Stonehenge

Well the idea was to find Merlin and dress up as druids, or both.

There were five of us and three rucksacks and too many bottles of water to worry about describing.

I was dressed like a prannock and the plan was to go to Stonehenge and take pictures of other people taking pictures and prove to the world that we’d been – which is obviously the point of going to any tourist attraction that you’re somehow massively familiar with beforehand anyway.

We thought it best to first have a night of drinking and rolling down hills in Bristol, so we did that. Then we got up and I applied my factor fifty and off we trundled to the foot of my good friend Edd’s drive where we’d wait an hour for a taxi to actually find us.

And lo, we did catch a train to Salisbury.

Salisbury’s nice – one of those nice places that’s full of nice architecture and stranger people; a big mish mash of groups; young lads, signet swans, Japanese well-travelleds and idiots like me. Many buses. Shops of signficant meaning to somebody, but evidently not to the people who’ve come to take pictures of something they’ve already seen a million pictures of in the years preceeding their arrival.

So is it more authentic to have a picture of Stonehenge with you in it somehow? Isn’t that what Photoshop’s for anyway? Isn’t that what Stalin did with pictures of Lenin to win popular Russian support?

Either way we paid £Stupid to get to the site on a clumsy set of bus seats with a clumsier set of wheels to get us there, and when we arrived it was baking and most without shade, and I began to melt precisely as a snowman might not. That is, a snowman does not melt from the feet up, does it? Or have I taken leave of my wits?

After paying another disgusting fee in what I justified was a manner befitting the discovery of Merlin, we were admitted to the site itself, roped and pathed as it was and without a single wizard in view, save for some crows pecking away at Arthurian legend.

It was terrific, peering at those enormous heaps of stone. You’re quite able to see why so many lunatics go there at the height of summer. I spent a number of minutes questioning where Merlin might be, before sulking about the sun destroying my body and giving me face cancer or what have you. I had a hat though. Did you?

So we didn’t turn a single cartwheel and we got photographic and it was jolly, price-anger besides. I wouldn’t claim to have had a spiritual moment because that’d be untrue, but there’s something humbling about a large pile of rocks much bigger than any usual kind, and that the whole assemblage is older than things like the Humber bridge.