The Wessex Grand Tour

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The Wessex Tour – sort of! Day Three

Steve should have brought his boat!

The front windscreen concertina blinds snap back to reveal our worst nightmare; the beginning of a lake in the field ahead of us. Puddles everywhere and some are a few inches deep. Steve ventures out and immediately on stepping down to the ground, discovers it is soggy. Very soggy. Positively squelchy!

We fervently pray that there will be no more rain today. Just some sunshine and breeze to dry out the field before we depart tomorrow!

We cadge a lift into Glastonbury with family to climb Glastonbury tor. We have visited this area several times every year since forever and yet we have never both been to the top of the tor together. Steve, who has never been up it is keen to get up there today. With cool windy conditions and bright sunshine, the views will be outstanding. All the trees in their autumnal colour finery.

It's a twenty-five-minute stroll to the top. The steps help but we all remember when there were no steps; when as kids we used to just race straight up the very steep sides and then run and roll back down them.

Steve is busy with his camera taking landscape photos in all directions. We navigate Britain quite often by ‘case studies’ i.e. if there is a chance he can visit a case study he has taught in his thirty five year career as a geography teacher, then we will visit it! I’m very patient!

And so, on the wind-blown summit just to the east of the church tower, we are given a gentle but informative brief lecture about the Mendips and the Somerset Levels afore us and an explanation of why they often flood so badly. The fact that the three people with him were born in the area, grew up in the area and have lived all their lives in the same area is wasted on him. He can’t help himself. You can take the geographer out of the classroom but …. And all that! To be fair, it was the very last GCSE case study he taught just before he retired.

Back down in Glastonbury we call in at the tourist information centre to pick up the leaflet about the town’s mural trail and we set off. It takes around an hour of ambling the back streets. Some of the art work is genuinely quite impressive and the town centre shops are always value for money. Today incense wafts out of several shops down the high street giving a very ‘mellow’ ambiance to our walk. We window shop looking at displays of crystals, buddhas and hippy style ‘sustainable fibre’ clothing. 

For me this was the most poignant of the murals. we have noticed over the months that the government has been trying to change the rhetoric... from asylum seekers and refugees.... to 'migrants' .

The research shows that actually the vast majority of those crossing the channel at the moment would be granted asylum and/or refugee status. We need to resist these linguistic gymnastics. 

At the same time we also accept that both the UK and the EU need to work together to find solutions to the crisis which stop people making the dangerous cross channel boat journey. 

Currently at the time of writing, according to Today's Guardian, Times and Daily Mail, France has granted 84,000 refugees asylum status; Germany 115,000 and the UK 24,000.