Rambling Whilst Rambling (Blog 125)

Painshill is an 18th century landscape garden in Surrey, so called because all of the hills eventually cause mild leg pain. Well, that’s the theory. My theory, anyway. What’s in it? Lots of trees and fields. A fairly typical garden, then? Not quite, it is ever so slightly random in that it is peppered with quite a variety of structures and buildings over its 2 and a half mile length. One of them is the so called ‘crystal grotto’, filled with ‘100s of 1000s of crystals’ on the ceiling, walls and floors. An excellent cave-like place to roam around and explore? Unfortunately just before entering it, me and the friend I was with got approached by a tour guide who was working a little too hard, and gave us a huge lecture about the place that was somewhat needless and boring. Now that I think of it, it’s just a grotto. It may have been interesting when it was built, but we are living in the space age now and we can build buildings hundreds of meters tall. I hate to say this but from outside, the attraction simply looked like a blob.

Eventually her talk was over, so the now three of us entered the thing. Only to be approached by a man who was equally annoying. He kept disapprovingly going on about a person apparently dancing deeper down in the area and also about someone filming her. Who cares? They were being quiet and weren’t causing any trouble. Personally, I thought the guy was a bit nutty. When he stopped talking (so much) me and my friend had an opportunity to walk and see the disapprovees. Hopefully they weren’t recording with sound, or over their artistic forms of self-expression, they would have recorded me and my chum’s somewhat out of place conversations. (Out of place unless they were dancing to very strange subjects, I mean).

How out of place were the chattings? Judge for yourself: I noticed on display, a number of crystals (as if there weren’t enough already). One of their chemical names was apparently ‘CaCo3’, and I pointed out that ‘caco’ was Latin for ‘bad’. A bad crystal in this case. I sounded very intelligent, right? Unfortunately, that is one of the only Latin words I know so I had to point that out, in case I got asked any embarrassing follow up questions, such as ‘where did you learn the language?’ If I was asked to say a foreign sentence I’d be f**ked. I quickly explained I knew the word from the SNES game ‘Doom’ as cacodemons (yes, bad demons) were mentioned in the instruction book. However, after just doing some research, that name may have actually been Greek, and it may have been spelt ‘kako’. In hindsight I hope that conversation wasn’t taped for a second reason, as there is a good chance I had no idea what I was talking about. THAT would be embarrassing. What’s worse, I may have had my face on film too. :S

Never mind, me and my friend soon after trekked to a gothic tower with 99 steps. Personally, I would have added an extra one to round the number up, but if it was misplaced it could obviously trip someone up, potentially resulting in catastrophic injuries. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t included. But why not just make the steps fractionally smaller? Never mind. Thankfully no one told us how to fully appreciate the staircase, and we climbed it with that extra little bit of dignity. As we did so, we passed a few rooms with nothing particularly interesting them, but if I were to move into the building I would certainly spice the place up. I would love to live in a tower, especially with such a nice view. At least for a little bit. Let me, please.

Other than some more fields noticed whilst walking around the garden again, nothing too interesting was seen. However, I did observe perhaps the first tent of my life that was made of (I think) wood. That’s not a tent, that’s a building, what are you on about? We didn’t go in as what’s the point? Who needs to see more grass? After leaving the park, we went….. CD shopping! I only got one album as my buying addiction is getting out of hand, so to fill the void, we went to the gym soon after. However, things didn’t go quite to plan. As explained in an earlier blog, some hiking machines seem to be harder to use than others, even on the same difficulty setting. Unfortunately my friend didn’t use any of those machines with me, so I couldn’t cheat at an endurance race. However, don’t think I’ve forgotten about my scheme, I’ll get him one day. And on that sneaky note……….. Bye!