Aaaand bam. Summers over. Back to school. Bugger off. Go on. Be miserable. I get to go to college again. And this time I'm dragging my brother with me. And he's having to go through stuff like enrolment and inductions. So ha!
Anyway, casting my mind back to the month just past...
Cue the wavy memory thing with the glittery music. You know what I'm on about? Yeah, that...
"Ah, home. After a decent holiday and a buttnumbing trip, I could really use a-"
"You're going to your mum's."
"But I've-"
"Pack yer bags. Again." [Boots kids out of front door straight into mothers ford focus.]
Well not quite, but nearly.
Once again, we visited our mum in Somerset, in her cottage on an old farm, which she lovingly refers to as The Funny Farm.
She seems to like naming things, our mum. Her and John's cottage is now entitled 'Rawshack 42'. I'm sure there is a reason.
The title might have something to do with the cottages somewhat shackish nature. Less of a shack, mind; more like a dump for John's old art projects, which have now been cleared out and dumped into the 'Shed', which is as big as the cottage is. And what I mean by 'old art projects' I mean tables covered with strange, strange objects which in turn were covered in cobwebs and dust. A shame that they've been moved, really, I feel I missed out on a rather good photo opportunity.
But it's good because now, apart from floor, there's a dining table - the one from our old house! - with chairs and candles and everything. That, with the bare stone walls and the high wooden roof with the exposed beams... we were seriously considering putting up tapestries.
And speaking of floors; the floor boards in my mum's cottage - sorry, Rawshack 42 - used to be shelves where cheese was kept after it had been made. They're wider than your average floorboard and you can even see the faint circles where the cheese sat. People used to make motherfucking cheese on the floor of my mothers cottage! Well... it wasn't really a floor back then, whenever 'then' was, but still! Oh, and these 'floorboards' are exposed, I didn't vandalise my mum's carpet or anything.
Now I know you're all just itching, itching your face off, to know what kind of cheese used to be made upon what are now the floorboards of its humbleness, Rawshack 42. Well, itch no longer, because it was goddamn mother fucking cheddar.
Yeah!
Speaking of cheddar, we went to visit the Cheddar Gorge nearby, which is totally where all cheddar comes from. We went into a cheese cave where everything was made of cheddar, except for the skeleton, which just so happened to be the oldest intact skeleton in Britain. What a bugger. I imagine it's bad enough being the last of your family. Poor sod probably just tripped and fell and happened to be conveniently conserved in cheese. Ah well.
The rest of the place was beautiful.
There were great halls of cheese, some stretching off into other halls that you couldn't get to because they're just too high, leading off into strange places.
There was stone-age graffiti; the shape of a mammal carved into the cheese, evidence of ancient life, ancient human life. Might have been the bloke to whom the skeleton belonged to, you never know.
Then there were stalagmites and stalactites, growing a few millimetres per thousands of years, reaching to touch each other. My mum had visited this gorge when she was younger, apparently one of the stalagmites was mere centimetres away from one of the stalactites. And we came only to find said stalagmite/tite/the-one-that-goes-down-from-the-top had been cut off, needlessly vandalised by vandals who never amounted to anything because no-one remembers they're names, the pathetic sods (unless they were foreign and that's how you pronounced one of them). This did happen in the seventies mind, so they've probably grown out of cutting things. One can hope.
After that, we visited the cheese museum, which was mind blowing, because everything there was made out of cheese too.
Well it wasn't, but everything in the above paragraphs is true if you stop imagining cheese and start imagining rock of brilliant golden beige that seems to gush out of every high opening like water from Niagara Falls, still and rock solid as if frozen.
I think my mum did have pictures, but I don't know where they've gone.
Another thing we did was go swimming, after buying shorts and goggles from 'Clarkes Village' and getting changed at the pools 'Changing Village'.
My mum didn't name either of those:
Clarkes Village is like a shopping centre, but it's where all the companies sell products that are deemed not to have a viable market, so they send them there, because it's Somerset and Somerset is full of mad people, so it's fine. Apparently people from all over the country flock here just for the few rare products you can get. I don't know what rare products. Glow in the dark... oh I don't ruddy know. Glow-in-the-dark plimsolls? It's fucking Clarkes.
The Changing Village of Wells' Leisure Pool is not a village going through constant technological and economical advances, neither is it half as dangerous or strange as it sounds. It's just a bunch of unisex changing cubicles, set into a labyrinth beside the pool. It's not even all that unisex; there are still separate toilets.
The pool itself is awesome. It describes itself as a leisure pool, and as such it doesn't have a serious deep end, more of a slight incline, which leads to a kids section (read: paddling pool) at one end. On the other end, there's a couple of jacuzzi areas, which are awesome, and, get this, a goddamn current, which picks you up gently, carries you out of the main pool section, into a sort of pool corridor (I guess that would be a river, really) that curves round and deposits you back into the pool, right next to where the current is, so you can unwittingly step into it and have the most fucking fun you've ever had in your life. Then they switch it off at four so all the kids'll get out and piss off and let the adults have some nice relaxing leisure time.
The pool is awesome.
What isn't awesome is how my ear canals somehow mistake pool water for the ear equivalent of fucking SARS and goes into quarantine, shutting down all systems by clogging them with earwax, all systems including not-being-deaf. Luckily, my mum's a teacher for the deaf, so I think I'm sorted in that department.
Oh yeah, my dad had a birthday the other day. I brought him a book by Stephen Fry and a book by Hugh Laurie. Happy birthday dad!
