1594. There's a stone seat overlooking the old road where he sat smoking his pipe and watching the traffic to and from Dorchester passing just below him. (Supposedly a servant, startled at his master's new fad, doused Raleigh with the pitcher of beer he was bringing out, thinking he'd caught fire.)

In the 1750s the then Earl of Digby hired Capability Brown to reshape the property according to the tastes of the day. This was a massive undertaking which included grading the slope from the house down to an artificial 50-acre lake.

It didn't stop there, however. There's a real ruined abbey in the rising woodland across the lake. Shortly after Brown had finished, the Earl hired a local stonemason to build a false ruined tower (a folly) onto the existing abbey wall. He liked the effect so much that the next year he had the mason come back and add crenellations to the wall itself.

On the grounds but walled off from them (and separately administered by the National Trust) is a real castle, also ruined: it'd held out for several days against Cromwell in 1645, so he destroyed it to avoid having a similar problem later. (Not a stupid man, Cromwell.) It wasn't open yet either, so we contented ourselves with taking pictures over the wall.

The walk along the stream below the lake was very attractive. Indeed, Sherborne was a nice place to spend a morning generally.

On our way out we stopped to take a closer look at the field gun standing as a gate guard. The British aristocracy really does take its military responsibilities seriously. (And while I'm as ready as the next working-class American to comment on the blunders of titled fools, Penshurst Place--which we saw in 2004--was the seat of Lord Gort, who prevented disaster at Dunkirk and then at Malta.) This gun, a 75-mm Model '97, was marked as having been captured from the Turks in 1915. Turkey didn't have an indigenous arms industry in the early years of the 20th century, so the Turks bought from Europe . The French 75 was the best available at the time.

We headed for Chichester with plenty of time, so we stopped for a heavy breakfast--we hadn't eaten since the night before--along the way. The restaurant was one of the few we ate at which didn't appear to have been a pub originally; rather, it was an adjunct to a large farming operation.

I asked the manager--that sounds more fancy than proper for the very family operation--if there was a drop box where I could mail some postcards. There was a brief discussion, ending when one of the women eating at the next table said she'd mail them from her home. (Thank you, unknown British woman.) This was typical of the genuinely nice people we met consistently on our trip.

We (by car) and Val (by train) reached Chichester at the same time, but it took us some while and phone calls (presumably across the small train/bus station) to find one another. Jo and I had the same problem finding John in 2004 at the West Kensington tube station; perhaps it has something to do with the English air. We then bundled into the Vauxhall and drove to the Roman palace at Fishbourne.

The site is very large and fascinating, but 'palace' is misleading. Fishbourne was a very provincial place, a villa built after the Roman Conquest. It's a very important archeological site, but it wasn't an important Roman site in its own day.

Fishbourne become an administrative center by the late 3d century as systems broke down and magnates took increasingly governmental roles in the prelude to feudalism; but the notion that it was built for an allied British king is a hopeful guess, and the extensive mosaics are of no particular artistic merit. (They're clumsy, generally simple, and some of the designs are truncated because the workmen laying the tesserae got the dimensions wrong.)

Fishbourne is precisely the sort of rural center that I've used frequently, both in stories set in Roman times and for settings derived from those originals. (There's one in Mistress of the Catacombs, for example; but I've done similar things in my SF.) Seeing the site taught me things that I hadn't realized from extensive reading about villas (including Fishbourne itself).

For example, mosaics were laid directly on the ground instead of on a bed of concrete or a raised floor of planks. If the ground wasn't firm--one room of the villa had been built over an old rubbish pit--the floor quickly began to ripple. Eventually the owner would have a new floor laid over the old one with a layer of fill to level it temporarily. The rubbish pit was repaired with more extensive fill and a new design over the central hole; the floor must've looked rather like a sunken bathtub immediately before.

The docents and the guidebooks referred to the Greek Key design. I was trying to figure out what that was, when suddenly the light dawned: they were talking about the Greek letter Chi, ch, which looked like an X and was pronounced Kee. I was a little disturbed by this realization, because it suggests that the written materials hadn't been edited with the care I would've expected.

Fishbourne was destroyed in a fire toward the end of the 3d century AD. There's no sign of fighting, but the timing suggests that the fire may be connected to the reconquest in 293 AD by Constantius Chlorus of the British Empire of Allectus (who'd taken over at the assassination of Carausius, who'd declared himself emperor in 290 ad . An invasion could cause all manner of disasters which have nothing to do with battle. A few of the obvious possibilities are deserters, slaves getting drunk after the master flees with the money chest, or tenant farmers burning rent records.

The present Fishbourne site has extensive gardens. Though they aren't exactly historical recreations, they focus on Roman plants. I was particularly taken by the lush purple blooms of the cardoon, which I now know is a relative of the artichoke and (by the Romans) eaten in the same way.

We then drove to Arundel to see the castle. Which indeed we did--it's a huge thing in the middle of town--but we got there just after the 4 pm closing. (John later learned that it's really a 19th century recreation, the equivalent of Colonial Williamsburg.) Since we were there, we wandered around the heart of Arundel.

An art gallery had Chagall prints for sale. Across the street was a computer shop where I bought my own converter cord. (The shop assistant was a little puzzled; it isn't, of course, the sort of thing that's normally sold separately. "A fiver?" I said, pulling out the bill. "Done!" he said.) And we found quite a nice used bookshop where I got Wildlife in a Southern County by Richard Jeffries (though the author isn't listed on the volume) and Jo found a Dr Doolittle she didn't have. I'd planned to read the Jeffries on the flight back to the US , but we'll come to that. They had one of my books also--one of the Isles series, as I recall. I signed it for them and gave them a bookmark.

We then headed toward Havant where we were booked for the night, figuring to pick up dinner on the way. We ran into some difficult traffic and had to change plans a couple times. We passed through Bognor Regis, where George IV died. We agreed that George summed up the place with his last words: "Bugger Bognor!"

In looking at the map--maps; we were using three of various sorts--I noticed Emsworth nearby and suggested we head there because of the connection of the name with Wodehouse (though the Earl of Emsworth and Blandings Castle weren't located on the south coast). In any case we got a very nice dinner (mine was organic lamb, which always makes me wonder if in some places lamb is silicon based). Emsworth is near the Goodwood, where cars as well as horses race. The pamphlet on Vintage Car racing made me think of watching GP races at Indianola and Elkhart Lake in the mid '60s, vintage indeed by today.

And, reading a biography of Wodehouse after our return, I learned that Wodehouse lived at Emsworth early in his writing career. Though I didn't know it at the time, the town of Emsworth really was a Wodehouse location and probably provided the name (though not the location) of the owner of Empress of Blandings.

Thence to another Premier Travel Inn, with large clean rooms in a pleasant hilltop location. The picnic tables set up outside the associated restaurant sloped significantly, but by rotating one so that I leaned forward rather than sideways I wrote and read comfortably outdoors (where I prefer to be).

Thursday, August 10 : up and read outside at the (slightly relocated) picnic table. When the rest of the group arrived, we went further down into the restaurant proper and had a very pleasant Continental breakfast and chatted.

The news (which John and Val had listened to) wasn't reassuring. There was some sort of flap on and the government had banned all carry-on luggage from aircraft. I figured that with luck this would've sorted itself out by Sunday, but it'd be what it'd be.

John mentioned another nematode team off the west coast of Scotland on the old research vessel Discovery, whose engines failed. They began to drift toward the rocky lee shore. Lifeboats from the nearby coast guard station were circling them, and a Nimrod search and rescue aircraft was overhead. While this was going on (and before the cursing engineers got the engines started again), the nematode team was standing on the deck and singing over and over, " Abide With Me ."

When I got up to pay for breakfast, I found I didn't have my business credit card. John paid for the meal while I rushed back to the room hoping that I'd set it down on the dresser when we arrived the night before. I had, thank goodness. It was a stupid mistake to have made, but all it cost me was a few minutes of stark terror.

Thence to Hever Castle, the family seat of the Bullen (now more commonly Boleyn) family, and thus connected with Henry VIII through his association with both Ann and before that her sister. After Henry executed Ann, the castle became the marriage portion of Anne of Cleves who lived here after Henry divorced her in turn.

On the way I noticed that the trees to either side of local roads in Britain are notched to allow cars, but they aren't cut flat vertically as they are in the US . There are no utility lines flanking the roads, so trimming just forms a square conduit high enough for vehicles.

The topiary in front of Hever Castle was really amazing; I particularly liked the sculpted ladybugs. I also found the clematis growing in and through the yew hedges attractive. I suppose it was a planned effect, but if an accident, it was a happy one.

As usual I got all the available guides on the assumption that I won't be back and the incremental cost is negligible. Here that meant booklets on both the castle and on the extensive gardens in the rear.

Hever, like many other sites in England, didn't permit photographs of the interior. I understand the wish of the proprietors to maximize their income, but generally the available printed material doesn't cover as much as I'd like. (That wasn't the case here, for reasons I'll get to.)

Entrance is through an attractive enclosed half-timbered courtyard. In the lobby were displayed two (not a pair of) postillion's boots, armored with wood and heavy leather to protect the inside leg of postillions riding the right-hand horses of a team. They're very similar in design and purpose to motocross boots.

There wasn't any obvious reason for postillion's boots to be displayed here rather than anywhere else, but in fact I'd never seen or even heard of such items before in my life. They by themselves made the visit to Hever worthwhile.

The castle had been in a run-down condition before it was bought and rebuilt by Lord Astor in 1903. I realized what that meant as I listened to a docent describing the first ground-floor room we entered, mentioning that the carved railing around the upper level was modeled on one at King's College, Oxford . When I prodded her, she admitted that the room had been a kitchen in Tudor times. It'd been completely built and furnished by Lord Astor in accordance with his archaizing tastes. In fact, apart from the fabric of the walls, it was as phony as the Rockefellers' Colonial Williamsburg or the Vanderbilts' Biltmore House. One wonders if there's something genetic bursting out in the need for palaces by the offspring of Anglo-American robber barons.

In the staircase to the second (well, first in British parlance) floor is a watercolor showing the castle before renovation. It was basically a very large equipment shed (or tack room). I'm not blaming Astor for what he did; but the result is no more Tudor than the Luxor Casino is Egypt . There wasn't anything I wanted to photograph.

In the long hall upstairs is a series of tableaux of various scenes from the life of Henry VIII, concluding with the execution of Ann Boleyn. It was odd to be reading CJ Sansom's descriptions of Thomas Cromwell before breakfast and seeing a costumed manikin of Cromwell in the afternoon.

Letters and a prayer book used by Ann Boleyn are on display upstairs as well. Hever Castle has a lot of real history in it, though the ground floor interiors aren't part of it.

I was put off by the phony pretension of the castle interior, but the gardens were marvelous. They were in a variety of styles but didn't claim to be anything but magnificent, and they were.

They're picked out by antique statuary placed in appropriate settings. I was particularly taken by the Roman style garden which reminded me of photographs I've seen of Tivoli, and by the lakeside loggia and piazza in the style of the Italian Renaissance. The latter are used to stage Shakespearian plays--and work very well for the purpose, John and Val say.

Pictures are allowed outside the castle, and I took many. While I'm not able to identify trees and flowers with any ability (despite efforts and many opportunities to improve), I've come to very much like gardens. The grounds of Hever Castle are among the most attractive that I've seen.

We headed back to Rochester but stopped near Hever for dinner at another upscale rural pub, the Wheat Sheaf. The food was excellent as was the case every time we ate on this trip. (Well, there were a couple of hotel breakfasts that should either have been better or a lot cheaper, but breakfast is just fuel for a day of sightseeing.)

I don't remember eating well during our 1977 trip to England --with the exception of a magnificent Full English Breakfast which Jennie Campbell cooked for us when we stayed overnight with her and Ramsey in Liverpool . I think that's a combination of factors, including the fact that we were on a tight budget. I don't believe that saved us very much money (the places we ate on this trip were all reasonably priced), but by focusing on inexpensive we got cheap.

And of course we didn't have native guides in 1977 to the degree that we did in John. We were in the tourist areas of London seeing tourist things on a packaged tour, and that didn't bring us to places like the Wheat Sheaf.

And yet again--29 years is a long time (though I swear it doesn't feel like a long time). John says that changes in English culture and demography have caused rural pubs to become restaurants rather than primarily drinking spots in order to survive. The standard of dining today may simply be better than it was in 1977. In any case, if you like plain food extremely well prepared, you'll be pleased at what Southern England offers.

Back to Rochester and Bridgestone Manor, not a place where I expect to stay on further visits. The Ethernet in the room still didn't work, and the wireless worked only in the lobby. It turned out that because the room (though the hotel was new) was very short of outlets, the cable box had been unplugged to allow use of the coffee maker. (You got the choice of one or the other.)

Premier Travel Inns do much better. The fact that they're also much cheaper is less important to me, but it's nice to have.

As it turned out, I didn't need an internet connection: no major wheels had come off. On the other hand, things most certainly could have gone wrong; I'd have worried both about the pets and the Baen situation if I hadn't been able to connect.

Friday, August 11 : Again, I got up and read Sansom outside for a bit before John arrived. These moments of down-time, completely by myself, are something I need in order to function. Among other things, it makes it difficult for me to stay at somebody else's house (or for that matter, to have a house guest myself). I don't mean I can't handle that--just that it adds a bit to my stress level.

We stopped at John's house again to pick up Val and to look at the cover of Lucy's Blade , John's first novel, which he'd found on the Amazon website. It's an excellent piece of work; I guessed (correctly) that it was by Clyde Caldwell.

John was very excited. It made me think of all the covers I've had--probably a couple hundred all told. Most of them were good, and some have been extremely good. A good one still pleases me, but the utter delight that John was displaying--that I can't muster any more, not since I saw the art for Hammer's Slammers back in 1978. Maybe it does feel like a long time after all.

We zoomed off to Canterbury, Jo and I in the back because I don't need legroom for comfort (headroom is another matter, but the Vauxhall did much better than the back seat of many larger American cars). (John and Val apologized, but she gets carsick in the back and so far as I was concerned it was their car.)

The center of Canterbury is very touristy, though not in a bad way. We went first to the cathedral, which surprised me even before we entered. It's built of very soft yellow limestone, similar to the Niobrara Chalk I grew up with in Dubuque . We used blocks of that local stone for a retaining wall in front of the house which dad built, but I would've said it was too soft to use for a building.

Having seen the cathedral, I'm even more strongly of that opinion. The exterior fabric is in the process of reconstruction and probably has been in the process of reconstruction from a generation or two after it was built. I noted for example that the statues in one of the porches were being replaced; they'd been replaced in the 1890s also, and the features which'd weathered completely away were those of the benefactors of that date rather than those of Norman nobles.

The interior held much of great historical significance; I was particularly struck by the tomb (being renovated) of the Black Prince and by the place where Becket was murdered (marked by a slab on the floor and above it by a sconce of swords, a work of art which reminded me of a steel asterisk). I'm very glad to have seen the cathedral, but I feel toward it as I do toward Westminster Abbey (which we saw in 1977): it would've been wrong not to visit when the opportunity arose, but it wasn't one of the great emotional moments of this trip.

For lunch we sat on street benches and to dine on packaged sandwiches and bottled water from Marks and Spencer. We then tracked down the local museum with more difficulty than four very smart people should've had.

The Canterbury Museum was a creation of World War II. Hitler got the bright idea that bombing tourist sites was the way to win the war. (All I can find to say in favor of the notion is that his next idea, invading the Soviet Union , was even worse.) The cathedral wasn't much damaged, but a bomb did excavate extensive Roman remains well beneath the present city. (In 1983 we viewed a Carolingian palace in Frankfurt which'd come to light in similar fashion a few years later.)

There's a little gift shop at street level and stairs down to the museum itself. Some attractive Roman mosaics have been left in situ (separated from the visitors' area by windows). As at Fishbourne, they were laid directly on the ground and have therefore settled into humps and dips less level than most American front lawns.

Kneeling to peer at the mosaics is a professorial, pipe-smoking manikin whom accompanying photo captions identified as Sheppard Frere. He was headmaster of a nearby boys' school and took charge of the excavations, parlaying the experience into a chair at Oxford. I was delighted to see this because Frere's Britannia , which I'd carried with me to Viet Nam, had a lot to do with my interest in Roman Britain and things Roman more generally. It truly is a small world.

We headed back through the drizzle (the weather, which'd been unseasonably warm when we landed at Gatwick, had shifted to cool and wettish) and called John Treadaway to see if he'd like to come down from London to have dinner with us. He was delighted, so we arranged to meet at our hotel (easy to find) and them for him and his partner Jerry to follow us to the White Rabbit (which isn't so easy for a stranger).

The plan was for us to pick up a rental car in Rochester on the way back. That would give us two vehicles the next day to proceed with the entire Lambshead family. We got to the dealership, started the paperwork--and learned that the car itself was at a distant location (on the way to Canterbury, in fact; we'd gone past it) and effectively inaccessible on a rainy rush hour. This was very irritating, but England doesn't have a monopoly on stupid people who don't communicate.

JT and Jerry (Jere? I've never seen her name spelled) arrived with no difficulty on his 1300-cc Yamaha sport tourer. JT and I use motorcycles as our primary transportation. We've owned Kawasakis in the recent past but have gone back to brands that work better for us (in my case a Suzuki Bandit 1200). We're both very pleased not to be riding Kawasakis.

JT and Jere have matching Chase-Harper bandoliers like the one a fan/friend sent me for my birthday. I mentioned in a newsletter how handy it was, and they got them on my recommendation. (They're pleased too.)

Dinner was a delight. I recall both Kirsty and Kim being along, but I'm probably wrong because we had only the one car. The back seat of the Vauxhall is comfortable with three (so long as they're the size of me, Jo, and either Lambshead daughter) but I don't think you can put six in the vehicle unless one is curled up in the trunk. (Well, the boot.) In any case, it was good food and good conversation with really good people. A fit ending to another marvelous and informative day.

Saturday, August 12 : John arrived in the morning with two bits of good news. First, JT and Jerry had gotten safely home (last we'd seen they were taking the wrong road off a roundabout in the rain and heading for some place other than SE London). Second, John had found a rental car at another garage.

We went to his house and picked up Val, then got the car: a Ford Focus with a 1.6 liter engine. It's very similar to the US model, though the engine is smaller and more highly stressed. (Regular gas in England is 93 octane, so even econoboxes can have what by US standards are high-performance engines.) The trunk/boot is huge by European standards, there's plenty of interior room, and the car performs well though it's not as quite peppy as John's Vauxhall (which has factory tweaks). In all, a good choice for a rental after the disappointing performance of the Nissan when we were here in 2004.

We went as a small convoy (Val and the girls in the Vauxhall, John carrying us in the Ford) to Scotney Castle, which I'd never heard of. It's a deliberately picturesque delight. That is, the site began in 1380 as a real moated castle with four round towers. In the 1640s much of the castle was pulled down and a new 'modern' dwelling was built from the fabric of the castle; one tower was retained, however, simply for looks.

Finally, in the 19th century most of the 17th century wing was pulled down for material to build the current house on higher ground overlooking the original site (which of course is surrounded by water and not terribly healthful). Part of the wing was left as a folly. The family owned successful ironworks and didn't lack money for its whims. More important (and far rarer), the successive owners had taste. One was himself a noted watercolourist, and family friends included major artists (including Henry Moore, one of whose statues stands near the boathouse).

The result is welcoming, peaceful, and altogether wonderful. I took many pictures, so many that I ran my camera batteries flat again (I should've brought an 8-pack in Portsmouth when the rechargables pooped out; live and, apparently, learn in a depressingly slow fashion).

The new house wasn't open, but there were docents in the living quarters which remained in the original dwelling (it'd become the bailiff's residence when the family moved up the slope).There's an honest-to-goodness priest's hole, used for several years by an English Jesuit, one of a group whom the Spanish crown inserted in England claiming to be survivors of a ship wrecked during the 1591 attack on Cadiz. (The written description is rather disingenuous, implying that priests were persecuted at the time for their Catholic faith. In this case, the individuals were agents of a foreign power bent on the subjugation of England and the enslavement of her people--as Spain was attempting to do in Holland then also.)

Some whimsical family oddities were on display also. I was particularly taken by a model of the original castle made from bottle corks. It'd been finished in 1906 by an male family member who was by then 85. It makes one think about personal legacies. (I'm not objecting to his choice; he left something that remains a century later, which very few people can claim.)

We had a heavy, very good meal in (as usual) a rural pub, The Globe and Rainbow in (if I wrote it down correctly) Kilnhurst. While there I leafed through a booklet listing National Trust houses and gardens in Surrey, Sussex and Kent . There I found Bateman's, Kipling's house from 1902 till his death in 1936. I checked it against the roadmap (I have embarrassingly little notion of where things are in England ) and found to my surprise that it seemed to be close.

John checked and, equally surprised, agreed that it was close. Thence to Bateman's!

Distances are tricky in England, especially when you're way out in the sticks (the Kiplings moved here in part to dodge tourists). Jo and I rented Naulakha, the house the Kiplings had built near Brattleboro, Vermont, over the week of my 51st birthday. That had a lot of good memories (my sister and her guy, Jim Baen, and the Van Name entourage stayed with us during parts of the period); it was interesting to compare the two experiences.

To a degree the houses are very different. Naulakha was built of wood as a writer's residence, looking down a slope to the Connecticut River; Bateman's was stone with the date 1634 over the entrance and lay at the bottom of the valley of the River Dudwell. Both made me feel extremely comfortable, however. A house has no more important attribute than that.

Bateman's is as Kipling left it, which wasn't the case with Naulakha. The walls are decorated with work by major artists (including Whistler, Poynter, and Philip Burne-Jones) as well as plaques by Kipling's father illustrating several collections of stories set in India .

The study where Kipling wrote contains his working library; this reminds me a great deal of my own library, just as the concepts underlying the design of Naulakha reminded me of those dictating the design of the house my wife and I built. (This doesn't mean that I'm like Kipling, I think, but rather that Kipling and I were writers with similar tastes.) I noted with amusement that he had a complete set of the works of the journalist/naturalist Richard Jeffries, whose Wildlife in a Southern County I'd bought in Arundel to join the Jeffries titles I'd found in the US.

There were very knowledgeable docents in every room. The fellow in the study recited a number of poems in the room where they'd been written, identified the wolverine-pelt rug (I had no idea the darned things were so big!), and pointed out the photo of Dr Jameson over the mantel. Jameson had led the disastrous (and I would've said stupid) raid into the Transvaal in 1895 in an attempt to spark war between Great Britain and the Boer Republics . He was, I was amazed to learn, the subject of Kipling's famous poem If . (I like and respect both Kipling and his work. There are, however, subjects on which we would've differed.)

They didn't allow photos inside Bateman's, which was a pity. I got batteries (actually, I got two sets as the first quartet was dead out of the box) and took a few pictures of the exterior. Only a few, though, because it'd begun to drizzle.

Before we entered the main building, we'd seen the garage with Kipling's blue 1928 Rolls-Royce (his sleigh is similarly displayed at Naulakha). We did not, and after the fact I regret this, walk to the bottom of the garden to see the old mill which was the setting for one of his most savage political allegories, however. Well, I'm not dead yet.

We motored severally back to the Medway, in my case at least happy and exhausted. Because of our large midday meal, we didn't get together again in the evening (though Jo and I snacked in the hotel bar). Packing wasn't difficult, and I was hopeful that the regulations about carry-on luggage wouldn't be as absurdly draconian as the news suggested.

Sunday, August 13 : John arrived in the Focus (our luggage fit in the Vauxhall, but with more of a struggle than in the rental Ford required) and got us to Gatwick with no traffic problems. The interior of the terminal was a zoo, however.

The first task was to get to the American Airlines desk, which was on the far side of a huge room filled with people standing in lines to check into other airlines. I took the lead and marched forward, saying, "Passing through," loudly at each new mob.

Have I mentioned that I'm uncomfortable in large groups of people (which is agoraphobia, not claustrophobia as most people seem to think)? It's all right if I can either lose myself in reading or keep moving. Here I kept moving. We reached the proper line and learned that no, the new regulations were just as absurdly draconian as the news said: only travel documents could be carried aboard. No food, books, paper, or medicines; pens were being confiscated by some security people.

The situation was more the result of Labour Party politics than of international terrorism. Blair, the prime minister, had lost all authority and was likely to be replaced as head of the party by his enemy Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Blair's ally, a political hack named John Reid, was Transportation Minister. Reid planned to run against Brown and decided to show himself as Doing Something about the Terrorist Threat. Because Brown is a stupid man, his choice of what to do was stupid also.

I thought about it. I was wearing many layers of clothing with pockets. I poured aspirin and caffeine pills into various pockets, a few in each, and clipped a blue disposable pen in the breast pocket of my blue shirt. It was in plain sight, if anybody happened to look. I stuck the camera card into my hip pocket, under my handkerchief; I preferred not to trust my 378 photos to the high-power X-rays used on checked baggage. If there was a problem, I'd deal with it.

This whole business hit me at an irrational level. I got through it by deciding that the army hadn't broken me in two years, so I wasn't going to let security people do it in one day. The army had come pretty close, though, and I'm still not healed from that. Still, they weren't going to shoot at me this time.

The security people were trading off jobs at ten-minute intervals; there were multiple stages of screening. I watched a pair of blue-uniformed personnel walk past with automatic rifles (RO 80s) rather than the MP-5 sub-machine guns I'd expected. Thinking about it, I decided that penetration of 5.56 ball ammo was probably less than that of the 9 mm from the MP-5, but I still grimaced to think of using a weapon like that in a crowd of civilians.

I chatted cheerfully with the security man while I was patted down and had no problem. Jo was carrying a toothbrush and toothpaste: these were confiscated.

We then proceeded to the gate and waited in the corridor for it to be opened. There was an internet kiosk there. I sat in it and wrote notes and letters on the back of various travel documents since I didn't have a book to lose myself in. (You weren't allowed to buy books or newspapers inside the security cordon. Did I say John Reid is a stupid twit?)

They opened the gate, and to my utter amazement we were searched again. Men and women were separated. I had no problems, but Jo's screener tried to take her watch. (Steal her watch, I suspect. Well, there are crooks in America too.) Jo refused and the woman gave up to look for a more pliable victim.

We then boarded our 777. I like the aircraft, but this time my seat was in the center of the five-abreast middle section. I'd drunk quite a lot of fluid in the gate, since I've learned how dehydrating a long flight can be. There is a corollary to drinking a lot of fluids: I made three trips to the john in the course of the flight, changing aisles each time to limit the amount of trouble I was giving two people each trip. Oh, well.

I continued to write my notes, which a stewardess noticed. "You have a pen!" she said. "Yes, ma'am," I agreed. She said she needed to take it for examination.

I surrendered the pen, figuring that a show of reasonableness was my best available response. She returned it in a few minutes. I have a vision of a conclave of stewardesses staring at a blue medium-point Jimnie, discussing whether it could hold a bomb.

That's the trouble with hysteria, of course. If you have someone screaming, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" it's very hard even for reasonable, reasonably intelligent people (and all the stewardesses I've met have been both those things) to keep their mental equilibrium.

I usually read books instead of using the in-flight entertainment, but under the circumstances I explored it. There were several music channels that was interesting, and the videos included sitcoms and a BBC sampler that I found delightful. The common thread of the block was cars, a subject I'm interested in; getting to see Top Gear with Jeremy Clarkson was the silver lining in a generally foolish and unpleasant business.

An amusing aspect of the flight was that we had to fill out landing cards. On the flight in the other direction, the stewardesses had been issued 30 ballpoint pens for passengers to use and return. They'd only gotten four of them back, so they were distinctly short. I loaned mine to other people in my block of seats, some recompense to them for sharing the row with somebody who kept getting up to pee.

We landed at RDU at 4:50 pm local time. The hassle wasn't as bad as it'd been in 2004 when our Port of Entry was Philadelphia, though it involved yet another search. We took our bags to the shuttle, which took us to our car in the long-term parking lot, which took us home where all was well.

Despite bureaucracies, it was a wonderful, wonderful trip.