When you're jetlagged, go to Bedfordshire

So far, I have to say that we are having a dream trip, with minimal jetlag. Can I just take a second to give a hearty plug to the pedicure providers in the transit lounge at Changi? Their English was sketchy, and the DVD drama with real lions with dubbed-over voices was wrong in so many ways - but when you've been up for 20 hours and have the prospect of a 14 hour flight to go, the foot rub is bliss and the midnight-blue toenails very cheering. We all slept most of the second leg.

Jeremy picked us up at Heathrow and after second breakfast he departed for work. We (EGI - Emma, George, Ian) toddled into St Albans and prowled the high street in search of coffee and sights. The Boot is still there - anything with a roof that wonky at home would have been bowled for sure but England has no particular reason to worry about tottering brick parapets and undulating foundations.

Then we wandered on down through the heat to Verulam park, where George found all the open spaces overwhelmingly in need of a football. After a brief exploration, we met up with Jeremy again outside St Mike's and off we all went along classic English country lanes to the Holly Bush for a beaut lunch. Then J dropped us at Traffic where they foisted an A3 (4 door) Audi on us - it's a diesel that stalls in second if the revs are too low. This made for: a) fun at all the roundabouts on the way home, and b) a grumpy husband. However after a few turns about the Waitrose carpark Ian had fought the beast and established some kind of loose truce, while I bought the makings of this and that - Welsh lamb for tea (fairly bland, I thought) - but Ian crashed early and missed it.

Friday, EGI were up and off early to Bletchley Park. Bletchley Park is many things (think Seaview at Hokitika, or indeed any long-deserted mental asylum), but mainly it is a missed opportunity to offer decent coffee. No, actually I am being tremendously harsh; the coffee was unbelievable shite but it's a dead interesting place. The campus is large and spread out, and consists of many huts and bunkers in addition to the main, weird, Victorian building. Most of the outlying buildings are decaying - but the site retains a strong sense of the people who lived and worked there so intensely during the war.

Colossus Mark 2 - National Museum of Computing

We nearly left without seeing the Colossus; arguably the world's second general purpose programmable computer. Jeremy has just informed me, in sepulchral pseudo-Churchillian tones, that after WWII Churchill demanded the Colossus be destroyed. I have checked this on Wikipedia and apparently the great man commanded that the machine be broken down into pieces no bigger than a man's hand. However enough information survived in notebooks and heads for the machine to be rebuilt, and we saw it. I wish we had taken a photo of the hut that houses the National Museum of Computing - it's underwhelming in the extreme.

"Claudia" in bronze (15,000 pounds)

After lunch at the Old Green Man in Little Brickhill, we headed to Bedfordshire and Woburn Abbey, home to the Russells - D and D of Bedford. We shed the requisite 45 quid at the gate and drove in through the deer park. The house is lovely - millions of marble busts everywhere, and hundreds and hundreds of paintings. The vaults contained an astonishing collection of Sevres porcelain, silver, and gold, and a Rembrandt. After the house tour we wandered through the garden and goggled at the sculpture, some of which we liked.

Then home to Becketts Ave for dinner and the real business of this trip - spending time with our beloved family.

Jeremy introducing George to Linux

More photos here...