Crossing the Central Reservation of My Imagination

Early to rise, and rarely to bed, will make a man hazy and lazy and dead.

They're not yelling at me, they're yelling with me.

If problems were goblins, then beggars would hide.

The proof of the pudding is in the staying eaten.

Some people see the glass as only half full. I prefer to see it as twice as empty!

There's a fine line between "Got your back!" and "Got your nose!"

After two days touring Bletchley Park and the Computing Museum (both of which I shall write about at greater length in another post), we left Milton Keynes yesterday and headed back north up the M1 to Birmingham, where we had a truly spectacular dinner and evening out with jenova_red and edwards.

Now getting packed up to drive towards are starting point in Manchester, where we shall return our car and spend our last remaining evening in Britain before flying home tomorrow.

Day 12 of our holiday finds us in the southeast town of Milton Keynes. For those of you keeping score at home, that's 900 miles we've travelled in Britain so far. We're here for no reason at all other than to pay homage tomorrow to Bletchley Park, where during the Second World War a team of mathematicians and computer scientists, including the legendary Alan Turing, laboured in secrecy to decipher the German Enigma. This single feat, more than any other, served to break the back of the Nazi war effort because, with fewer troops and in most cases inferior weaponry, they relied overwhelmingly on the element of surprise for their operational successes. Lacking secure communications, this advantage was severely compromised.

So, we celebrate this band of geeks who won the war for our side. But, being geeks ourselves, we're mostly here to check out their lab space and drool over their cool toys.

Which is good, because otherwise, Milton Keynes has got to be the most drop-dead boring location in Great Britain.

250 miles and half a day later, here we are in York. (It would have taken much less time and less driving, but Scotland has basically one road that goes to England, and it was out being mended.)

York appears to have what I would describe as an overwhelmingly pub-based economy. Walking in Stonegate this evening, I counted within a distance of a hundred paces no fewer than fifteen pubs. It may have been more; in spots they are so densely packed together as to make difficult a precise reckoning of their number. If you should ever find yourself missing a pub, you should travel to York immediately; there is a very good chance you will turn it up there.

Unfortunately, most of the pubs I saw were in the business of selling "fayre". I do not, under any circumstances at all, eat fayre; it makes me extremely ill. We did manage to find one place that did us a very respectable plate of sausages however.

Apparently, blueberry muffins are a distinctively American treat.

A taste of America	Have a nice day!