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

Sunday morning both Amy and I were up well before Carol, who slept for about 12 hours. We had a lovely, slow breakfast of bacon and eggs and bagels and fruit whilst sorting out what to do for the day. The first activity we chose was "shopping". I use quotation marks because I don't recall any of us actually buying anything, rather we tried lots of free samples at the monthly Kirkgate farmers market. Carol didn't like black pudding, so I got extra. I think a nice bit of Wensleydale went down better.

After "shopping" we wandered over to the Henry Moore Institute, an art gallery that was mainly closed, but we did get to stare at a couple of wooden sculptures for a few minutes. Then we headed to the railway station and thence to Saltaire, a town that nineteenth-century industrialist Titus Salt had built for his cotton mill workers. The mills are no longer functional, of course, having been turned into offices and homes and in one case a museum featuring a lot of David Hockney paintings.

One other remarkable thing about the museum is that the gift shop is not a seperate room, but takes up tables spread throughout the main gallery, which is a large room with a brick ceiling that once will have held dozens and dozens of looms (the room, that is, not the ceiling). The good news is that the shop sells not over-priced pencils with little mills on them, but various interesting books about art and design.

At the end of the room a doorway leads to a small room with Saltaire's history described around the wall. Carol read this in detail, while I skimmed most of it and amused myself trying to decipher 19th century legalese ("said Titus Salt two tunnels or culverts to be constructed heretoafter and theretofore" sort of thing), after which we headed upstairs, through another gallery to Salt's Diner for dinner.

In the afternoon we took a stroll along the canal side, watched a cricket match for a bit and tried to explain the basics to Carol. We also saw ducks, swans and a narrowboat entering a lock. Then it was off back to the station, because we wanted to be in Leeds in time to catch a film called something like "Dosser's Map of the Universe".

Quite clearly the main British institution that any foreign visitor needs to be introduced to is the pub quiz. Forget Michael Howard's ideas about immigrants taking English tests and getting checked out for diseases - they should instead be challenged by a number of general knowledge questions and a badly-photocopied picture quiz. So we went to the Bricklayers Arms near the university where two friends of mine run the quiz. Our team, Igloos and Totem Poles won by quite a margin, despite failing to identify the Phantom in the comic book picture quiz. Okay there were only five teams, which is unusually low, but still I despair at the state of today's undergraduates.

Sadly we had to leave before we could claim our prize of a gallon of beer, but Amy kindly offered to drink it at some future time, as the other two of us would not be in town.