h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Last week I finally did my finals at Lancaster University.
This required a three day stay in the fair city, which as per usual I had utterly failed to organise properly until the very last minute. Months earlier I had made a loose arrangement to stay with Dave and Amy and had only thought to contact them to confirm this 2 days before going. Needless to say they were away, camping.
When I did speak to them, an hour before I needed to leave, they were happy to have me stay but had already planned to go climbing with a friend on a range of climbs named after David Bowie songs.
Surreal though it was that they were unavailable because Dave had an urge to practice finger jamming tachniques in a crack halfway up Ziggy Stardust it did mean that I was to spend some time in Lancaster with little to do.
To me that is always good news.
Lancaster holds a special place in my heart (to the extent that I really do want to write an article about it for the guide once I've waded through the extensive historical side) not just because I have experienced my student life there but because it is a very, very pleasant place to be. Having lived in London all my life I appreciate the comparatively crime-free quietness of the town, and also the proximity to the countryside. I also love the way that it has all the things I worried I would miss in a small northern town, like good resturants and a quality arts cinema.
So I was happy to be at my leisure when I arrived at 4 in the afternoon on Bank Holiday Monday. I strolled into Lancaster and arrived not in a Lancashire city centre but the bustling market of a Normandy town.
A French market had descended on the town for the day offering a range of craft stalls alongside some excellent food. Of particular interest to me was the fromagerie selling the most attractive camemberts I have seen at an even more attractive price.However I managed to resist this huge temptation and move on through the town in search of a more preprepared lunch.
It was on this stroll down to the M&S food hall that I was accosted by Sarah. Sarah was a devastatingly attractive girl with a winning smile, cute German accent and a large ring binder. Much as I hoped that she was coming over to ask me if I wished to learn something about the German tongue (or to be more precise her German tongue) I knew that what she really wanted to do was drag me into the alley at the side of the main street and show me her ring binder.
This she did. Sarah works for Greenpeace and given my lack of anything to do I was more than willing to be given a lecture on what I could do to save the planet. In fact I found the talk Sarah gave, in amazing English despite her protestations overwise (you try and explain the failings of the inner workings of BNFL and the new Kyoto agreement in German), to be fascinating. I had always kind of turned a blind eye to her organisation before. Not really wishing to spend anytime strapped to oil rigs in rough seas I simply let people like Sarah get on with it and applauded them from my sofa. Unfortunatly for Sarah the aim of this activity was to get me to sign a direct debit form to donate regularly to the cause. In my unemployed state this was impossible. So I made my apologies and walked on. To be honest I think she was happy someone had stopped and been genuinely interested (oh and when I do start earning I will find Sarah and sign anything she wants).
Having collected my lunch from marks and sparks (feeling guilty about the slightly corporate nature of the repast) I made my way up to Lancaster Castle with a plan to sit in the field by castle hill, eat and then do some revision in the late afternoon sun. Unfortunately I found myself accosted by several whores.
I had forgotten that on the late August Bank Holiday one of the special events in the Lancastrian calender takes place, the Georgian Festival. Every year a gang of people (and I speak here with no actual knowledge of the true organisation so forgive me for innacuracies), who in any other English town would be spending the day running a church bric-a-brac sale, attending a homecraft contest with the chutney they have been maturing for 18 months or getting the village of Ingleflipflop ready for Britain in Bloom judges, dress up as soldiers, thieves, gentry and whores from the eighteenth century and parade around or run stalls on the theme. Of course this is all for charity (I think) though which one I don't know. What I do know is that the whole thing is truly fantastic. Maybe it is helped by being in the seemingly unchanging presence of the castle but it really does feel exactly like being transported back a quarter of a millenium. I highly recomend a visit next year if you're around.
Anyway I passed through the rabble, sat in the quiet field nearby, ate and revised.
I did this for a couple of hours but it was a gorgeous day and I couldn't fully keep my mind on the subject at hand. I decided to stop for the day. However my hosts would still not be home for another hour and a half. In the meantime I decided to tick a couple of items off of my 'Things I should have done while I lived in Lancaster' list. Number one was a visit to the nearby ruined roman bath house. After meaning to check this out for 3 years my disappointmant could not have been more strong. After crossing the needlessly muddy and overgrown hillock that obscures the thing from the path I found it was fenced in. I had hoped to be able to walk around its foundations imagining myself taking part in some bacchanalial ritual. Instead I was to discover that I couldn't get near the thing and whichever angle I tried to view it from I could see little detail of what I was looking at. What would have helped greatly would have been a little diagram attached to the fence. If the bath is ever open to the public there was no sign there saying so so I returned to the path and carried on my journey.
My friend Andrew had recently taken up jogging after I had become interested in improving my fitness. Being half my body weight he was already somewhat fitter than I and while I waddled around the small circuit of St Georges Quay he would go bombing off like a commando under fire. On one particularly insane occaision Andrew had started running with no particular idea of where he was going and ended up simply not stopping and just going on and on and on until he found he had run out of the town and all the way around it back to near our house. During this journey he had discovered a particularly nice walk that went along the River Lune as far as where an aquaduct carries the Lancaster canal over the river and then along the canal towpath through the eastern side of town. I decided to use my free time to check it out. I went down to the Quay and used the new (wobble free) footbridge to cross to the far bank of the Lune. It was a fascinating stroll through everything Lancaster could offer including council housing, modern commuter type estates, industrial parks and also amazingly beautiful stretches of both the river and canal.
An interesting moment came when I got to one of several little wooden pontoons sticking out into the river above the weir that marks the change from the calm waters of the Lune to the tidal area of its estuary. On this particular pier were a group of 5 or 6 boys in shorts with their shirts off, fishing. As I approached them I looked on them in their idyllic setting with wonderment. Having lived in London during my childhood I was used to the normal protocol on approaching a large pack of young boys on a river bank or canal towpath to be to get your wallet out and remove your watch ready to hand over in avoidance of a severe beating at the hands of your munchkin proportioned assailants. Here, I could see from a distance, it was different. Here was much more Enid Blighton. Here boys frollic in the sun on a late summer day getting close to nature and doing the things boys are meant to do instead of being corrupted by the smog of London.
As I approached them I heard their 10 year old's conversation come drifting downstream to me...
"Give me a f**kin' go you qu**r"
"Why should I you f**kin' bummer"
"Coz its our rod too"
"No its not I f**kin nicked it"
"No you f**kin didn't we all did"
"I picked it up didn't I?"
"Yeah but we were f**kin lookin out for you, and that guy was asleep."
I got my wallet ready for presentation. Luckily it was unnecessary as by the time I passed by they were deeply engrossed in torturing the youngest of their brethren by puposefully flicking the hook dangerously near to him when casting. Ahhh kids.
The walk was gorgeous. Particularly the stretch on the canal which took me through a kind of hidden Lancaster I had never seen before.
Happy, I headed for Dave and Amy's.