Vampire Weekend (in which we go to Whitby)

St Mary's churchyard, Whitby

<For quick links on where we went in Whitby, scoot to the bottom. For general ramblings read on!>

Now, what with Halloween approaching and suchlike, it seemed like a good idea to trot off to Whitby, on the North East coast of the UK. It’s famous for quite a few things, but fish & chips and being the setting for large parts of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ are probably the main ones. With that in mind, Diceman, the Bear and The Director anticipated much spookiness as we headed over the moors.

In summer, the journey over to Whitby is glorious. Yorkshire’s moors are almost unfairly beautiful, splashed with purple and broken up by amusingly suicidal sheep lining up to laugh at the Hole of Horcum (Diceman is definitely too old to find this name amusing. Definitely). In the autumn it’s a different, more dramatic story – low skies, blasts of rain, the occasional rainbow and giant black clouds rolling towards the cliffs like an avalanche. Your first glimpse of Whitby is the silhouette of the abbey, skeletal against the sky, before you come down from the heather and into the town. Goth-tastic.

After that, however, it’s not a scary place at all, apart from the monstrous 60s office block a bunch of boneheaded town planners dropped into the middle of things. Instead it’s a jumbled mass of red-roofed buildings mingling with crumbling (but still wistfully glamorous) hotels, a snug harbour where a replica of James Cook’s ‘Endeavour’ reminds visitors of the town’s other famous name, and a slew of fish & chip shops, hippy boutiques and the odd arcade plonked towards the end of the pier. Whitby’s got a cobbled, tea-room charm but doesn’t want you to forget that it’s also a working fishing town – chippies boast ‘best in town according to the locals’ signs and the Whitby Gazette is everywhere to remind you that life goes on regardless of your holiday. It’s fair enough – a town doesn’t stare down the barrel of the North Sea for its entire life, getting raided by Vikings, shot at by German battleships and invaded every year by hordes of Goths, without developing a certain kind of weatherbeaten welcome.

But there’s definitely a welcome here, however different. The grizzled chap in the pub who recommended a type of unpronounceable whisky to me, or the long-suffering barman he’d been chewing the ear of, for example; or the blustering cake shop lady cheerily bellowing about the daftness of these ‘wheat intolerant ones’ as she gloated over something fabulously unsuitable for them; all were splendid.

But what of the spookiness? Well, staying in the kitschest, cutest, four-poster-beddest little boutique room didn’t swoop a cloak of dread over things for starters, and nor did the pretty little courtyard it overlooked, complete with trailing plants, fuchsias and quaint little wholefood shop attached to it (more of that anon). In fact, there are only the faintest of nods to the Count in town – a Dracula exhibition promising Christopher Lee’s cape, a sinister looking sweet shop and a couple of sexually ambiguous goths were all we spotted. It changes when you climb the 199 steps to St Mary’s church and the Abbey, though.

Is it spooky up there because I’ve read Dracula, or is Dracula spooky because it so perfectly evokes what it’s like up there? Hard to tell. But there’s definitely something more mournful than your average churchyard about it – perhaps it’s the obdurate stockiness of the church itself, with the gutted remains of the Abbey frowning down on it; it could be the sheer number of crooked tombstones, all pocked and ravaged by the elements; or it could be the location, teetering over the North Sea – from up there, it swirls like mercury around the rocks, thick and freezing cold.

Maybe it’s all of that, but really for Diceman it’s the church itself, which is very strange indeed. Its proportions are somehow wrong and ungainly, and inside there’s none of the comfortable serenity that even Diceman, a bit of a heathen, can feel in churches. Instead it feels like a lifeboat: a thing that exists only to save you from terror, that can offer no more reassurance than that it might – and only might – deliver you from the tempest. It’s a place built to honour the God of the edges of the world, a maker of oceans and undertows and storms, a place for people to shelter from higher powers. Inside, the pews are boxed in and high sided, the congregation cattled in to face each other as if in dinghys after a wreck, crammed together in whatever order would fit, with the pulpit haphazardly aloft in the centre. Some of the box-pews are labelled ‘Strangers’; above everything a hanging mezzanine helps stuff in more of the shipwrecked. You don’t go here to seek comfort from God: you go because you’re afraid of him. Little wonder Dracula’s arrival and subsequent lurking around this fearful place was so chilling.

The Abbey, on the other hand, is stirring and atmospheric, but certainly not as forbidding. Unless you count the territorial duck that shouted at us and made The Director scream. What’s remarkable is how it endures, despite centuries of pummeling by wind and sea, plundering by greedy kings and gentry, and battering by artillery (the German battleship actually hit it with a shell). The only thing not damaging it are geese: there are none here, and none ever fly over it, apparently. It seems that one had the temerity to ‘bomb’ an Abbess many centuries back; the outraged lady cursed all geese to fall dead if they ever approached the abbey. ‘Love they neighbour’ obviously doesn’t apply to winged things…

Whitby-ness!

The Shepherd’s Purse B&B

Very cute, VERY pink, and very charming – we arrived to find our cosy little room all warm and lit with fairy lights. There were suitably battered old copies of Edgar Allen Poe by the bed, loads of Rajasthani blankets to ward off the October chill and very friendly owners. However, someone should remind them that if you call yourself a Bed and Breakfast, people are going to want feeding in the morning. They don’t do breakfast. Doh! Instead, slightly bemused staff in the wholefood store that makes up the other half of the Purse empire will look at each other and say ‘it’s funny, everyone who stays here always wants to know where they can get breakfast.’ Happily, they knew just the place…

Java

Just up the winding hill from the harbourside, this little diner has got the retro thing right: high stools, long counters, neon colours and shiny metal, plus a lively atmosphere – but more importantly absolutely gigantic breakfast sandwiches. Diceman got thick slices of bacon and three huge slabs of excellent black pudding between toasted bread, all cooked perfectly without a trace of a greasy spoon. The coffee was great, too, and there was even a nutter talking to himself the whole time to add some colour. They squeeze their juice fresh, as well.

Marie Antoinette’s patisserie, 139 Church St

The only place Diceman has ever been where they add waffles to the top of cheesecake, just in case it wasn’t already decadent enough. Like everywhere on Church street it’s about as big as a phone box, but has loads of character. Upstairs there’s a creaky old gramophone amongst black and white Parisienne furniture and old pictures; downstairs the till is a push-button affair from the days before t’electric came. Every now and then they open the door to the baking room and smells of absurd deliciousness waft out.

Moutrey’s Italian Restaurant, 9 Grape Lane

‘How fresh is the seafood on your pizzas?’ quoth Diceman. It duly arrived stacked with prawns, squid, mussels and one whole little octopus in the middle, all fresh that day. Outstanding. The Director, a vegan, was less impressed; just as well I didn’t make them do the ‘Under the Sea’ song from Disney’s Little Mermaid, then…

Mr Chip’s fish & chips, Church St

Voted best in town by the locals according to the Whitby Gazette, this place isn’t as good as the Magpie Cafe, but is still very good indeed. You get the option of fish from sustainable species, instead of cod and haddock; Diceman had the sweet and flaky Panga, which I’m assured is a real fish, and was mightily impressed.

Back from B&Beyond

The Bear enjoys his weekend in Warwickshire

Diceman doesn’t stay in many bed and breakfasts, as I mentioned in the last post, so it’s always a bit of an adventure. This weekend it was The Man With No Boo’s daughter’s first birthday, so off we dutifully trotted and parked the car with the nose facing the lawn, as specified. This was wrong, of course, and Diceman was told by our host to move it so that another guest’s ‘bloody great Jag’ could fit in; that’s car Top Trumps for you. A Jaguar will always be more important than a lowly Corsa.

Contrary to expectations, Our Host was not a tweedy gentleman of later years, but a great burly fellow with arms the thickness of Diceman’s legs and a gruff but nonetheless accommodating manner. He ushered us into the Loxley Guesthouse, cheerfully explaining that he was a bit stressed out because his wife normally ‘deals with all this’. With that, we were shown into easily the cleanest room the Director and I have ever seen – almost intimidatingly clean, in fact, all very light and modern with a nice wooden beam and a gleaming shower. (I should point out that our little pad in the Walled City only has a bath, so the prospect of a power shower cubicle to sing Blur’s ‘Tender’ in fills Diceman with glee.)

Loxley is one of those Midlands villages that you’ve never heard of but wish you had as soon as you arrive, because it’s just lovely there. You reach it after a long windy road hemmed by thick green trees and hedges, past an ancient rambling church clinging to a hillside, wander around lost for a bit and see a nice looking country pub, and finally get to the Loxley Guesthouse, which guards some lawns, a apple tree indecently burdened with fruit, pots brimming with flowers and with chickens in a coop at the back. The Director is horrified by the idea of chickens, but agreed that the rest of the place would do very nicely. The Bear is afraid of nothing (apart from Golden Retrievers) and loved it.

One party later, back we tottered at three in the morning (one year olds really know how to party these days) and spent a few hours blissfully unconscious before getting up for our pre-booked 9am breakfast. Guests are hoofed from the Loxley at 10am, which seemed sadistic to us on a dopey Sunday morning, but perhaps it’s to give them time to make the place so mercilessly clean before the next lot arrive. Diceman still managed to get a full run through of ‘Tender’ in the shower, though, hurrah!

Any gripes are forgiven when Our Host serves breakfast. Thick, juicy slabs of bacon cooked in the oven, the way Diceman likes them. A robust sausage so full of flavour it actually made me think something was wrong with it at first. Lovely free range eggs, mushrooms cooked until just soft but with plenty of bite left, grilled tomatoes, and astonishing black pudding that melted in the mouth – easily the best I’ve tasted. Afterwards it came out that I’d just eaten a contender for the Best Breakfast In Warwickshire award, announced this week – the Loxley is down to the final two, and should really make more of a song and dance about it. It’s bloody good. The vegan breakfast met with approval too, after a few gentle reminders that yes, just a little bit of bacon or butter still counted as animal products. Our Host had kindly gone out to buy ingredients specially, so many cool points were earned there.

After that there was just enough time for some vegan-baiting, as Our Host marvelled at the Director, adamant that one day she’ll come to her senses, before The Man With No Boo arrived to collect us. I told him about the food, which is painstakingly sourced from local suppliers by Our Host, a man with admirable zeal for good meat and the art of turning it into a spanking breakfast. ‘We’ve got croissants at home,’ TMWNB replied bitterly. ‘Great.’

Home we went. So, if you’re visiting Stratford upon Avon, or anywhere in Shakespeare country, Diceman recommends staying with Our Host at the Loxley. You’ll be up early, but it’ll be worth it.

BandB bafflement

The last serious batch of travelling Diceman did involved staying in lots of hostels, campsites, tiny Japanese capsules and curling up in berths on ferries. They all have their associated oddities, of course, but last night I finally put my finger on one that’s been bugging me for a while: what is it that I find so odd about the Great British Bed and Breakfast?

It’s something that comes on in the early stages, during the process of booking a room. I find myself reluctant to call them or even get in contact, when I’ve had absolutely no trouble at all anywhere else in the world – I even pitched up at a French farmhouse once and asked if I could sleep on their lawn (they shrugged and said yes, then went back to their soup). Yet calling a B&B to book fills me with nerves, and now I know why. It’s because they seem so totally dumbfounded by your request for a room.

So much so, in fact, that I usually think I’ve got the wrong number. Last night’s conversation(s) went like this:

<ringring>

Antique voice: Hello? Hello?

<sound of shipping forecast being turned down>

Antique voice: Hello? Yes, hello?

Diceman: Um, hi, I wondered if you have any rooms available this weekend?

AV: Sorry, pardon? A room?

Diceman: Yes. Ah, is this Quaintly Suspicious bed and breakfast?

AV: (suspiciously) Yes, it is.

<pause>

Diceman: Great, so do you have any rooms free this weekend?

AV: Rooms? Well, I’m not exactly sure. I’ll have to check.

<rustling and tinkling of china>

AV: No, I’m not sure. Look, would you mind awfully if I called you back?

And then they don’t, of course. I called back a few hours later and had the same conversation with someone else, again with limited success. He said that they probably didn’t have rooms, but that he wasn’t sure, but for the sake of argument it was best to assume that they didn’t. This morning his wife called again and left a long message explaining that they had problems, terribly sorry, and so probably didn’t have rooms. I actually feel bad for intruding.

And that’s the thing with the B&B. I can live with everything else surrounding them, the doilies, the gnomes in the garden, the fact that I always become 73% more English when confronted with a genteel B&B owning couple; but it’s the utter surprise in their voices when I call and ask for a room that unsettles me. It’s as if they’ve opened the house to visitors without meaning to and are totally freaked out when someone wants to come and stay. I’m guilty even before I arrive and traipse mud onto the Axminster.

You can imagine the fun we had explaining to the one place with vacancies that The Director is vegan. ‘So just a little bit of bacon, then?’ They’re keen for me to park the car with the nose facing the front lawn. I can’t wait.

The homeliness of the middle distance runner

Ever driven through blinding, cotton-wool scoop fog? Stuff so thick you can feel it pressing down on the car? The amazing thing about it is that fog can render roads you’ve known your whole driving life unreadable: all sense of distance, time, sharp corners, where you live is gone.

A similar thing happens if you (perhaps unwisely) decide to run a 10k race through the middle of your home city, as Diceman and The Director chose to do recently. ‘Oh, that doesn’t look so bad!’ cried Diceman heartily, looking at the proposed route. ‘We walk that way all the time, that bit’s right in the city centre, and that final section is a lovely walk by the river. Easy!’

The key word in all of that? WALK. Walking a route in the city is very different, it turns out, to running it with several thousand others. When you’re ambling out for a coffee, for example, you don’t notice exactly how steep that slope is, or how murderously the cobbles are slicked with morning dew. The lovely walk by the river is indeed lovely, but 8km in it’s little more than a bright green glittering mural of pain lining the walls of your tunnel vision after you decide to ‘push on a bit’. There’s nothing more likely to render the comforting heart of your city a strange, unforgiving place than trying to run through it. Flat streets turn out to be hills. Bollards are punishingly permanent. And since when were all these pavements so teeth-chatteringly solid?

But another thing happens at these events that turns your preconceptions of home on their heads. Walking through the city every day, dodging people, swerving around Emergency Stop Photographers gawping up at the monuments, cursing cyclists on the pavement, you get used to the ebb and flow of human traffic. Close the roads off and run through them, and all those people, those obstacles, stop being half-noticed bits of scenery and become cheering, clapping, amazing individuals. They’re the ones giving strangers high-fives on the finish straight, or handing out oranges down by the river to keep people going. They’re waving, or shouting ‘well done’, or jogging alongside you briefly to hand over a quick sugar fix in the form of jelly babies. Diceman doesn’t know where you live, but chances are this sort of thing doesn’t happen every day on the streets.

Which brings me back to the fog. Because while the foreignness of that swirling  gloop makes a familiar journey unpredictable and difficult, it also makes everything unexpectedly beautiful. I’m glad to have completed the run not just for the sense of physical or mental achievement, but for the chance to see home in a strange and splendid light, just for a moment.

Strangely familiar

The Director at Castle Howard

One of the great woes about escaping within your country of birth is that you’ll never really see it the way a visitor from foreign climes would. Diceman regrets this – one of the splendid things about roaming around is seeing the way they do stuff, particularly the little details.

So, off we trotted to Castle Howard at the weekend, The Director and I. It’s beautiful there, a conscious blend of rolling Arcadian fields, medieval enclosures, rose gardens and a daft great house covered in scrolls and arches. They filmed ‘Brideshead Revisited’ there twice. (Brideshead Revisited Revisited? Sorry, it’s late.) Apparently we have to call this kind of thing a ‘Staycation’ now, although not sure I approve of that, but hey ho. With this ’stranger in a familiar land’ idea in my head, I thought it might be fun to try and see things with an open mind, rather than one informed by a childhood of National Trust membership and the fact that we’re tripping over stately piles in England.

Here are some of my attempts:

- the English enjoy flocking to these stately homes at the weekend, apparently to enjoy sitting in the car park on folding picnic chairs. They don’t go in, which seems a bit of shame after running the gauntlet of  murderously crowded A-roads stuffed with roadworks and huge agricultural machines going about their business,  gleefully causing half-mile tailbacks.

- it’s the little things that are the same at every self-service tea room. These are the things that define the English to the bemused Italians lounging trendily on the lawn. They individually separate the biscuits and wrap them in a little bit of heat-sealed plastic. They bleat on about the quality of their tea and then get a hunched teenager (who has never, ever drunk tea) to hurl water resentfully onto it, slosh some milk down and curse it towards the hapless punters. They insist that an egg sandwich is still acceptable for lunch sixty years after the war ended. Nice scones, mind.

- they tell fascinating tales about the statues in the grounds (it’s only a statue of Hercules if he’s carrying the pelt of the Nemean lion), the topiary hedges (which are cut and harvested to make cancer drug tamoxifen), the logistics involved in getting a steam-powered fountain from Chelsea to the middle of North Yorkshire in the 19th century (very complicated ones involving steam trains and lots of servants), but they overlook the most obvious story: that everyone, everyone who created and lived in these houses was absolutely and irrevocably CRACKERS. They’re used to it, so they think not much of building a Roman-style pyramid in the middle of a field, or building ha-ha walls. Walls that exist only to make people fall off them! Who does that? Lunatics! Maybe it’s an unquestioning relic of an old class system that makes them blind to it, but you can see the message etched in the faces of all the non-English folks.

- they love to close things. Oh, how they love it. Beautiful, golden late-afternoon light hitting the gardens is it? Bathing everything in caramel? Best switch off the fountains, close the house and start sweeping the floor, looking meaningfully at anyone who approaches, then.

That’s what the French family who came out told us, anyway. We were too comfy in our picnic chairs enjoying our grand day out to really worry.

On Greenhow Hill

There’s a corner of North Yorkshire called Nidderdale, and it contains some of Diceman’s favourite things. For one, the Oldest Sweet Shop in England is here, on Pateley Bridge’s high street – it’s the kind of place where you still point, goggle-eyed, at the many jars of treats on the back shelf and someone in an apron tips a load of them into a little bag for you. There’s a smell of wooden beams and dusted sugar and it’s always, always rammed with people.

Leading out of Pateley Bridge is a hill. A big hill. In winter cars use it as a helter-skelter, whether they want to or not, and should you make it to the top you’re rewarded with vast views of bristling purple moorland in every direction and forests stamped black against the sky. It’s unbroken apart from drystone walls and the odd tumbledown stone barn.

And the little village of Greenhow, too. Is it a village? More a clump of houses, really, hunkered down under the elements. The first thing that greets you as you enter is the cemetery, which sort of sets the tone for the place. It’s home to ghosts of all kinds, from distant farming families to the tin miners who left their towers and holes dotted about. A sharp, keening wind sings the soundtrack up here.

Diceman made a little pilgrimage when the snows came, partly to play ‘Drift the Vauxhall’ on empty roads and partly to stamp through snow and get my head blasted clean. Which the stinging ice particles duly did. Definitely something to be said for stalking the moors under the gaze of the ghosts.

The homecoming, part two – all you need is love

The initial signs weren’t good. London was buried under huge mounds of cloud as we circled to land. A Daily Mail headline shrieked ‘Blade Britain’ as we got off the plane. Terminal 5 was empty, and broken: all the baggage claim signs were displaying fictional flights, so staff were busy going up to tired passengers and saying ‘don’t trust the signs.’ So far, so dystopian.

But then an extraordinary thing happened: the customs and immigration lady made a joke. A joke! Diceman had always thought these people were chosen precisely because their sense of humour gene was missing, but was happy to be proved wrong. Looking at the old incarnation of Diceman on the passport, with dyed blonde hair and the indescribable ‘otherness’ that the photo machine always contrives to give me, she paused. ‘Is this really you?’

‘Yes. Honest. And I’ve been on a plane for ages, do not mess me around.’ (Script may be exaggerated.)

Another pause while she ran it through her barcode bleepy thing, and then – I promise – she looked at me deadpan and said…

‘Computer says no.’

I was too busy scrabbling on the floor for my lower jaw to come up with a witty riposte, so settled for ‘whah-huh?’ and a laugh that my vocal chords have never tried out before. At which point she smiled cheerily and waved us through.

Now, diceman knows that this may be the tallest tale of all of these ramblings, but would I lie to you? Of course not. Anyway, this set the tone for not quite the horrifying homecoming we’d both been expecting. England is crowded, London is a bit glum and full of determinedly grumpy people, there does indeed to be much knivery going on and credit is being pitilessly crunched, but here are a few things diceman had forgotten about the place…

1) It’s green here! Incredibly, lustily green! There are actually layers and layers of different greens, and fields, and ranks of trees, and we have hedges. Hedges! How ace are hedges! They’re like big bristly party zones for singing things, and scurrying things, and badgers. Badgers! How ace are badgers! And don’t get me started on hedgehogs. It’s a marvel of green and pleasant-ness – after the relentless grey and neon of Tokyo, it hits you hard.

2) It’s absolutely beautiful here! OK, London’s suburbs are a dull splat of brick and misery, and the York to Harrogate train is absolutely the single most desolate space on earth, but have you seen the stuff in between? We really do have golden fields dotted with haystacks, rivers splashing through copses, and Yorkshire…well, Diceman has always been a proud Northern gatecrasher (don’t tell them I was born in Maldon), but coming back to it, you have to say there’s nowhere quite like the Dales. Where else do you sweep the horizon and go from steep hills, green pasture and stone walls, to lurid purple moorland scoured by curmudgeonly gamebirds and pocked with rock, to little villages with a pub the size of a phone box and people who know your business just a little before you do?

3) The English are hilarious! In the space of a few days Diceman and Sparklehorse went to a wedding in a castle, watched a village cricket match and drank some tea, had a BBQ that was menaced by the threat of rain, and watched people queue while they thought about which ATM queue to get into. Queuing to queue! Apparently we really do all the things we’re known for. And it must be said, nowhere on our trip was able to get a grip on a good cup of tea: hurrah for Blighty!

So, as promised, we tottered back to our little Yorkshire town, took a deep breath, and legged it to The Wedding. Countless hugs (only some of them manly), three punishing hangovers, four late nights, Pimms on the lawn, a battering ram raid on the disco using Diceman as the ram and several croaky voices later, it was over. One happy couple, many happy guests, a huge amount of pictures, and the last point on the itinerary. We’re done.

I thought about trying to find a moving, pithy quote to end this with, but Sparklehorse would have flicked my head and called me a gaylord. And of course, there’s bound to be a few more posts yet, at least until I get a job. So in the meantime I’ll take a cue from the last song at the wedding, as sung by John, Paul, George, Ringo, and a lot of drunken friends and relatives.

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done…

Thanks for riding with us.

The Homecoming, part one – Setting Sun

After a few more days in Hiroshima, battling weirdly aggressive small deer for our lunch and eating the strange combination of cabbage, bacon, noodles, pancake batter and smashed eggs (absurdly delicious) that serves as the local speciality, we whooshed back up to Tokyo for the final few days of the trip.

So, swords. Fair enough to think about them in the context of Japan, really – bushido, samurai, katana, replicas sold in various markets, and various ninja death battle scenarios replaying in diceman’s whirring little boy mind every few days or so (nothing to do with Japan, the last one, just a diceman thing). Not something I’d previously associated with fish markets, though.

But that’s what we saw as we braved the Tsukiji fish market, still slightly rattled by the fact that at five in the morning the world still exists and isn’t just static – swords. Swords being wielded by frantic fellows, diligently about the business of de-finning, beheading and generally getting a bit cutty with the largest fish diceman has ever seen. Forklifts tear up and down the aisles and swerve for no man, piloted with a kind of grim fanaticism by men in overalls, who stop briefly, hurl boxes of fish at other men in overalls, and then tear off again in pursuit of an American tourist to run over. Writhing tentacled things curl about in tanks and trays, winking suckers at you as you pass. Pissed off fish stare moodily from other tanks, remembering they were in the ocean a few hours back. Other fish are too dead from swords to look pissed off, and are instead carted off without heads, lifted into huge freezers, haggled over, even hacked up with a bandsaw in readiness for heading out to the restaurants.

Presiding over the carefully organised madness are countless lined, bent men, all with the obligatory fag dangling from their lips scattering ash over the fish, laughing, yelling, and in some cases grimly wrestling wriggling things before jamming a wire into their spines to end things. The sheer volume of aquatic genocide is staggering, it’s hard to imagine how the seas aren’t already empty save for a few lost souls muttering ‘who turned off the music?’. Unfortunately diceman finds fish slightly too delicious to stop eating them altogether, but the scenes here, exciting and bustling though they were, certainly gave us both pause for thought.

With that, and the freshest sushi in Japan finally discovered next to the market, it was time to slope reluctantly to the airport, via the capsule hotel for a final few nights of vague claustrophobia. For places that signify arrival and departure and various adventures, diceman still sometimes finds airports curiously dispiriting, queues and horrifying prices and sweaty fellows playing Guitar Hero maniacally, but this time there was a slight thrill, the prospect of seeing people, home, wondering which England we’d find: the green, pleasant one, or the snarling, stabby one with the anonymous PM?

And, after 12 hours, gleefully devouring the new albums on the in-flight entertainment system, we’d find out…

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds…

The name Hiroshima has entered Diceman’s psyche, over the years, on a level that approaches onomatopoeiaic; it echoes with destruction when you hear it. Going there, it’s easy to try and read too much into the topography: is it so spaced out because of…; does it all seem so new because of…; is the personality of the city different because of… You know. Coming into the city, your mind can only see mushroom clouds.

But there’s no escaping that Hiroshima is new, and is spaced out, and part of the reason for that is going to be that they rebuilt it, from the ground up, on a simple grid system. It’s a small city, near the ocean, with wider streets than Tokyo and Kyoto along which trams rattle and hum. There’s an island just off the harbour covered in glorious temples, with a shrine gate (or tori) set out in the water to look like it’s floating on the waves. It’s a compact, interesting little place.

But you can’t get away from August 6, 1945, the day which atomised the heart of the city in ways Diceman had never fully comprehended before. You can’t get away from it because of the giant Peace Memorial Park with its attendant museum, or the childrens’ memorial, or the Atomic Bomb dome – the ruined shell of the only city centre structure left standing after Little Boy unleashed hell  – which gapes blindly over the river, roof torn open to the sky. It’s been left as a reminder, and it works. Amidst the shiny new buildings and against the baseball stadium, it still holds its own as a witness to horror.

Diceman is no history buff, but knew a bit about the bombing of Hiroshima – the quote from Oppenheimer that gives this post its title, the name of the plane, the shape of the explosion. What you learn at the museum is intended to put you on the ground at the moment the bomb went off, to try and give you an idea. Of course, nothing can give you an idea of what 5000 degrees C feels like, which was the heat on the ground at the hypocentre. Or the thousands of miles per hour winds. Or the hundreds of tonnes of pressure per square metre that literally shattered the city into dust and hurled it into the sky to rain back down as black, irradiated poison. There are testimonies from survivors, usually parents of children (who seem to have been the worst hit), talking of their five year old son vomiting up ‘what looked like lumps of his internal organs’ as he died of radiation poisoning a few days after the blast; or of the child trying to slake his thirst by sucking the pus from his fleshless, ruined fingers.

The children, Diceman learned, had all been conscripted to work on building sites in the city centre, so they were all outside – thousands of them – right where the bomb went off. 140,000 people died by the end of the year, either at the moment of impact or slowly, as the months wore on. They were thought to be reasonably safe, as Hiroshima had not been the victim of an air raid previously; turns out this was a deliberate move on the part of the allies, who left the prospective target cities for the bomb alone. They wanted to assess the damage done by the new weapon without having to take into account prior air raid damage – very scientific, as were the instruments dropped along with the bomb to measure the effects.

Not that you needed instruments. The city was blown to matchwood in seconds, shadows were burned onto walls, concrete bubbled and cracked, glass melted and fused, and people’s skin literally dripped from their bones. Terrifyingly, this was the bomb at 1/50th of its intended power; only one of the 50 kilos of Uranium it carried actually ‘went nuclear’.

This is all scary enough. Scarier still are the declassified US documents relating to the bomb, which discuss, dispassionately, the business at hand. Should a warning be given? Should the bomb be deployed at all? No to the first, and yes to the second, but for reasons Diceman never knew. One cited reason: to show a solid outcome of the expensive Manhattan project, allaying the wrath of the US taxpayer; another, to intimidate the Russian government and give the US postwar leverage. Why Japan? They were considered less likely to gain immediate knowledge of the new technology than Germany would, should the weapon fail to detonate. All decisions that probably made sense to those who made them, when put into context, sure; but viewed now, standing staring at the blackened bones and bloodied uniforms, nothing but the testimony of murderers. But like I said, Diceman is no historian and finds it hard to be objective about these things. I was simply left with a profound feeling of unease, a nagging sense this did not need to happen; that there were other ways. One document advised not dropping the bomb without at least giving warning, advising that if the US unleashed this terror it would gain itself a reputation as a warmongering nation and plunge the world into a deadly nuclear arms race for years to come. Phew! Just as well that all came to nothing, right?

And yet, and yet. Don’t know what London’s blitz spirit might have mutated into had the bomb been dropped on them, but Hiroshima began to rebuild within days, and instead of nurturing a deadly sense of vengeance, has dedicated itself to peace. The mayor sends a telegram of protest to every nation that conducts a nuclear test. They try to educate children, raise awareness, and attempt – vainly, perhaps – to have all nuclear weapons destroyed. It’s a moving experience, a terrifying one, and not one I’ll forget in a hurry.

Love, with a bullet

The Japanese bullet train experience is actually a bit of a non-event. You turn up at the station, it shows up, you get on, and you arrive. There’s not a lot to it, to be honest.

Until you stop to think about that last sentence. You arrive at the station, and it’s easy to book a seat, even with the language barrier. No-one patronises you to the extent that you want to punch through the little speaker grill and choke them to death with their ratty little GNER tie.

The train shows up. And when I say shows up, it doesn’t cough resentfully up to the platform three hours late with half the promised carriages – it’s on time to the minute, almost silent, and gleams like a gleamy emissary from the planet gleam.

You get on, and the bloody things are massive. Wide aisles to walk down, no risk of being decapitated by an errant chav’s Burberry underarm bag-weapon, and cool, quiet and comfy. Not quite enough baggage room, if we’re niggling, but the seats recline, so who cares?

You arrive. Almost before you noticed you left. They’re shockingly fast, curving smoothly into the corners, and just tear across the land with no fuss at all – and you’re there. You realise that the reason it’s uneventful is that this is how train travel is supposed to be, and not some form of penance for your past-life sins.

Love!