Which way to the Circus Skills Workshop?

Tomorrow morning Sooz and I are driving a couple of hundred miles to the town of Totnes in Devon for a few days' holiday. Let me tell you a few things about Totnes. It's made up of a quirky, pretty mixture of buildings, many of them Elizabethan in origin. At the top of the High Street it turns into a lane called The Narrows, where the houses and shops look the way Americans think all English houses look.

It's the lowest point at which you can cross the River Dart by bridge (further down you have to use the ferry.) Still further down, at the river mouth, is a town called Dartmouth. They were obviously a literal-minded bunch, those old Devonians, so why Totnes isn't called Dartbridge is a mystery to me.

The Kingsbridge Inn serves up baked potatoes the size of rugby balls. In the Guildhall you can sit at a table where Oliver Cromwell signed something or other.

It's also the Old Hippy capital of Devon.

To back up this claim I'm going to use the following piece of evidence. It's circumstantial, but if I were on a jury I'd go for it, especially if they also showed me Exhibit A. (a picture of the flotation tank in the Arcturus Centre in High Street.)

A few years back the local newspaper ran a story about a Totnes man who wanted to publicise the fact that he was eager to be contacted by people who were interested in forming a unicycle hockey league. Let me run that by you again. He didn't want to buy a unicycle. He wasn't trying to find someone to teach him how to ride a unicycle. He didn't expect to find one other person who could ride a unicycle and would be his little chum. This man confidently expected that there were in the Totnes area people who not only could ride a unicycle, but were skilled enough to play hockey while riding one. And that there were enough of them to form not just a team, but a league.

I rest my case.

(I'm not a great fan of the Circus Skills thing, and I still can't walk past a street mime without having the urge to kick him in the nuts, but at least I've mellowed enough to know that I'm not actually going to do it. For those of you over-familiar with right-wing blogs, be advised that here in the U.K. the terms "socialist", "liberal" and "hippy" are not interchangeable. Lefties here are generally much more enthusiastic about punching people in the mouth than you might think.)

Anyway, despite all the above, tomorrow I will be wheezing my way up Fore Street (I don't know how they do it, but it definitely gets five degrees steeper every year), gagging on the smell of patchouli and didgeridoo wax, hand in hand with ma baybeh, happy as a pig in shit.