"And then he said..."

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Beloved Other Half took a trip down to see friends on the Isle of Wight recently, and came back with intriguing tales of a fort on a shingle spit, part Tudor and part Victorian, poking out into the Solent from the mainland and almost touching the island.

This was Hurst Castle, and earlier this week we drove down to take a look at it - not without a pang of guilt that circumstances and scheduling would prevent us from meeting up with our friends on the island.

There's no road access to the castle, you must either walk along the spit (heavy going on the shingle) or take a ferry from a nearby village. Ever gluttons for punishment, we walked - both ways, as the last ferry left before we'd finished exploring.

Construction of the castle began in 1541, and the Army only moved out in 1956, so it was in pretty much continuous use for more than 400 years - you can see this in the patchwork of blocked-up doors, windows bricked up or converted into entrances, and other tell-tale signs of continuous use by people who lack sentimentality when it comes to playing fast and loose with historic masonry.

It's an odd contrast between the Tudor central tower of Henry VIII - all gloomy basements, 12-sided rooms and precision geometry in stone - and the two utilitarian Victorian wings grafted onto it like crinolines on the Mona Lisa. The Tudor section feels like a proper castle, but the Victorian area looks like nothing so much as racehorse stables - albeit stables where the 'horses' weigh 38 tonnes and boast rifled muzzle loading barrels. A final surreal touch is added by the surviving World War Two tin baths.

Definitely a cool place to visit, and I suspect we'll be back some day - but next time I think we'll take the ferry…

As ever, photos follow. More (and larger versions of most of these) are on Flickr here.

Threading the needle
A yacht enjoys the freedom after emerging from the narrow exit of the Solent, with the Isle of Wight and The Needles in the background

Flank approach
Beneath the towering walls of the western wing of Hurst Castle

Secure area
A courtyard in the Tudor section of the castle, by the original battery

Vanishing point
A run of doorways disappears into the distance in the long Victorian west wing of the castle

Safe as houses
Vaulted brickwork arches and ceilings in the living quarters of the castle's central tower

Descent into darkness
I have a real phobia of dark spiral staircases, so this was a difficult photo to take…

Blast from the past
This very large cannon had a very small bird perched on the top of it (look for the very faint diagonal line, dead centre where the barrel thickens).

The birds
Back at the car, black-headed gulls express their displeasure at being disturbed by a photographer…

Kwok - a picture he's almost
certainly forgotten I ever took

Another appeal for money in aid of another good cause, folks. My old coding buddy at the Royal Mail, Kwok, is doing the London to Brighton Bike Ride on June 19 in aid of the British Heart Foundation.

On the plus side, he lives in Brighton, so he has plenty of incentive to complete the 54 miles - it's his only way of getting home. On the minus side, he freely admits he's not much of a cyclist - badly out of practice, with a training regime that takes alarming and unexpected detours through nettle patches.

So he could do with the support that comes from you dusting off your credit cards or WorldPay accounts. He's a really nice guy - nothing's too much trouble for him - so he deserves to have a little put back in his direction for once.

Also, having been born with a heart murmur (but not affected thereafter), heart disease is one of those causes I feel a bit strongly about. And the BHF is deep into its Help a Heart Week at the moment, an event designed to highlight the often-underestimated impact of heart disease on women. So there's two more things to add to the list of good reasons to donate.

Which are, to summarise:

1. Kwok's a really nice bloke
2. Anyone prepared to cycle 54 miles voluntarily deserves support
3. I once had a dodgy ticker, so I think it's important too
4. All the reasons listed in the 'Help a Heart Week' campaign
5. Oh - and Kwok reads this blog, and once put paid work my way, which is of course utterly unconnected with my decision to make a big thing about this. Honestly.

Click here to donate to Kwok online - every penny (or dollar equivalent) can make a difference.

Somewhere out there, within a couple of miles of me as I sit and type this, is - I hope - a young bloke whose day I comprehensively ruined.

Earlier this evening we visited my father-in-law in hospital and got stuck in traffic at the last couple of sets of lights. And as I sat there waiting for them to change, I noticed something odd in the rear view mirror.

Every few seconds, for what seemed like forever, the driver of the car behind us would sling his fist out and punch his passenger, a cringing young woman who was presumably his girlfriend.

She squirmed as far away from him as she could in the car, pressing herself up against the door, and on one occasion she started to take her seatbelt off until a flurry of blows persuaded her otherwise.

A lot of the blows fell on her upper arm and shoulder, and were just about soft enough to be classed as play fighting. Rough play fighting, where only one party was having any fun, but play fighting nonetheless. It was difficult to judge how she was reacting - once she seemed to strike back, grabbing his fist and pushing it away, and they might even have been laughing once or twice - it wasn't possible to be sure, but they might have been.

Every so often, however, he slung a closed-fist punch to the side of her head, and that was no joke at all. The worst of it was the deliberate nature of it - a pause, she moved back from the door closer to him, then wallop, another carefully-placed blow.

We took their registration number and car make as we drove into the hospital car park and they drove into the neighbouring supermarket car park. As soon as we stopped I phoned the police. The woman who took the call seemed shocked and slightly baffled by what I'd seen, and pleased but surprised that I'd bothered to phone it in. She promised to send a car out.

Beloved Other Half went off to see her father and I nipped into the supermarket for one or two bits and pieces, emerging just as the police arrived to find the couple's car still parked outside the store.

I went over to have a quick word, telling them what I'd seen. I told them what I think is the truth - that, nine chances out of ten, they'll get an earful for intruding where they're not wanted. But we used to know a woman whose teenage daughter was chucked off a balcony by her boyfriend, with fatal results, so we know that tenth chance is a risk not worth taking.

The older of the two policemen (who still looked younger than me) didn't seem overly enthusiastic about what he was hearing - probably, and not unreasonably, aware of the nine chances over the far less likely tenth. His colleague looked like a schoolboy on work experience, and he was too busy making notes to show any visible reaction. But they said they'd have a word with the store manager to see about finding the driver, and on that note I went off to the hospital.

So what happens next? Probably, they found the couple and the girlfriend said it was all a game, meaning no action gets taken. But even if this did happen, with any luck the driver's been given the fright of his life. And maybe, just maybe, he'll think twice about how he takes his fun in future.

Better still, perhaps she'll decide there's more to romance than a smack in the head, and find someone new.

Or perhaps they'll just carry on as they were, dancing the same steps again and again, until one day it all ends in tears.

For reasons that make a long and not very interesting story, I had to travel into work by train on Tuesday instead of driving.

This was wildly inconvenient, as a 20 mile / 30 minute drive north west was instantly transformed into a two hour marathon that took me eastwards right into central London before I could head out beyond the M25 again.

So, to commemorate that strange day where a straightforward journey was transformed into a tangled meander, here are some photos of lines and curves.

March of progress
The M40 motorway stalks on stilts over an industrial estate car park.

Blue barricade
The freshly-painted fence at Beaconsfield station vanishes in the distance along the platform.

Wembley rising (perhaps)
From the train window, cranes surround the arch of the new Wembley Stadium in the week that its finances collapsed.

Telephone conversation this morning:

Caller: Hello, my name is Mr —–, I want to complain about rubbish collection in Wembley.
Me: I'm afraid you need to call Brent Council about that, this is a private house in the London Borough of Hounslow.
Caller: But I dialled the number for Brent Council.
Me: No you didn't - if you had, Brent Council would have answered the phone. Instead, you called me, possibly because you're stupid. *hangs up*

I know I should be more tolerant with these callers, and back in the days when we used to get 15 calls a day like that I was. Usually.

But now it's something like five years since the phone codes changed and people started to make the mistake of calling us when they actually wanted the Streetcare Department of Brent Council, and I figure if you can't work it out in that time, you don't really deserve to be treated with kid gloves.

If you've Googled this page looking for how to actually contact Streetcare, the trick is to just add 020 to the start of the eight-digit number - if you add 0208 you get us.

And you don't want to do that, okay?

Sunset over Vauxhall Bridge, on the way home tonight.

And here's a post I wrote last night in the lobby of the hotel after the wedding reception, on a PC with coin-operated internet access which ran out before I could cross-post it here.

As a kid, I pretty much taught myself to read on a collection of books owned by my parents from an organisation called the Companion Book Club. You can still see dozens of titles from this club, which seems to have operated through the 50s and 60s, and into the 70s, languishing unloved in charity shops and second-hand bookshops even today. I buy as many as I can, having rescued Mum and Dad's collection from exile in the attic.

About a third of the ones my parents owned were biographies from the war and these, combined with some Penguin Classics owned by my Dad, pretty much colour my view of who's heroic in the armed forces even today: pilots, submariners and POW camp escapers being right at the top of the list and the actual army way down the bottom out of sight somewhere.

And if you're an impressionable child reading about the Battle of Britain and Colditz Castle, drinking in every word with wide eyes, you pretty soon form the impression that there's something special about Poland.

Whether it's Dowding's quote about the Battle of Britain, “had it not been for the magnificent material contributed by the Polish squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry, I hesitate to say that the outcome of battle would have been the same”, or Pat Reid's tales of Polish verve and elan in Colditz, or hearing about the Warsaw Rising or how Polish cavalry charged invading Nazi tanks, I grew up with a rosy picture of heroism that was only amplified by the accession of John Paul II and the Solidarity movement when I was just a few years older.

Of course, such sweeping generalisations rarely survive into adulthood in any sort of logical way, but they do remain as an undercurrent of sentimentality. In the same way that a Spitfire fly-past or the Submarine Service memorial on the Victoria Embankment can leave me misty-eyed, so can a good tale of Polish derring-do.

All of which makes it odd that I had never visited the Polish War Memorial, a landmark just a few miles away from where I live. Even Beloved Other Half, who tolerates my less logical eccentricities with a sort of weary indulgence, had been moved to comment on this oversight.

Well, now I pass it every day on the way home from working near Wycombe, when I use the junction that's officially called 'Polish War Memorial', and so I stopped one recent evening, weaving my way to the car park entrance across lanes of traffic more used to surging past it without seeing it.

I wandered around for a while, looked at some of the many names on it and at the crests of the squadrons carved into the stone. It's beautifully maintained, and obviously still a living memorial - a small display of flowers had been placed at the foot of the central column and, when John Paul II died, a Polish flag appeared at half mast on the flag pole for a week.

And that was it, really - I took some photos and drove home. There was no romance there among the names of the dead, but I guess that's not a surprise. As we rediscover to our cost every few generations, the only romance in warfare is to be found in the foolish heads of small boys and politicians.

Taking wing

Flowers for the fallen

Rollcall

At the going down of the sun…

Wedding rehearsal
A jolly female vicar, firmly in the Dibley mould, leads Sarah and Dave through the rehearsal of their vows for Saturday.

Up to my hometown (or rather, a village nearby) this evening for the rehearsal of my sister's wedding. Given the sort of service we feared we might be going to when she was diagnosed with cancer a while back, this is going to be quite a weekend.

The contrast between the historic church and the relaxed atmosphere tonight was interesting. Even if the vicar's in casual clothes and the display by the church door is selling trendy Fairtrade chocolate and teabags, you still expect a building like that to have an air of oppressive solmenity and emptyness - not tonight.

I pottered slowly back to my parents' afterwards, in time to catch the extra time and penalty shoot-out in the cup final.

On the way I stopped at an industrial estate a mile or two from the church, where I used to work on a production line about 15 years ago. It's not the first time I've been back, but I've never had the chance to linger. The unit I used to work in is still owned by the same company, but it seems like it's been gutted and converted into warehouse storage during the intervening years.

I looked through the doors and remembered the noisy, cheerful gaggle of people I worked with and wondered where they are now. Without them, the place looked cold and empty.