If we took a holiday

 ...we would have to travel to get anywhere. It's a long time since my poem Against Travel but I haven't revised my opinion of it. Train, aeroplane, coach, car - I honestly don't know which is beset by the least evils.

It's been quieter than usual here lately, partly due to the Easter hiatus in lunchtime concerts but also due to last week having myself a little excursion 'zipping up my boots and going back to my roots', to Nottingham where we left in early 1968 and where I haven't been back since the late 1980's.

It's said one shouldn't go back and I generally don't but once I'd had the idea it had to be done. There are only three people in Nottingham who even know who I am, assuming junior school contemporaries have by now forgotten me or moved away, and it wasn't appropriate to land myself on them and so inevitably one is in a place that, left to its own devices, has moved on and I'm a stranger in my own land.

A five hour walk tied together all the significant family-related sites. I sat outside the Trip to Jerusalem pub with Guinness rather than Nottingham beer, paid homage to Notts County, revitalised Forest and Notts cricket and that was Nottingham done. Some terrible irony struck me that while sat outside the Trip, as part of the historic scene, my view was of some tawdry business premises that had been built, used, abandoned and become derelict all in the time since we left which is, after all, 57 years. And they don't talk much proper Nottingham there any more, either. My sister, father and I sound more authentic than most of the people I heard.

But I added three more cathedrals to my list. St. Barnabas, the Catholic place in Nottingham, is very ordinary and I only went in because I was passing anyway but Lincoln lived up to its billing, easily Top 10 in the UK, maybe not quite up with Durham, Wells, Westminster Abbey and one or two other superstars but very good and essential, really. There's always some show-off know-all on a guided tour and on mine the guide asked if there were any Latin scholars that could translate the inscription Cantate hic.

Sing here, they said.

Yes, exactly, he said. It was me, of course, still even now unable to resist a chance to impress the teacher.

A great added bonus, though, was Lichfield with its impressive cathedral, too. Maybe not quite as grand as its magnificent frontage leads one to expect but very good. Even better, and possibly the unexpected highlight of the week was Dr. Johnson's house and Museum.

Spectacularly well done, all the better for being an 'extra', with its very well read and forthright lady presiding over it with to talk about not only Dr. Johnson but two Eliots - George and T.S.- Larkin and matters arising. Deeply impressed with that, I bought two books from her and so Tender is the Night is abandoned late on, Fitzgerald Studies can wait and I'm back with the great man all too gladly.

I'm sure he could have put it better than me but,

Travel, sir? It is an impediment to be suffered in pursuit of such places as might provide the satisfaction of fulfilment.

I must remember next time that while 'transport' is a good thing, when prefixed by 'public' it can often be a degraded pleasure. What normally happens is that I vow never to go anywhere ever again but that starts to wear off and then I think of somewhere to go. I'm not in any hurry yet, though. Dorchester for Thomas Hardy country might not be bad by train. London to go back to Westminster Abbey is easy enough but Hereford, Ely and York Minster aren't persuading me at the moment.