"And then he said..."

The fear of going bald does strange things to a man - just ask Mark Oaten.

Thing is, there’s no turning back from it. Greyness can be dyed - or embraced as distinguished - while general creakiness and excess weight can be argued away with vague promises of the gym. Hair loss, however, is the end to your illusions of eternal youth.

In my case, I’ve spent the last couple of years cultivating a ponytail that reached halfway down my back. It’s gone now - sent to a charity that makes wigs for child cancer patients.

For the last month or so I’d been seeing signs that screamed ‘hair loss’. From the scalp pains and the variable depth on different parts of my head, to the slimmer ponytail and the dead hamster in the plughole each time I showered, it looked very much like the game was up.

My mum, briefly a hairdresser in her youth, disagreed. So did Beloved Other Half who, despite her fondness for radically short styles, still has more experience than me in possessing long hair. Both argued that hair can, and does, thin under the stress of length.

Nevertheless, I decided it was time for the ponytail to go. If the barber discovered acres of rolling space, we’d have an answer.

I’m now back living in my home town after 20 years away in Norfolk and London. The barbershop I used to go to when I was younger is still there, although the staff has - of course - completely changed.

Once, it was dominated by a cartoon Italian with long permed hair and a moustache, a twinkling smile, and a love for the ladies. Alas, it transpired that one of the ladies he loved was aged 14 and, faced with the police, he threw himself under a train. The young lad who cut my hair barely remembered him - he’d seen him for childhood haircuts but never worked with him.

These are the things that underline the passing years.

Has to be said, young Rez did a fine job on the hair. After checking three or four times that I did really want the ponytail cut off, he sheared it away. A brief look of panic crossed his face when I cried out “nooo, I’ve changed my mind”, but it was replaced by a broad grin when he checked in the mirror and saw from my expression that it had been my idea of a joke.

After a remarkably short time, and an even more remarkably small bill, I was shorn neatly and the ponytail, still secured by its hair band, was wrapped up in tissue in my pocket. He conducted a close inspection of my scalp and declared that no, I had nothing at all to worry about in the hair loss stakes. Not yet, anyway.

And the ponytail? That’s going to charity.

I have an ambivalent attitude towards cancer charities. Heroes during one close family member’s illness, villains during an in-law’s last months. However, I was determined that I’d do something useful with the discarded hair.

The Cancer Research UK page on the subject of hair donation is not terribly encouraging. But Beloved Other Half did some digging on those ol’ interweb things and came up with a charity called the Little Princess Trust (website / Facebook group) which was set up to provide wigs to children with cancer and other illnesses that cause hair loss.

Now, I’m not generally one for excessive pinkness. And I do tend to believe that little girls are better served by aspiring to be engineers rather than princesses. But there are times to be a grouch and times to shut up and embrace your inner sparkliness.

The Little Princess Trust was set up by the parents of Hannah Tarplee from Hereford, who died in June 2005 of cancer, aged five. It helps parents of children with cancer and other illnesses that cause hair loss to find and pay for realistic-looking wigs made from real hair.

And, obviously, the hair has to come from somewhere. Hence the donations page. The rules (lifted here word-for-word from their website) are simple:

1. Ensure you have at least 10″-12″ of clean, good condition hair.
2. Hold the hair tightly whilst cutting it and securely tie the follicle end of the hair ensuring all the hair is lying in the same direction.
3. Package the hair in such away that it cannot become tangled.
4. Send it to;
   
   Little Princess Trust
   43 George Road
   Edgbaston
   Birmingham
   B15 1PL

It turned out, when measured, that my ponytail was exactly twelve inches. So off it goes.

I think I’ll stay short-haired for a while now. It’d be sad to turn 40 looking like a member of Status Quo, after all. But its nice, and a trifle ironic, to reflect that my brief panic about getting old has resulted in an action that will - hopefully - help someone young whose battle is simply to get where I am now.

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So, yesterday we went to have a potter around some woodland where, 26 years ago this month, an alien spaceship was seen to land.

Possibly.

The Rendlesham Forest Incident, in which a group of American airmen rushed out to what they thought was a crashed aircraft, is sometimes known as the”English Roswell”. Some, including a fairly senior officer, still believe with total sincerity that they encountered an alien craft that night. Naturally, a lot of people who can't be doing with that sort of thing have developed perfectly sensible arguments explaining why they didn't.

Our view? Just because an object flies and can't be explained, that doesn't make it an alien spacecraft. Equally, it's perfectly reasonable to assume there are some things in the sky - particularly the sky around two military airbases - that the average person has insufficient knowledge to explain. You can dismiss the suggestion that the airmen actually saw Orford Lighthouse (a tiny winking dot on the horizon when we were there yesterday) without having to accept they must therefore have had a close encounter.

These days the forest is rather different from that night in 1980. A combination of the Great Storm and regular Forestry Commission logging has radically changed the tree cover, the Americans have left the nearest base and, last year, the 25th anniversary of the incident was marked by the establishment of a three-mile marked “UFO trail” that takes a walker around the key locations involved.

Since the site is near the Suffolk coast, and we are on the west of London, it took us a while to get there. With the short winter days a factor, we tried to walk fast. We failed. By the time we reached the little clearing where the landing is supposed to have happened, it was pretty dark. Not as dark as the photos suggest, but plenty dark enough to reduce the visible detail and dramatically ramp up the atmosphere.

Do we think we stood in the shadow of where aliens once trod? Pffft - I seriously doubt it. Did we stand on the site of a mystery that, so far, has defied convincing explanation? No question.

The start of the UFO trail, in the Rendlesham Forest Centre car park

Easy, well-signposted broad paths make up most of the trail

Easy paths were helpful - because soon we started to lose the light

This object in the sky was easy enough to identify…

Landing lights near the gate of RAF Woodbridge - why are so many 'sightings' by military bases?

It just got darker…

…and darker…

…until, by the time we got to the landing site, we could barely see a thing.

Which didn't stop us trying.

Photos 1, 3, 6, 7, and (obviously) 9 by Beloved Other Half.

Newspaper bills - the posters outside shops with snappy headlines - are supposed to intrigue you into buying the paper by giving you a taster of the story. They're not supposed to leave you so doubled up with laughter that you decide it's safer to pass them by and look the stories up later online.

Which is what these two bills, classics of their kind, did to me today. They are, if the photo doesn't make it clear, on opposite sides of the same noticeboard - which surely counts as too much excitement in one place at one time.

Here are links to the stories, from the Bucks Free Press. One is a complicated tale of unsympathetic parking wardens, the other a jolly romp at a nightclub.

Jan's fined £30 … for being 60 seconds late

One of the 37 Wycombe motorists incorrectly fined by disgraced parking attendants has slammed the way he was treated.

Jan Lada, 52, from Cressex, was given the fine in September for being just 60 seconds late getting back to his car.

Rugby player takes pole dance title

Five hopefuls shimmied their way through the bar final of a national pole dancing competition on Thursday night - although a male student bucked the trend by taking the crown.

Crowds packed out the dance floor of Butlers in Frogmoor to cheer on the finalists who had spun, slid and shook their way through four heats to reach the bar final of the annual Polecats competition.

I wonder if he's landed yet?

The third and final batch of photos from our camping weekend (a dim and distant memory now, I fear) comes from Cleeve Abbey, which was strictly second division in the pre-dissolution abbeys and monasteries league, but which now boasts some remarkably complete ruins and is therefore well worth a visit.

Time warp
Looking across the cloisters to the largely-intact buildings on the other side, it's very easy to believe you're in a working building that just needs some repairs - not a relic from the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

Up to Bedfordshire
From the rear of the abbey complex, the two storey building with the dormitory upstairs and the ruined stub of the Chapter House sticking out. In the foreground are the footings of the reredorter (bathroom, to you and me).

Floor story
The late thirteenth century heraldic tiled refectory floor, discoved by excavation and now presenting a headache over how best to preserve it.

Monk beds
Upstairs in the dormitory - very atmospheric, and easy to visualise what life must have been like.

Watching for Santa
Up a chimney, taken with my head stuck in the fireplace. Couldn't resist it, sorry.

Unholy mess
Graffito of a tonsured monk, from a corridor - it certainly looks contemporary with the famous mediaeval wall painting in a nearby room. And the art is to a higher standard.

Obligatory sunset shot
Westwards from Blue Anchor. Who can resist a sunset? Especially with a thumping great cloud like that one, so artfully posed.

Here's a really cool thing: mini business cards with your Flickr photos on the back. They're from a London company called moo.com (you can guess the web address, I think…) and they're a) cheap and b) exceptionally high quality. I got a free sample of 10 cards as part of their launch, and will certainly be ordering a pack of 100. Only problem is, I'm not sure I'll be able to bring myself to give any of 'em away ;o)

For anyone motivated by a passion for vegetable growing, Rosemoor - the RHS gardens near Torrington in Devon - are a 'must see' at this time of year. I said I'd write more about our recent weekend spent camping, but frankly I'm inclined to let the photos do the talking.

Squash-like thing with blue flowery thing
One thing you learn early in vegetable growing is that it's not just utilitarian - you can grow for colour and beauty and contrast too.

Mirkwood
Rosemoor's atmospherically-gloomy woodland walk is a marked contrast to the floral bedding and homely veg of the rest of the gardens.

Des res for very small druids
All along the walk, piles of artfully-arranged stones and twisted, sentient-seeming roots have been left on stumps and against tree bases. Surreal, interesting and - at times - a trifle unnerving.

Hot stuff
In greenhouses and in the veg gardens, chillis in all shades of reds, oranges and purples grew with impressive verve.

Under the gourd walk
This pic by Beloved Other Half shows surely the most bizarre crop in the vegetable garden…

Fireflower
Almost the first things you encounter once you've paid and entered are the two rose gardens. This beauty was caught by my ridiculously low-quality camera phone - but looks none the worse for it.

Very mixed weather today.

Ever gluttons for punishment, we spent the weekend in a small tent on a hillside in Somerset. Friday night served up gale force winds, Saturday gave us thunderstorms, but the tent - a relic from my days in the Scouts and 25 years old if it's a day - was equal to all. A very good weekend, and a much-needed break from stuff going on at home. More to follow, but in the meantime here's some photos:

Home, sweet home

Room with a view

Time for tea

Having lots of lovely weather

Bit late, this post, but what the hell. A couple of weekends ago we combined two of our favourite interests - good books and archaeology - in one visit to the excavations at Silchester Roman Town.

Every year, Reading University holds a dig for its students on Insula IX of the site, gradually uncovering four centuries (so far) of history. Each year they hold a couple of open days - we went to a previous one and were greatly interested - but this year they did something extra: a visit from one of our favourite authors, Lindsey Davis, who gave a talk, read from one of her Falco novels, answered questions and signed autographs.

There are a tiny number of writers whose story-telling ability is such that I will automatically buy anything they publish, as soon as they publish it, and Davis is one of them. The Falco novels are an entertaining mix - part gritty detective tales, part comedy, with all the human insights that a well developed set of characters and their sprawling family relationships can provide. They were conceived as a way of setting a Philip Marlowe-style PI novel in the mean streets of ancient Rome but, as they have progressed, Falco's dreadful relatives have elbowed their way into the narrative, and Falco's adventures have also taken him across most of the empire - including that nightmarish rain-swept near-barbarian province to the north called Britain.

And you didn't have to spend long at the open day to see why the Romans must have hated it.

We had a quick look round the site in blazing sunshine, then went to Davis's talk - held in the marquee where the student diggers had their meal breaks. She was - as anyone who's read her pugnacious website would expect - entertaining, erudite and witty, with a to-the-point, no-nonsense attitude. Afterwards, we joined the official site tour, where one of the senior archaeologists took us around the edge of the trench and explained what was going on within it.

At this point, a thunderstorm materialised and the heavens opened.

Most of the diggers were, fortunately, on a break - most had dressed up in costume and those stranded outside, where they had been tending nail-making demonstrations, giving out directions or selling books, swiftly found that torrential rain turned bedsheet togas transparent, worked its way into all the nooks and crannies of plastic breastplates, and transformed realistic ancient British tunics back into heavy, itchy, sodden blankets.

We sheltered at the plant sales stall and watched the information Portakabin fill to bursting with summer-clothed visitors, then as soon as the first fury of the rain subsided we nipped back to have a look at the diggings - when you're relying on interpreting features from different coloured bands of earth, wet ground is so much easier to understand than dusty, dry ground. Strangely, no-one came with us.

We headed back to the car park as the rain continued to fall, passing ever more drenched visitors, our books bundled up tight in a plastic bag to keep them dry - a good day. Here's some photos:

The author and her public
Lindsey Davis signs autographs for fans after her talk, held in the marquee where off-duty diggers eat, rest and - to judge from the stereo on the other side of the tent - party after hours.

The road that used to be
A senior member of the digging team explains what's going on: she's on the fourth century road surface, behind her the excavations have reached the first century ground level. Running alongside the road is its drainage gully and a row of postholes from a late roadside arcade that have been driven through the earlier achaeology. The larger holes were all wells (apart from one cesspit) and the whole area behind the road was workshops.

Storm
At the height the storm, everyone's fled for cover. But see how the ground in the trench is now darker, more varied and therefore so much easier to interpret?

The Romans in Britain
How they must have hated it here… costumed students shelter from the rain after striking down a display of finds.