Malrborough Lemmy

Lemmy dead? Unbelievable! He should have died decades ago.

Went to Marlborough yesterday to see the church of St John the Baptist at Mildenhall, a church interior that John Betjeman called the most beautiful in England (photos to follow). Unfortunately it was locked - a sad indictment of our times. On the way there we went past Silbury Hill, an Iron Age barrow on the A4:

I tried to snap a monument on a hill on the other side of the road, but it was too far away. Not sure what it commemorates, probably the mass genocide of a tribe of fuzzy-wuzzies in some God-forsaken part of the Sudan during the mid 1800s by a colonel Blimp.

Marlborough is a beautiful town in Wiltshire with stunning architecture and wonderful charity shops where everything is designer label and consequently three times the price of items in normal charity shops. I dare say you could bag a brace of 2nd hand Purdey shotguns in a charity shop there. Hay loves it for buying 2nd hand clothes and always manages to come back with some chic item that would cost several hundred pounds if brand new.

Most people in the town centre seemed to wear a uniform comprising the clothes townies think country people wear - flimsy, expensive, designer countrywear in the manner of 'London barrister goes country'. Lots of yellows, salmon pinks, pea greens, flat caps, Hunters, Rupert the Bear waistcoats - the kind of clobber that makes you look 20 years older than you are and is totally unsuited to life in the country (if you really do live in the country, everything you wear should be the colour of grass or mud, inherited from your father, repaired countless times and yet still falling apart). I was wearing my shorts and mucky topsiders (the ones Hay has been trying to throw out for the last 6 months). I said to Hay that I felt a slob by comparison - she retorted that I'd look a slob in Bootle.

There's a shop there that sells all this faux country clothing which is filled to the brim with Waitrose shoppers who drive 4x4s and must live in the middle of London during the week. Had to snap this sign on a Christmas tree in the shop:

Like a red rag to a bull! Well, being a bloke I just had to check.

Hay hates going round shops with me, accusing me of autistically barging past people and loudly denouncing, in a parsimonious northern manner, the exorbitant prices of wares in various emporia. She says she's going to develop a perfume called Badger Away that she can spray in my face and force me to go outside (I have an allergy to most women's perfumes and gasp for breath like an old steam train when exposed to them).

Here are the pictured of the church. As it was closed, the interior shots had to be taken through the windows, which were rather mucky:

Almost makes me want to be religious - if it wasn't for all the superstitious nonsense that goes with it.