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The previous post was better, but I wanted to showcase the screensavers pieced together by Squeezin’ (with my gratitude for these).  The pics, in order, are

Venue	Where	beer #
The Princess Hotel (done around 5 am New Year’s Day)	Swindon	1
The Bank House	Cheltenham	2
At the New Year’s Races in Cheltenham (watching my nag drag in)	Cheltenham	3
Midlands Hotel	Cheltenham	4
The Queen’s Tap	Swindon	5
The Four Candles	Oxford	6
The Turf Tavern (at the sign commemorating Clinton failing to inhale there)	Oxford	7
The White Horse	Oxford	8
O’Neill’s	Oxford	9
Ellington’s	Swindon	10
The Red Lion	Oxford	11
The Gloucester Arms	Oxford	12
Eurobar	Oxford	13
The Volunteer	Faringdon	14
The Red Lion	Faringdon	15
The Bell	Faringdon	16
The Lamb and Flag	Oxford	17
The Bird and Baby	Oxford	18
Far  The Madding Crowd	Oxford	19
Southbrook Inn	Swindon	20
The White Hart	Wolvercote, Oxfordshire	21
The Red Lion	Wolvercote, Oxfordshire	22
The Plough	Oxford	23
The Gardener’s Arms	Oxford	24
The Rose and Crown	Oxford	25
TP’s	Swindon	26
The De’s Cut	Oxford	27
The King and Queen	Longcot, Oxfordshire	28
The Woodman Inn	Fernham, Oxfordshire	29
The Eagle	Little Cocks Swell, Oxfordshire	30
The Wheatsheaf	Faringdon, Oxfordshire	31
Faringdon Folly	Faringdon, Oxfordshire	32
Salisbury Cathedral	Salisbury	33
The King’s Arms	Salisbury	34
The Old Castle Pub	Salisbury	35
The keep at Old Sarum	Salisbury	36
Wheatsheaf	Lower Woodford, Wiltshire	37
Bridge Inn	Upper Woodford, Wiltshire	38
Black Horse	Great Durnford, Wiltshire	39
Wilsford Cum Lake sign (heh, heh)	Wiltshire	40
Stonehenge (really a great disappointment)	Wiltshire	41
King’s Arms	Amesbury, Wiltshire	42
George Hotel	Amesbury, Wiltshire	43
New Inn	Amesbury, Wiltshire	44
The Greyhound	Amesbury, Wiltshire	45
Royal Oak	Oxford	46
The Red Lion	Marston, Oxfordshire	47
The Angel and Greyhound	Oxford	48
The University Club	Oxford	49
The GW Hotel	Swindon	50
Jude the Obscure	Oxford	51
The Victoria	Oxford	52
The Rickety Press	Oxford	53
Wahoo Sport Bar	Oxford	54
The Oxford Retreat	Oxford	55
The Grapes	Oxford	56
The Rolleston	Swindon	57
The Baker’s Arms	Swindon	58
The Dolphin	Swindon	59
Marsh Farm Hotel	Royal Wootton Bassett	60
The Cross Keys	Royal Wootton Bassett	61
The Old School	Oxford	62
The King’s Arms	Oxford	63
The Swan and Castle	Oxford	64
The Victoria Arms	Marston, Oxfordshire	65
The Black Swan	Abingdon, Oxfordshire	66
The Blue Boar	Abingdon, Oxfordshire	67
The Bowyer Arms	Radley, Oxfordshire	68
Zen Bar	Swindon	69
Sir Daniel Arms	Swindon	70
White Hart	Lyneham, Wiltshire	71
Sodom	Wiltshire	72
The Angel	Royal Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire	73
Cape of Good Hope	Oxford	74
Rudi’s	Swindon	75
Burn’s Day Lunch (Haggis, Neeps, Tatties, Whisky, and 2 beers)	Oxford	76
Swindon Wildcats 3, Sheffield Steeldogs 4 (SO)	Swindon	77
The Longwall	Oxford	78
The Royal George	Purton, Wiltshire	79
Riff’s Bar	Greatfield, Wiltshire	80
Magic Roundabout	Swindon	81
The Three Tuns	Wroughton	82
The Havana	Swindon	83
The Lydiard	Swindon	84
The Savoy	Swindon	85
The Brewer’s Arms	Cirencester	86
The White Horse	Woolstone	87
The College Farm	Watchfield	88
The Horse and Jockey	Ashton Keynes, Gloucestershire	89
The Vale Hotel	Cricklade	90
Goldfinger Tavern	Highworth, Wiltshire	91
The Red Lion	Northmoor, Oxfordshire	92
The Bell Inn	Standlake, Oxfordshire	93
The Maybush	Newbridge, Oxfordshire	94
The Beehive (this is about 100 yards from the house we are moving to)	Swindon	95
Baker Street	Swindon	96
Steam Railway Company Pub	Swindon	97
The Pig on the Hill	Swindon	98
Long’s Bar	Swindon	99
near Parliament, with a Cuban cigar and a bunch of dirty looks (and after 5 pub stops)	London Marathon	100
The Bear	Oxford	101
The Old Tom	Oxford	102
The Crown	Oxford	103
The Beehive	Carterton, Oxfordshire	104
The Crown Inn	Faringdon, Oxfordshire	105
Romany Inn	Bampton, Oxfordshire	106
Talbot Hotel	Bampton, Oxfordshire	107
The George Inn	Sandy Lane, Wiltshire	108
The White Hart	Calne, Wiltshire	109
The now defunct King George	Calne, Wiltshire	110
Barrington Arms	Shrivenham, Oxfordshire	111
Groves Company Inn	Swindon	112
Revolution	Swindon	113
The Plough	Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire	114
The George and Dragon	Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire	115
The Fish	Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire	116
Great Western Railway Staff Association	Didcot, Oxfordshire	117
The Prince of Wales	Didcot, Oxfordshire	118
Tap and Barrel (good read goes along with this pic)	Swindon	119
Old Town Festival	Swindon Town Gardens	120
Cock Inn	Combe, Oxfordshire	121
Three Horseshoes	Long Hanborough, Oxfordshire	122
Swindon Pride 2012	Swindon (duh)	123
Wernham Hogg’s	Slough, Berkshire	124
The Myrtle Grove	Risca, Gwent, Wales	125
The Sirhowy	Blackwood, Gwent, Wales	126
Railway Tavern	Sirhowy, Blaenau Gwent, Wales	127
The Castle	Bryn Serth, Blaenau Gwent, Wales	128
The Coach and Horses	Ashvale, Blaenau Gwent, Wales	129
Ye Olde Red Lion Hotel	Tredegar, Blaenau Gwent, Wales	130
The Tumble Inn	Pontypridd, Wales	131
The Maltster’s Arms	Pontypridd, Wales	132
Wyvern Theatre	Swindon	133
Byron’s Bar	Swindon	134
The Bear Hotel	Wantage, Oxfordshire	135
Source ot the River Thames	Kemble, Gloucestershire	136
Carpenter’s Arms	Lacock, Wiltshire	137
Mill House	Chippenham, Wiltshire	138
Sunny’s Pool Bar	Swindon	139
The Royal Oak	Marlborough, Wiltshire	140
The Lamb Inn	Marlborough, Wiltshire	141
The Crown	Marlborough, Wiltshire	142
IMS/TOF Mass Spectrometer	Oxford University	143
New Year’s Eve on Ferndale Road	Swindon	144

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The Aldreth Causeway was the path by which William the Conquerer was able to invade the Isle of Ely and eventually defeat the forces of Hereward the Wake.  For me, it is a nice fen trail that gets me between Haddenham and Wililngham fairly quickly on my long runs and with a minimum amount of traffic.  Here are some historic information signs from the footpaths:

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There aren’t a lot of things I miss about the US…I think it boils down to food, for the most part.  There’s not much that compares to sloppy barbecue pork shoulder sandwiches slathered in hot sauce and eaten in 90 degree heat and 95% humidity while waving a cold beer around your head to fend off the deer flies.  Or, proper pork sausage with spices and flavour and not a speck of breading.

I’ll come back to those in the near future (I bought a meat grinder and make our own sausages now due to the abysmal state of the offerings here).  But the thing that has been haunting me for the last few weeks is a desire to sit on Buford Highway in some fly infested Guat restaurant with Telemundo or a Mexican soccer match playing in the background and to wolf down some hot salsa on corn chips with a pitcher of cold lager (or two…maybe three if Jackie joins me).

You can’t get spicy food on this island, though.  I don’t know how they manage it, but even the imported pickled jalapeño pepper slices have been castrated and are as mild as my grannies sugar dills.  I’ve even bought brands I recognise from the States and somehow the Health and Safety (and Fun?) bureaucrats have come up with a form of irradiation that neutralises the capsaicin with the sealed lid in place.  Bastards…you can use these peppers to cover your eyes for a beauty treatment, so mild are they.

I finally found some real peppers squirreled away on a small shelf in the supermarket a couple of weeks ago and bought up copious quantities of habañero and jalapeño peppers.  I was now ready to prepare my fix, and my hands were shaking with the anticipation of a junkie.

After mixing, stash half of it away or you'll eat the whole batch

I just replanted my cilantro (known here as coriander, which at home only refers to the seeds) which I have been using by the handful to doctor up Thai and Mexican dishes all summer, but they have only now sprouted and won’t be ready for use for another month.  The tomatoes from this summer’s plants were delicious but most were disappointingly small; I gathered as many of those as I could, as well.  The onions and garlic are locally sourced from our farmers market.  A bit of cumin and some lemon juice were all that remained.

It always comes out as too big of a batch so I have enough leftover to hit it again next weekend (or tomorrow if the urge hits).  I’ll have to go back to the grocer to grab another bag of tortilla chips, but they are especially easy to spot with the offensive caricature of the bandito on the package:

Cannabis growers with £26k stash spared jail

Here’s an article wherein a couple receive suspended sentences for growing 83 marijuana plants because they are heavy users and the judge found it plausible that this was meant for personal use.

First consider that the plants were valued at £26000, total…that’s a little less than $500 US.  The newspapers in the US typically value a cannibas stem as $5000 to $6000.

Then, consider that even crappy growers are going to bet an ounce of buds off each plant (dunno how I know that).  If half are males and discarded, the 41 ounces (forget that they could easily harvest up to as much as 300 ounces) they have sitting around the would easily keep two stoners going for 6 months to a year if they lost half of it (and what are the chances of that).

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I forgot what long runs can do to your nipples

This month was very good for the progress of the Run Across Britain, if not for the shear number of new miles logged then for the psychological boost brought on by piercing the membranes of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Hertfordshire thus expanding this at least to more than just a Run Across Cambridgeshire {this is a little disingenuous since I already had some runs in Edinburgh and London, but almost everything to the end of July was centered on Cambridge, Stretham, Ely and Fordham}.

There were a couple of decent long runs to the north. The length from King’s Lynn to Ely (mostly in Norfolk) was covered in two runs each with an end (or start) in Downham Market.

From Downham Market to Ely, I made a bad map judgement at the confluence of the River Ouse (pronounce like “ooze”) and some large washes and found myself steered to Hilgay along a very pleasant dike but had to run the rest of the way mostly through thick grass along the A10. The run became more like hard labour as I trudged along without proper carbs and into a steady 15 mph (gust to 30 mph) wind.

The path from King’s Lynn went much better and yielded many nice sights along the Ouse. There was the cemetary in King’s Lynn, the paper plant (with an ambiguous name, I thought), and the ruins of a large church along the way.

This past weekend took me from Wisbech through March via a path along the River Nene and a bike route built on an abandoned rail bed passing Her Majesty’s Prison and a land fill close to March.

I got trapped on a farm where, I suspect, the farmers had sabotaged the trail markings; faced with a choice between running back a mile or more (already at 18 miles into the run) or finding a way across a drainage canal I soon found myself dangling beneath and 8 inch diameter gas line going hand-over-hand NEARLY to the far side…lost my grip and ended up running the last 2 miles in sweats soaked to mid thigh.

I finally connected a few runs by doing an out-and-back to Aldreth, famous for the causeway that William the Conqueror used to approach the Isle of Ely in his last assault against the forces of Hereward the Wake. Aldreth falls off down the hill from Haddenham’s high spot as part of the Isle and makes for an unusual bit of terrain in this dreadfully flat part of the country.  The road here sort of dead-ends, as well, so there’s a manageably small amount of traffic even when the paved bit of pedestrian access ends.  Some of the subsequent late evening and early morning runs have yielded stunning views of the surrounding farmland.

One afternoon on holiday I managed to get out to Little Downham and do another farmland loop.  I was rewarded with some rustic bridges and a visit to an out-of-the-way village called Coveney.  Pretty.

There were two runs out of Kentford, a small Suffolk village on a bus line out of Cambridge (and Newmarket and Bury St. Edmunds, should you find yourself there).  Kentford is rich with footpaths and pubs and seems a relaxing stopover if that suits your interests.  The first run followed the trails and bike lanes to Gazeley and the Icford long distance trail to Ashley and Cheveley before climbing to Newmarket along wide wooded B-roads with very wide verges (shoulders, in American) to accomodate the thousands of thoroughbreds housed at the farms and studs around the area (Newmarket being the home of British racing). At the end of this run, I decided I had had enough of the Sundown at the Pass t-shirt (rides up in back) and left it for the vagrants near the Three Horseshoes in Newmarket.

The second run from Kentford was more recent and involved an hour and a half in torrential rain, high winds, and 12 deg C temperatures.  That said, the run was most pleasant, taking some reasonably mildly travelled roads across the rolling terrain past Barrow and into Bury St. Edmunds, a larger market town in the center of Suffolk that I really have taken a shine to considering its distance from both the house and the campus.

I entered Hertfordshire on the trail from Harston to Royston (another easy bus trip to or from Cambridge).  Another hilly town as you leave the Fens, Royston is fairly large and seems to have a vibrant nightlife with many bands and clubs supporting them.

Essex is thus far represented by a trail passing through Littlebury and Saffron Walden, a really cool little market town bordering Audley End.

Audley End is an estate covering hundred of acres within its walls but the stately home is open for tours and the grounds host open air concerts throughout the nice weather.  The gardens are designed by Capability Brown, whose gravesite got a mention in last month’s wrap up.

Finally, a couple of runs came to be on our trip to Oxfordshire, setting a target for future runs to connect.  One run found me on some steep hills, passing through the village of Great Milton, and eventually slogging through a marsh and some especially stingy stinging nettles.  The next morning I got lost in some fields, squashed thousands of black slugs (no offence to Arthur Gash), and looped through some very small villages.

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The weather has been absolutely gorgeous except for the times when it has been completely shit.  Above, there was a nice day in the village, so I shot the house (above) on my way to catch the bus to work.

Then, I noticed that the neighbourhood kids must have been bored the night before, having stacked what appear to be some concrete structures on the northbound bus shelter:

I shaved at the halfway point of my marathon training regimen, a few weeks ago.  I was planning to let it go wild until the marathon in a couple of months then clear the brush after the race but I had to get a new i.d. card to have access to the lab at Oxford and figured it would be better if it matched my passport photo. I have noticed that I get better service at uppity places but not quite so good at dive bars since shaving…here it is after a morning run the day it went down the drain:

Jackie injured her knee and has been reduced to walking for outdoor exercise. Even then we managed to really over do the effort on a hike around Wicken Fen.  On another run this month I spotted my first native ferret, but the only unusual wildlife we saw on our hike was this herd of wild horses:

Saffron Walden, Felixstowe, Wisbech, and Bury St Edmunds have emerged as some of my favourite towns in East Anglia over the course of this month’s travels.  Saffron Walden has a few of these houses around with patterned surfaces; while these are pretty attractive, it seems that you see a lot more of these deeper into Essex (a trip back through Thaxted is planned in the not too distant future where nearly every old house has some of this sort of masonry):

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I spotted this plant along the River Ouse:

At first I reckoned this to be where they publish the Daily Sport and the Sunday Sport, a newspaper that prints a “nipple count” on the cover so that you might make an informed news purchase and that brags that they have more nude women than either of their other main tabloid rivals.

On reflection, I think the Palm in Palm Paper might be a family name and not a description of one of their product’s primary function.

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To get to work today, I left the house at 6 am and ran from Stretham to the Newmarket Rd/East Rd roundabout in Cambridge.  It rained last night so the trail was especially damp but the morning was beautiful.  I can see this becoming a regular method of commuting into work as long as the daylight holds up.

After a short 2 miles on the A1123 avoiding traffic, it was all sunrise, World War II bunkers (above) and wildlife (and loads of cow shit–sorry, Fatty, no mushroom growth yet).  Since finding this brick on a walk through the Grunty Fen last Sunday, I have also been scanning the trails for other fun souvenirs:

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Having mentioned the run in the post on Chequers in Sutton, I should probably include a post about this nice little trail.

click for better map

I rode my bike to Haddenham so that I could connect a run segment I had already done to the run today.  I have done this thing before that I am doing now: a run across [fill in geographic area here].  It isn’t done all at once because it is not an athletic achievement (sorry, Brownie); instead, it is a form of tourism, a way to see the sights at about 8 miles an hour without limiting oneself to bike trails.

In Holland, I managed the run in the east to west and the north to south directions with runs of 5 to 25 miles length that involved taking a train to one location, renting a locker to stash my dry clothes, getting on the next train to my start location and then running back across the countryside (which, funny enough from what I stated in the previous paragraph, was crisscrossed with bike trails…but Holland is a special case).  Here, the run across Britain started in September 2001 during a week of interviews up in Edinburgh, then only resumed this year when we finally move here.

Anyway, today was a 9.3 mile loop from Haddenham.  The weather was cool and sunny with a moderate-to-strong breeze.  Haddenham sits on one of the few hills in the fens and these hills are what make up the Isle of Ely.  When the fens were underwater, this would have been an actual island but on a run you would only be surprised that you are actually trundling downhill and that that is an unusual circumstance out here.

The hill bottoms out fairly quickly just north of town and you lose the sidewalk as you hit the edge of the village.  Here you get the beauty of English farmland in the spring when you aren’t avoiding the high speed incompetence of English drivers.  This day, being both a Sunday and the middle of the holiday, there were fewer drivers than usual so the run was not so bad.

At the junction with the A142 I had a choice of heading straight on to Witcham (with no pedestrian side pavement) or to head into Sutton which had a nice bike path.  I had more-or-less already decided to do Sutton having spotted it on a long ridge high above the fens I was crossing and so I took off to the west. The bikepath into Sutton left the main road and headed into the wood before town and revealed an abandoned stretch of the old A142 with sone public byways crossing it.  This was worth noting for future reference, but I had a thirst and decided to continue on and find a pub.

After a nice bevvy at the Chequers, I headed toward the large church rather than retrace my steps; I was also looking for a store to buy some batteries for the camera and found one, miraculously, and was even given good directions to an abandoned rail bed to follow back to Haddenham.  The rail bed, down Station Road, had been pulled up 40 or more years ago, according to an old woman I stopped for directions after I got turned around at the hill bottom.  She was quite spacy, but said that her husband had been on the crew that took up the tracks and that her brother used the bed to walk to Haddenham and hmmm, I know it is around here somewhere.  I thanked her, headed a few hundred feet east around a scrap yard, and there it was…a nice, perfectly flat (but curvy) berm to trot.  Hooray.

There is a drainage canal beside the old tracks and rows of trees set up as windbreaks for the fields.  You stand about 8-10 feet above the fields which is huge in this flat land (like south Georgia or Kansas, but the fields are segmented more frequently).  Another nice vantage you have is that the ridges and hills of Haddenham and Sutton are much more obvious and you get a real feel for the Isle of Ely, you can see the craggy coastline that would be there when it is flooded.  This is one of the hipper views I have had out here and I wish I was a better photographer and could show it off.

The rail bed finally turned west and I was only a mile north of my finish so I took a farm path in between a pair of windbreaks toward the village.  This was beaten up by tractor tyres but passable down the center, or so I thought until I hit a rut left by (probably) a badger and went down like a sack of wet sand.  “Motherfucker!” I said and lay there a moment to make sure I hadn’t injured myself and miraculously I had not.  Back up, I ran with a little more attention to the path but still hit a couple more ruts in spite of the diligence (but stayed upright, nonetheless).  This not being a public right of way, I had to find a fence crossing along the roadway, but that wasn’t too difficult.

Back up the hill into Haddenham I had to run past the church where I stashed my bike to connect the trail to the Cherry Tree down on Duck Lane, but this was a minor detour.  Coming back from this extra 1/2 mile, I noticed that the sundial on the church had something in Greek chisled into it that transliterates to “Kairon gnothi” and roughly translates to “Know your opportunity” or “Opportunity Knocks.”  Looking to the right of this sign from above, I saw the Three Kings pub…obviously, this sign from above must not be ignored.

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Waterbeach continues to surprise me. About 7/8 of the way through this article on the lack of St George Day celebrations I spotted this line:

“The village’s Beach Social Club will host its second annual sausage competition….”

I got no indication that Waterbeach was at all that way the last few visits, not that there’s anything wrong with it.

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I’m entirely in favour of community volunteer service but this article would be easier to take seriously if it had less in common with Tom Sawyer tricking the other kids into whitewashing a fence (“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”).

It is a short article, but essentially it is basing family fun around the entire clan helping to muck out a clogged waterway, then spending the afternoon picking up litter.  In Arizona, this is the sort of fun reserved for guys wearing orange jumpsuits, and in Georgia you’ve usually got a “camp director” with a shotgun and some dogs to play with if you are clever enough to slip your chains.  But, this is a more egalitarian community, and like they say in the article: “Everyone is invited to take part.”

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I saw this article a few months ago, but forgot about it until I was heading down the A-10 to Waterbeach, yesterday.  Again, I like the small town atmosphere here, but this story is really adorable.

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Click on the article for a full sized and easy-to-read version (from the Ely Weekly News 16 april 2009), but the gist is that an ugly crime from years past appears to have been solved.  Good thing, too, since:

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Coming to Europe from Atlanta Georgia (by way of a number of other violent-crime ridden American shit holes), it is easy to get lost in the bucolic simplicity and utter safety of small town England.  But, it’s not all tea cozies and Women’s Institute meetings, here, no sir indeed.  The complete disrespect for order and the rule of law here in the fens is illustrated here in this photo lifted from the Ely Weekly News (16 April 2009) showing the depths to which the village of Stretham has sunk:

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From the Ely Standard, a page devoted to news from Littleport has an unfortunate edit in it’s banner (perhaps the editorial staff is made up of pre-menopausal women):

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The run today was 5.9 miles and the weather was fantastic…roughly 12 deg C and sunny.  Jamie headed toward the Lazy Otter, walking, and the run took me to the Fish and Duck then turned around to catch her up.  The first segment was 1.3 miles and went by the Stretham Engine (link to

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2577026
Before running, there was a letter to post and the church and post office offered some nice views of the town on my block.  The Church is Anglican, but I really don’t have any info on it beyond that, at present.

The Post Office is also our local shop and an off-license (ie, liquor store).  The post in front of it is also in front of the Red Lion pub and is a medieval cross (without the cross bits).

Heading to the Engine, you go down this long, one-lane road through the alotments (these little garden patches the council rents out for would-be farmers) and then some real farmland.  Here’s a shot of Stretham looking back over the alotments:

The Engine is an old coal fired pump that used to drain the fens.  It replaced the system of windmill pumps copied from the dutch, and was in operation from 1831.  It has since been replaced by modern motor driven pumps, but is kept in working shape for the sake of history and tourism.  It will be open for tours after Easter, so I’ll have more to report then.