"And then he said..."

This is nice.

I'm sat with a cup of tea in the bright, airy garden room of a National Trust holiday cottage in the far south west of Cornwall, free from most of the cares of normal life and about as far as you can get from the barrage of Christmas commercialism. Hopefully we'll make it back to the Smoke in time for me to meet Ali before she returns to LA, but apart from that - goodbye world!

We're frequent visitors here and know the area well so Beloved Other Half has gone out exploring, to reacquaint herself with the coastal footpaths and sights here. I haven't joined her - instead I'm having a lazy few hours recovering from the aches and stiffness caused by nearly eight hours in the car yesterday getting here.

We're gloriously fog-free here at the moment - you can see for miles from our hill-top retreat - but most of yesterday was spent crawling through thick, freezing banks of the stuff, all the way from London to Bodmin. There we abruptly broke out of it and, in the space of a couple of yards, went from zero visibility to being able to see the Milky Way with the clarity of a planetarium display.

At one point, somewhere beyond Salisbury, we spent some 90 minutes in static traffic backed up from what appears to have been a very nasty accident about a mile ahead. We were on a dual carriageway, and we saw a procession of emergency vehicles come up the opposite site past us then, about five minutes later, force their way up from behind us through the immobile traffic on our side of the road.

Two fire engines came first, followed by a pair of ambulances a couple of minutes later. The police turned up maybe five minutes later, by which time the two lanes of traffic on our side of the road had long since arranged itself neatly on the verge and against the central reservation to create a clear lane between them.

While all this was going on, some of the cars stuck in the traffic jam were doing three-point turns and driving back against the traffic flow down the clear lane, braving evil looks from the rest of us, then diving down a side road to villages with names suspiciously like Royston Vasey. On at least one occasion, a car found itself nose-to-nose with an emergency vehicle. Serves the impatient bastard right, we all thought.

Finally, an hour later, five flatbed rescue trucks came through to clear away the wreckage, followed by one last police car, which made a big - and completely unnecessary - show of flashing its lights to clear a path that was already clear. We figured the driver was just throwing his weight around to cover up the fact that his role was going to be nothing more than standing there in a tall hat, directing traffic. The traffic started moving again and by the time we got to the accident scene most of the emergency vehicles had gone, leaving just a line of wrecks by the side of the road, some appallingly bent and some just slightly dented and two of them on the back of flatbeds, plus a couple of depressed-looking policemen waving us past.

We finally arrived at the cottage at a time not unadjacent to midnight, lit a fire in the new stove, and sank into the lumpy armchairs with a glass of wine.

Bliss.

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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.

Saturday saw us belatedly celebrating Beloved Other Half's birthday with a trip to Whipsnade Wild Animal Park, which I must surely have visited as a child, if only I could remember. Won't forget today in a hurry, though.

The night before, I'd read through pretty much all of my 2003 entries in this journal - comments too - and been saddened by how different I feel now from how I was then. The 2003 me seemed more carefree, quicker to joke and laugh, more likely to just bash out a couple of quick paragraphs as an entry without worrying too much about it - better company, probably, and definitely someone on whose shoulders the weight of the world sat less heavily.

Well, should you find yourself in a similar position, I can suggest a visit to see penguins, bears, rhinocerii, giraffes and infinite numbers of free-roaming wallabies as a powerful antidote.

It's impossible to pick a high point of the day, as each new thing seemed to top the last one.

A low-key start saw the bear enclosure apparently empty - we speculated they might have, very sensibly, packed it in for winter - and the penguins at the penguin pool sat stoically, doing nothing much at all. But even sedentary penguins are a fine sight on a cold Saturday, and we spent the longest time watching them as they mooched around, occasionally peering quizzically back at us.

From then on, new and exciting things piled up rapidly, despite the growing inconvenience of walking on what I'm now absolutely certain is, after all, a broken foot.

I'm searching for the right words to describe what it's like to see these exotic creatures so close - often just a couple of feet away across a fence and ditch - and what strikes me now is that, for a lot of the animals, it was remarkably like watching English farm animals with a surreal twist. For example, the zebras - and, to an extent, the giraffes - behaved and looked like horses in their fields and stables. Except one set had a Photoshop filter of stripes applied and the other lot had preposterously long necks and patchwork hides that Beloved Other Half described as looking like moth eaten old sofas.

Nowhere, for me, was this more marked than at the rhinoceros enclosure, a vast open grass space with a stable building in one corner. The rhinos formed a herd - males, females and a few young ones - and they wandered around the enclosure very much like domestic cattle, even ending the day all standing in a row in the lee of their building, catching the last of the sun. The very English setting enhanced this feeling, of course, as did our experience strolling through countless cattle herds when walking on the South West Coast path, and other walks. But never have we walked through a herd where the animals were van-sized blocks of dark concrete on legs, with little beady eyes and horns like siege weapons.

Not everything looked so homely, of course - the hippos in their pool, the families of elephants eating their high tea in the elephant house, the ludicrous pink flamingos, they all felt more like traditional zoo attractions, packaged for attention-challenged visitors and their Ritalin-deprived offspring.

And then there were the predators - wolves, lions and tigers.

Of them, the lions seemed least threatening. They lay placidly, watching us watch them, until eventually the female got up and wandered over to check on the cubs. The cubs - quite large now - responded by jumping on her, practicing how to take down prey. She calmly endured their antics for a few minutes until they got bored and everyone settled down again. They looked as dangerous as a family on holiday by the pool. Only the thick safety glass we were watching them through suggested otherwise.

By contrast, the wolf pack was scary in a way that probably harks back to some long-buried ancestral memory of when humans weren't quite so secure in their mastery of the world. Like the lions, they barely moved. In their case, however, their stillness looked like a pause before a full-scale pack pursuit of some hapless tourist. A few ears flicked, a few heads turned, and three wolves stood as sentries, permanently alert and poised for action.

The tigers were a higher level of threat still, having seemingly developed the ability to silently teleport. For quite some time as we stared into the enclosure we thought there was only one, lying in the middle surveying its domain. Then I looked up to see a man walking along the outside of the fence towards us. He was about 12 feet away when I heard him. With a feeling of complete shock I suddenly realised he was walking to keep pace with a tiger patrolling the inside of the fence. If it hadn't been for the relatively noisy person, that tiger would have been literally under our noses before we saw it. And, a minute or two later, as we watched the patrolling animal recede, we suddenly noticed a third, standing hidden in full view. It was a frightening thought, to imagine being suddenly inside the enclosure and watching the first tiger as you planned your escape, while two others were out there, unnoticed and able to be on top of you before you were aware of their very existence.

On the other hand, not every dangerous animal looks dangerous. After a flask of hot soup, we made a second attempt to see the bears - and this time we were successful. Large brown bears are, of course, highly dangerous creatures. But it's very difficult to remember that when you're watching one carefully climb a tree that seems far too small to hold its weight, a look of intense and slightly nervous concentration on its furry face. The ease with which this enormous animal scaled the trunk was something of an eye-opener but, as it sat at the top munching berries, we wondered how it was going to get down again. And we wondered just how safe was the other bear, sitting under the tree in apparent blissful ignorance of the heavy weight that was bulging out in all directions from the unfortunate tree-top, five feet above its head. We'd have liked to hang around to find out, but it was cold and time was short.

In the end, we didn't see everything. To our disappointment, we missed the llamas and the lemurs, and saw little of the camels - just a row of them in the distance. Tickets are pricey, too, so we'll not be popping up again just to fill in the gaps. But after a while, when the memory has faded a little and needs refreshing, and when the world is a little too heavy again, we'll be back.

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.

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.

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.

So, we're back from holiday - have been for a week actually. We walked from Plymouth to Dartmouth, crossing a number of river estuaries by ferry and one by wading, but abandoned the last 20 miles or so because of the blazing heat and caught a steam train to Paignton where we played pitch and putt instead. We were on the platform of Torquay station waiting for a train home when the England / Portugal penalty shoot-out took place - and I was on the phone to Dad while he commentated with commendable restraint on the TV pictures for me.

Have been back at work for a week, which hasn't been terrifically easy, and have been trying to pick things up at the gym again - having come back from the walk with the flattest stomach I've had for two years (since the last one) I want to build on that, not slide back into unfitness.

Gone for a walk - back in a week or so

It seems to be the thing at the moment to be amused by newspaper bills - the posters with breathless headlines that papers give to their street vendors and newsagents to help shift copies.

The Evening Standard Headline Crisis 2005 set on Flickr has such classics as “TOOTHPASTE CANCER ALERT”, “MAN BEHEADED IN LONDON STREET”, “IPOD HEALTH ALERT” and “DOG STOLEN AT GUNPOINT”. But anyone who's ever seen the “Sub“, as we called the Standard when I was on the Kilburn Times, will know to expect that sort of thing.

More obscure, and therefore far more amusing, is the Cardiff Terrifies Me blog. This targets the bills put out by the South Wales Echo and all I can say is I'm awful glad I don't live over there: “DRUNK TEACHERS FLED FROM CAR CRASH”, “SEX TRAFFIC PAIR LOCKED UP”, “'MY BROTHER KILLED SHIRLEY'” and the chilling “MUSLIM PUPILS IN SAUSAGE ROLL BLUNDER”. Note that the last one says 'blunder' and not 'blender'.

So here's my sole contribution, published here to show that while some parts of the United Kingdom are hotbeds of sex, drunkenness, dog theft and inappropriate sausage meat, other areas are just a little bit calmer.

From the West Briton, mid November, Helston in Cornwall:

Issues To Be Looked At After Action Day
Isn't it exciting? Isn't it intriguing? Doesn't it just make you want to rush out and buy the paper RIGHT NOW?
Me neither.