A holiday blog with a difference I hope. We've just had a fab week of holiday in the West Country, our first proper chance to get away together as a family. We had mainly sunshine, some fabulous food, and my son had his first experiences of swimming and sculpture... he seems to be more Stewie Griffin by the moment as he really loved the Barbara Hepworth museum in St Ives, reaching out for the sculptures and beaming at all the beautiful curved shapes... he really was adorable. It was lovely. I'll write a review of the hotel separately but suffice to say it was fantastic and we'll definitely be going back in the coming years.

On the way back from Cornwall we stopped off several times. This is perfectly normal if you are travelling with a small baby - if it's not a feed or nappy change it's random screaming because they are bored or the dummy has fallen out or they've woken up and can't work out where they are
We stayed overnight at a Premier Inn, you know, the ones with Lenny Henry and a rubber duck in the adverts. They're fine - they're generally based at service stations but are perfectly comfortable and clean. Adam was not a fan of the travel cot they provided though and woke 14 times... only falling asleep if we put him down on our bed. We're NOT going to let him sleep in our bed though so we fought the battle to get him into his own bed. As a result we were all a bit fractious in the morning.

Anyway being in the West Country (Wiltshire is the West Country isn't it?) reminds me of two things.

The first is our heritage.
Barbara Hepworth said that she was inspired by the sheer pagan wildness of the South West and looking at the landscape you can see what she means. Practically every lump in the grass is a burial mound or a fortification of some iron age village. Every stone has the potential to be a neolithic place of worship. The whole place feels old yet somehow alive.
We stopped at Avebury on the way back - it's just down the road from the Premier Inn we stayed at and both my husband and I had been to Stonehenge many times. But I'd never seen Avebury. This henge is very different to Stonehenge. The standing stones are much smaller but there are so many of them. They encircle the village. We made the obligatory stop for a nappy change and a bowl of baby rice then walked a little way around the circle. There's something fabulous about the way that sheep graze around the stones, again something old, something natural. The sheep use the stones to scratch their backs, oblivious to any deeper meaning they may once have had.
While the stones have nothing of religious meaning for me, they are a real part of my heritage. We may not understand the meaning of the standing stones (a symbol of protection? A place of sacrifice? Some sort of calendar?) and we may not know exactly how life was conducted day by day and under what sort of society (there's nothing really in the way of written record left from that era, we guess from the artifacts left behind) but the stones are a physical link to our past. They remind me that these islands have been inhabited for millenia, that so many lives have taken place here and that we are part of something much bigger and longer lasting than ourselves.
Oh, and my son met a sheep for the first time. We wheeled his pushchair right up to a lamb munching grass by the biggest stone and it turned to take a look at him, pressing its nose against his sock. He giggled at it and it ambled off. Neither was particularly scared, so we chalking that up as a positive. Cows next, I think.

The second thing that the West Country reminds me of is Jasper Fforde. If your reaction is "who?", then you need to get yourself to a library or a bookshop as soon as possible. Or go to www.jasperfforde.com and start reading about that world immediately.
While the Jack Spratt books are enjoyable, Jasper Fforde has managed the unlikely feat of making me think seriously about visiting Swindon*, the principle location of the Thursday Next series. Thursday is a literary detective in an alternative world where the Crimean war lasted over 100 years, a huge corporation named Goliath is basically running the country, literature is prized more highly than science, Jurisfiction polices the running etc. etc. Oh I can't summarise the stories. Go and read them, they're really funny.
We didn't make it to Swindon this time, but we did make it to Leigh Delamare service station on the M4. Named after the mother of one of Acheron Hades' gang and the location of the checkpoint for the underworld if you read the Thursday Next books, of course. It is of course perfectly normal (if a bit more corridor-y than some of the other identikit service stations on the M4... I did mention you get to see lots of them with a baby, didn't I?), has been a recipient in the Loo of the Year awards several times during the last decade, and doesn't feature Jasper Fforde's books in the bookshop there. Ho hum. A missed opportunity, I think.

So there we are, we headed West, had a great time and returned home to temperatures 15c cooler and a week's worth of washing. Wouldn't have missed out on it for the world.

(*= note: Swindon, Basingstoke, Telford, Milton Keynes etc. All new towns in the sense that they were designed as complete towns post-war combining the best ideas of that times as pleasant places to live... we find this very amusing. This note is a poor reflection of a much better written one in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's "Good Omens". Go and read it for yourselves).