Dorset Road Trip 2008

It is good to get away to the South Coast I am sure you'll agree. Just getting back into life back in London. There is a lot of police sirens, planes and people, in no particular order.

The photos in this clip are principally from East Dorset, just east of Dorchester around the Jurassic coast between Weymouth and Bridport.


The youth hostel was in a little village called Lyton Cheney. I think all it had there was a pub, a phone box and a nice little stream. The nearest shop was about four miles away.
The sunset in West Bay was a fantastic colour and it was good to be there.

Driller Gate

Sitting in the waiting room of the dentist’s up the road and feeling a bit edgy

I had plenty of time to consider whether it was a mistake on my part giving up being a veggie

As these and other subjects passed through my mind I thought I heard the sound of drilling

But it wasn’t a drill; it was a littlun’ jamming a handheld fan into carpet which he seemed to find quite thrilling

With my appointment time far in the distance I was ushered into the surgery

My admission to the dentist that I hadn’t been for four years was no act of purgery

Realising I might be a bit anxious he give me a good vibe

Which I hung onto for the next ten minutes praying that I would survive

In fact with no sign of decay all I needed was antibiotics for a gum infection

Surprise, surprise: my vision of rampant, irretrievable decay was just a projection.

Later on Dad came round and we worked together to put an iron gate back on its hinges

It looks better swinging there than it did under an overgrowth of Lilac on the front garden’s fringes

I got the chances to use a drill myself to make holes in the wall and did not baulk

Marking a guide hole, getting the bit to bite and giving it some torque

I felt pretty good about myself and even better that the holes were in the brick

A more appropriate substance for drilling in than my one of my back teeth, however sick.

From out of the guts of the machine

Here is related the true story of a man who rescued my printer from a wasted life of peripheral redundancy. It is written as an unlikely poem although almost every word of it is nearly true:

That’s me on the phone and getting into a bit of a stinker

Trying to get Comet or Epson to do a warranty repair on my printer

I finally ascertained an engineer who would have a look locally

I checked the address and mumbled about my bad luck with printers vocally

The centre on Purley Way didn’t look all that modern

It was the sort of industrial unit you might expect to find in Waddon

The receptionist was polite and called down the engineer

Apparently casual dress is not an inhibiting factor in that career

We talked about the main issue which was that the paper was not grabbing

He went back up stairs got a pair of big pair of tweezers, a stip of cupboard and proceeded to shove that it

He looked like a surgeon fishing around for a bullet

Imagine my surprise when he located an old pencil jammed in the guts of the machine and out he did pull it

A moment of twinkle; a birthing; a miracle

But it was hard for the receptionist not to be cynical

‘That’ll do it everytime’ she quipped as the pencil hit the desktop

I thought about saying ‘Oh wow, I was looking for that!’ and then I thought, ‘no stop’.

It is better to say nothing and act like engineers pull pencils from the guts of printers every day maybe they should

And, well, if they talk about me when I am gone all well and good.