Stratford is grim. Actually, it’s a dump. What a shame it’ll be the transport hub of the 2012 Olympics, and visitors from all over the world will have to walk its dirty, grimy streets and shelter from the rain in the depressing, limp shopping centre.

It’s also, unfortunately, the easiest place from which to start a walk around the Olympic park before it’s all boarded up for development. So we went there this morning, and did indeed shelter from the rain in the depressing, limp shopping centre, and walked its dirty, grimy streets.

Then we cut off onto the Greenway, which I’ve seen every college and working day for the last 14 years from the windows of the train, and we walked along a scrubby, overgrown path that probably counts for ‘countryside’ and comes nowhere close.

Already the developers had moved in and erected blue wooden walls to block some of the paths, and tacked up cropped print-outs from Google Maps, annotated with inadequate directions.

We did, eventually, find the site of the Olympic stadium, after picking our way through piles of discarded tyres and junk from scrap yards liberally scattered across the roads, and were presented by an unlabelled mound of earth supporting a small crop of pylons.

What a dump. I can’t believe the Olympic committee wanted to send the games here. They must have got mixed up with Paris.

Ugh.

So tonight’s entertainment was all the more enjoyable.

We walked along the South Bank, which is always the perfect spot for a warm summer evening, had pizza under the ITV Tower, and then wandered up to the sparkly fresh Royal Festival Hall for This is Tomorrow.

This is Tomorrow is a film about the Hall itself, so it’s somewhat bizarre to be sitting in there watching it, seeing how the seats, boxes, walkways and balconies all around you came into being. It’s also momentarily uncomfortable when they explain that each of the panels above your head weighs the same as a small family car.

But at the same time it’s endlessly diverting, helped no end by the fact that the soundtrack, which was scored by St Etienne, was played live by the band, a choir and an 80-piece orchestra for this premiere showing.

Of course, you keep forgetting that, and you have to keep reminding yourself that what you’re hearing is being played right there and right then by the people spread out on the stage below you.

It was highly evocative, and made me quite sad that I never saw the Festival of Britain site (of which the Hall was a part) in its full 1950s glory. For that reason – and that reason alone – I’m glad that we slogged our way around the dirty, battered and ugly Olympic site, if only so we can say we remember when it was all just rubble and dirt.

This picture pretty much sums up the weather we’ve had all week. Rain when we were in the car, and sun whenever we got anywhere. This was the one instance when we got both at the same time. Nothing could have been timed better.

So today, Thursday, we turned the car properly south and headed home by way of Barnard Castle, another town with family connections. I don’t think I’d been before, but it was pleasant enough. We had stupidly cheap tea and cakes down by the butter market (cake each and tea each for about the same price as an expensive London coffee full of froth), took pictures of the castle, then headed home, by way of Leeds and Lincoln, a detour around some docks for little apparent reason, a loo break at Grantham, and a final heavy downpour.

Our northern exposure over, we head back to London tomorrow. Not for work, as luck would have it, but to walk the Olympic Park before it’s finally closed off on Monday to develop the stadium and peripheral buildings.

Car prepares to cross the causeway to Lindisfarne as Rich takes its picture in case we lose it in the mud and it’s never seen again.

We took the car north. A long way north. Basically to the hump-back bit of where England almost turns into Scotland.

(Well, actually, we went further than that, as we spent the morning in Berwick Upon Tweed, which looked far prettier from a train speeding over the impressive brick viaduct than it does up close, and then drove two minutes up to and over the border just so we could say we’d done it. That’s not the point of this post, though – this one is about Lindisfarne.)

Lindisfarne – also known as Holy Island – is more famous for its gospels and saints than it is for the small, slightly ugly castle that sits at one end, or the twee little village that marks the half-way point between the causeway and the fortress. As such, it’s still a feature on the pilgrimage trail, and as we crossed the narrow road that opens up as the tides recede, we could look out at the stakes that marks out the safe pilgrimage walking route across the three miles of mud flats.

Nobody was risking it today, but plenty had come by car, despite the fact this is still – technically – low season. I dread to think what it would be like at the height of summer.

So, we pulled up in the car park like everyone else, dumped the car and set off by foot to explore. It’s all very twee, with cosy little houses, a twisty little village centre and, in the middle of it all, the priory, half of which came second in the battle with age and decay.

Walking around the southern and eastern shorelines we passed by a tiny outlying island on which someone had planted a large cross, then by the memorial to the three islanders killed in the war, the boat yard where old hulls had been turned upside down and used as sheds, and the flocks of sheep that grazed the rocky heath leading down to the sea.

Eventually we found ourselves at the castle.

Lindisfarne castle

The National Trust describes it as ‘romantic’, and from a distance that’s probably true. Up close, though, it’s a rocky hulk that could give a Second World War pillbox a run for its money.

It was closed when we got there, so couldn’t look inside, but I don’t think we missed much. Instead we walked around the headland, clambered up on some rocks to get a better look at the sheep and then walked slowly back to the car by way of the tack-filled tourist shop for a leisurely pootle home.

Except we didn’t go straight home. The journey south took us by Gateshead, so we detoured to look at Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North. I’d dismissed this out of hand in the past, perhaps rashly, after seeing it through the window of a slightly speeding train and dismissing it as a bit crap. I was so wrong.

The Angel of the North

Up close it’s enormous. If you stand beside it the top of your head is in line with the top of its feet, and the wing span is slightly larger than a jumbo jet. It stands on a hill that encases massive foundations, 20 metres deep and weighing 165 tons, that help it withstand winds of over 100 miles an hour.

As you walk around it, it would appear to keep changing size. Sometimes it is a towering beast, and sometimes quite manageable and moderate.

I’m very glad that I had a change to rethink my opinion of it, though, as it would be a shame to have stuck with my original judgement – particularly as I thought it compared so poorly to the brilliant Event Horizon, his 31 statues that are lining the South Bank until August.

They’re positioned on the edges of high buildings, looking down on you with a disinterested, vacant pose, as though they are some kind of automaton preparing to take over the city.

They’re apparently causing the police some headaches, though. As Reuters reports,

Since the 31 life-sized replicas of Gormley’s naked body went up in early May, police have been bombarded with telephone calls from members of the public reporting that they had spotted a would-be suicide jumper.

“We had several calls a day in the early stages and are now receiving two or three a day,” a police spokeswoman said.

High Force

High Force is one of those places I’ve heard about my whole life. It’s a wide and tall waterfall on the River Tees that has been part of one side of my family history for many generations. So how I managed to get to the ripe old age of 33 and never see it I don’t quite know.

There are two photos of it on the walls of our house, but neither of them does it justice. You hear it before you see it, as the rumble of its fast-flowing waters comes at you through the trees long before the narrow, winding path opens up onto a great arena carved out of the rock by millennia of erosion. After the rains we’ve been having it came down at an impressive whack, and threw up a great smoky mist from the surface of the water where it fell.

We stood at the bottom for maybe half an hour, taking pictures and clambering around on the rocks and fallen trees, and then climbed up to the top, where it tips over the edge of the cliff and down a full 20 metres to crash into the pool below.

There, just above the torrent, you would never have guessed that you were standing on top of one of the UK’s most impressive waterfalls. It was so quiet and gentle, and the water seemed to just slip away, as though it had disappeared into thin air, rather than being driven at speed towards a terrifying drop.

We did the obligatory, and drove along the river’s course to Cow Green Reservoir, where we parked the car and walked a couple of hours along the Pennine Way and back to see Cauldron Snout, the great cascade of waterfalls that leads to High Force. But the rocks were so wet and slippery there was a real risk we would have slipped in and never been seen again if we went too far, so we never did make it down to the bottom of the chain.

Our second stop of the day was Hadrian’s Wall.

It’s another one of those places about which you hear so much as a kid, and you imagine some grand, wide motorway of a wall like the Great Wall of China, but it’s not like that. It is, nevertheless, a very impressive feat of engineering. We walked along a perfectly-preserved section from Housesteads Fort, where it would be wide enough to (carefully) drive a small car along the top.

It is in remarkable condition, and you can look out along the ridge of the hills to see it snaking across their top edges like a brick and rock spine. Turn to one side and you see that you are tramping through a fern-filled wood. Turn to the other and the true majesty of this wall is apparent, as the land on which it is built drops away 100ft or more to a distant field below. How many people must have been killed in the process of constructing so sturdy a wall on so precarious a ridge, we can only guess.

Unfortunately the light was poor, and it didn’t make for brilliant photos. While I did take some, and I’ve since downloaded and viewed them, I’d rather close with another picture from High Force of a stream along the path to the falls.

Vroom

I’ve not been away since the epic trek from Athens to Budapest, that saw me narrowly miss a car bomb in Bulgaria, and get pounced on by the Bucharest security guards as I took pictures of Ceausescu’s dirt grave.

So it was quite exciting to be setting off for a week long break, heightened somewhat by the fact Volkswagen had lent us a rather smooth and quite expensive car from its press review fleet.

The weather, as predicted, was abysmal, and our four hour journey to a valley with neither broadband nor mobile phone coverage took closer to seven. Still, the welcome was warm, the cottage was dry and, once the clouds parted, the views opened up to reveal a magnificent Pennine vista. We had sheep and rabbits in the garden, a dry stone wall running along one side of us and a brook just beyond the stones that, as with all the best cliches, babbled to itself quite happily.

Needless to say, after such a journey we did very little with what remained of the day but head into Consett for some food, bring it back home and cook it, before settling down to decode the poorly-remembered rules to cribbage and look forward to the week ahead.

Over at the house, the floor was dug up for a whole week as a gas man came to replace all of my pipes, seemingly got bored half way through the job and buggered off for seven days. The new plumbers I’d been talking to about fitting the bathroom took an equally long time to get around to putting together a quote, and still there was no sign of the missing builder.

So, it was a nice surprise as I was putting my bike away one night last week to notice than the bush beside my front door that we’d all so admired for its red blossom in the spring is now bearing a considerable amount of fruit. Even better that that fruit looks like quince, which makes for a very nice jelly. I had thought that bramble would be my first jam, but this puts a very different slant on things.

It’s fortunate, really since after giving around 24 fruits between them the strawberry plants have done nothing for the last three weeks. Less than impressive.

Rich plants a sprout plant

It’s been a long time coming, but we finally planted out the vegetable patch today. Now that the railway sleepers are in place it’s a proper raised bed, with plenty of room for root growth and space for branches and leaves to spread out.

So we started digging at the back wall and worked our way forwards, opening up little holes with our trowels and dropping in the sprouts, broccoli, beetroot and pepper plants that have been quickly getting more and more waterlogged on the patio.

It took us about three hours all told, by which time we’d not only transplanted the most vulnerable plants, but also seeded the carrots and leeks that will one day – hopefully – become soup, and the lettuces that will join the rapidly advancing tomatoes in a salad.

Stepping back to admire our handiwork was very satisfying. Now we just need to fight off the slugs, and await the fruits of our labours. Quite literally.

The patch, fully planted

Ocean’s 11 made sense. There were 11 gangsters in the group, and they were headed up by Danny Ocean. They were, in the most literal sense, Ocean’s 11.

Then came the sequel, Ocean’s 12, and then another one, Ocean’s 13, and each time around the name got just a little less accurate.

Fortunately that doesn’t matter. Neither does the fact that I skipped Ocean’s 12 and dived straight in last night at number 13, for two hours of mindless, fun entertainment.

Even if you don’t like a heist movie it’s worth a go, if for nothing else than the wonderful post-production, which has alternately bleached out, or over-saturated the scenes to make the whole thing look like it was shot 50 years ago, lost for half a century and then recovered from a dusty vault. Only the bang up-to-date Vegas strip gives away its true age.

The three leads, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Al Pacino are completely at ease in their characters, and utterly convincing. The cast of extras runs into the thousands, and the sets are vast enough to comfortably accommodate them all. All at once.

I read two reviews before booking our seats (me and dad), and while one gave it four out of five the other gave it only half that much. That, I think was unnecessarily stingy.

Go see.

I laughed out loud on the train tonight. Not a little giggle, but a full-blown fnar, complete with powerful nose snort that made the three rows ahead and three rows behind turn around to look. This went on for at least three pages of my book, and I was forced to stop reading for a moment to calm myself down.

Not quite as embarrassing as the man with the prosthetic leg who fell out of the train at Chelmsford yesterday and half dropped his false limb on the track, although I think he could perhaps have been a little more gracious towards the people who picked him up off the floor, especially as he seemed totally incapable of moving on his own.

So I feel I may have got away with it.

Sunday was educational (and Saturday was rainy and spent alternately sheltering in a nice coffee shop on Ipswich dockside and re-watching Moonraker) as we buzzed along to the end of the A14 for the second time in a little over a month. This time it was to Bruntingthorpe aerodrome, as guests of the VW press office.

They (and indeed we) were there to mingle with the thousands of modified VW cars strewn liberally across the apron and surrounding grass, some inches deep in mud, yet all still polished to within a whisker of their undercoats.

The airfield isn’t often used for flying any more, but during the cold war the US Airforce stationed many of its heavy bombers there, presumably as it takes less fuel to drop bombs on St Petersburg from Leicestershire than it does from somewhere far flung, like Virginia.

Nowadays it’s used for testing cars – particularly fast ones, and has facilities for repairing Maseratis and Ferraris on site, should the inevitable happen. Fortunately the inevitable didn’t happen at all – particularly not as Rich tried his hand at the quarter mile drag race (insert inappropriate joke about driving in heels here) in a couple of VW press cars.

All in all, we were treated very well, and fed and watered in the old control tower, which externally at least has barely changed at all since it was built in the 1940s. It’s got a king of basic charm to it. No frills, or airs and graces – just functional windows and walls, and a panoramic view across the airfield from the balcony that hugs its upper floor.

It’s a shame we didn’t really get time to explore the old planes scattered around the edge of the airfield. The most impressive was a huge propellor-driven Airbus used to ferry aeroplane wings around European factories, and the most unusual the bizarre Asda jumbo.

They’re a reason to head back next year, though, and perhaps to get there a little earlier in the day.