For my day out in October, I was trying to think how I could tie it in to Halloween. I have to be a bit careful about this, because I have a terror of mannequins, and my absolute nightmare would be to go to a museum and find that they've gone wild on the waxworks. In the end, I hit on the idea of Fountains Abbey. It's an interesting place on its own, being the ruins of a monastery that good old Henry VIII decided to do away with on his rampage through Britain. The grounds also contain an interesting hall, an old mill, and some lovely walks to see some temples and statues round lakes and water features. In terms of Halloween connections, it is where Damien Thorn finally gets his comeuppance at the end of The Omen 3. Sam Neill's version of the anti-Christ is last seen stabbed to death at the Chapel of the Nine Altars in the ruins of the abbey. As someone who loves The Omen series, and will argue the case for the much maligned third part, this was right up my street.  As I dis...

Sometimes, you do things in life that make you wonder what on earth possessed you to do such a ridiculous thing. For me, September's trip was the perfect example of one of those moments. This month, I went to Blackpool. Now, I hasten to add that visiting Blackpool isn't in and of itself a particularly ridiculous thing to do. Although, wearing shorts on the front in a wet and windy week in September definitely could be described as such, and I learned a valuable lesson. No, what was rather wild was my absolute conviction that I was going to ride The Big One, come hell or high water. Riding a rollercoaster was another thing that I had on my list of 40 things that I want to try and achieve before I hit 40. No little piddly kid-friendly coaster was going to do it though. I decided that if I was going to ride a rollercoaster, it should be one that was, at one time, the tallest rollercoaster in the world. Someone should have had a word with me.  I could not tell you the last time I w...

  When choosing days out, sometimes the destinations can sound fairly morbid. However, August was the month when I decided to tick another item off my list of 40 things I would like to achieve before I'm 40. I've always been interested in the village of Eyam in Derbyshire, sometimes known as The Plague Village. Now, trying to explain to people that you've had a longstanding goal to visit a village famous for a good chunk of the population being wiped out by plague can be something of a tricky sell. Nevertheless, their story is a fascinating one. In 1665, the local tailor ordered some cloth from London, inadvertently bringing the plague into the village. Once it started to spread, and it became clear that it would keep spreading, the village decided to put themselves into a self-imposed quarantine. In doing so, they condemned themselves to suffer through a large portion of their population dying and becoming ill. However, in doing this, they also stopped the spread of the di...