Travels – onetruekev

Eynsford – 3rd February 2018

We hadn’t made use of our English Heritage memberships so far this year, so we’d decided to take a look at somewhere to go for the day. We’d picked Eynsford, a small village of about two thousand people in North East Kent, which had two English Heritage properties.

The weather, which had been really good the previous day started to change as we were having a late breakfast. The rain started to fall about ten, a light sprinkle of spitting rain, and as the day went on it got gradually heavier.

It was still bright when we started out, only to find the journey out to Eynsford wasn’t going to be as straightforward as a breeze along the motorway pretty much door to door. The M23 was shut northbound between Crawley and Gatwick for resurfacing work, so it meant a detour along with hundreds of other cars, across country to the A22 and then up to the M25. Once that part had been negotiated then it was a straight run through to the village.

I’d printed off a map before leaving home, and as we drove through the village I was trying to look out for the turning we needed for the car park. Spotting it at the last moment we made the turn only to be faced with a narrow hump back bridge wide enough for a single car and a dip to a ford across the River Darent. We opted for the bridge rather than being swept away by the quite high river, and had to wait for cars coming the other way. We weren’t convinced the Vengabus could cope with the depth of water. In fact we weren’t convinced that the proper buses, coaches and HGVs that the sign on the ford demanded use the ford instead of the bridge, would be able to make it through the river today.

The car park was next to The Plough pub, where we nipped in for a quick and very tasty bite to eat. After the spot of lunch we walked back up through the village to the ruins of Eynsford Castle, hidden away from the main road through the village by the Baptist Church and some Tudor framed buildings. There were a whole host of old buildings from all eras along the main road in the village. Even the modern builds had been sympathetically designed to try and blend in.

The castle is one of English Heritage’s unmanned properties, so there is no guidebook available, but the information signs around the site were plentiful and useful. The outer walls to the castle buildings were about sixty per cent complete, and were thicker than a number we’ve seen at more complete buildings. A number of the inner walls were still partially complete, certainly enough for a good idea of what the layout would have been.

The moat around the building was still easily recognisable as such, and was a bit boggy as we walked across to the far side of it. That bank doubled as the bank to the River Darent, and as at the ford, it was running high. So much so, that if it gets much higher, Eynsford Castle may well have a moat once again.

The inner buildings showed there were two kitchens, the original “great” kitchen, and a smaller “new” kitchen, and we amused ourselves with fake medieval customer reviews comparing the two. Hence explaining why the first one was called great.

We walked back through the village in what was now a persistent drizzle, looking at the various buildings as we did so. There were three more pubs, an old fashioned double fronted village store, an old sweet shop, and another church, a Church of England one this time, and then we were back at the ford, and crossing the river by the old mill building, with its unusual semi-circular roof, and with a channel of the river running directly under the building. Something akin to several properties like ones we had seen in Winchester.

With the rain getting heavier we drove over to the other English Heritage site in the village – Lullingstone Roman Villa, passing under a spectacular rail viaduct along the way.

The Roman villa’s remains were covered by a purpose built visitor centre, much to our relief in not having to brave the elements any further. The remains themselves are said to be one of the finest examples of a Roman villa in the country. Finds there are said to be extremely rare as there was Christian iconography found, and those murals are now in the British Museum. The only other place said to have had these finds in a villa are in Syria. (Or might be if they haven’t been blown up or demolished.)

It was interesting to see the ingenuity and intricacy of the work within the villa, something that many modern house builders could do with taking tips from. It was also interesting to see that Eynsford Castle must have been built using a great deal of the stonework from the Roman Villa, the make-up of the two looked almost identical.

We weren’t the only people who had decided to visit both sites that day, as a father had taken his two children to both as well. He had been telling them all kinds of wrong information in a loud voice at the Castle, but at the villa he was playing a Roman board game with his son, and was getting stroppy with the son for not taking it seriously (why would he at only eight years old). And then at his daughter, who he’d been ignoring to play the game with his son, as she got bored and took to randomly moving items on the board game he was playing. I moved away to prevent my laughter washing over him as well.

There is another castle in the village, as the fifteenth century Lullingstone Castle (well, manor house) was only a short way away from the Roman Villa, alas it was too late in the day, and about three months to early in the year for it to be open.

We got back in the car and drove back through the picturesque village for a final time on the way out to the monotonous motorway journey through the now torrential rain. At least there were no motorway diversions going this way.

The Concert – 22nd November 2017

I’ve been past the Royal Albert Hall many times before, normally in daylight, but I’ve never been to a concert there until tonight, nor had Helen.

I bought two tickets to see Imelda May because I know Helen is a fan, and now five months down the line from buying them, here we are getting off the bus just outside. The building looks alive with the multitude of spotlights throwing their glares upon the spectacular Victorian architecture of the building.

We walk past the main entrances to make our way in through door four to the east of the building. Our tickets are scanned and after a per functionary bag check we are in. The seats are up in the Rausing Circle, on the fourth level; the lift by door four indicates that they are not for public use and suggest using the lifts at other doors instead. However we make our way up the wide shallow staircase as it sweeps its way up through the building. The stairs come to an end and we are in the outside of the Rausing Circle, with doors through to the auditorium to both sides of us. We look for door T, which just happens to be opposite the bar, and we stop to buy a drink before entering the auditorium.

The vast covered space shows an egg shaped arena with the huge organ behind the stage acting like where the top has been cut off a boiled egg. The organ and stage are bathed in a bright blue haze of light; a contrast to the wall of deep red seat and gold leaf that goes around the rest of the auditorium.

We are up in the gods, and as we make our way up to the last but one row, we can see there is a gallery above us, all the way around. There must be other staircases to the one we ascended that carry on up that extra level to get people there.

Looking down from in front of my seat as I stand gives me a quick rush of vertigo. Looking up hadn’t warned me just how steep the seating was arranged. I sit down quickly and the feeling passes.

There is something in the air looking across to the stage; the atmosphere seems a bit hazy, as if the legendary London smog has found a permanent home for it to drift around in.

I look up to the roof and see the vast array of matt bronze coloured discs hanging from the domed ceiling. There must be at least fifty of them, not all the same size, I try counting them, but lose track several times before giving up. They overlap in some places, and somehow they look like they are an invading army of aliens. Their spaceship fleet gathering above up all in the London Sky. I know they are up there to help with the acoustics, but every time I look at them as the show is progressing, with lights flickering over their surface and casting shadows on the ceiling above, I have to wonder what they would seem like if we were listening to Jeff Wayne’s “War Of The Worlds.”

The hall is still quite empty when the support act comes out. It is a female singer, with a single guitarist for company. She announces who she is, but is so softly spoken that neither of us catch her name. It is the same at the end of her set as well. However in between times her voice belts out, filling the hall with the somewhat nasally tones of her voice. Some of the songs seem familiar, but not enough to be able to put a finger on who it is singing. She mumbles through links, almost as if she is shy in front of a crowd in such an auspicious venue, yet that shyness disappears for her songs. Her set ends and she totters off the stage and background music as a much lower volume filters through to us as the stage crew make sure that everything is in place for the main act.

The seats fill up, though a lot of seats on our level remain empty, it would appear that a lot of their owners have opted to stand in the galleries above us. The lighting dims and then a spotlight singles out a person on the stage. It is a guitarist who starts playing the intro to the first song. A second spotlight highlights Imelda May as she starts to sing, looking very glamorous, as if for the surroundings, in a little black sparkly dress.

The voice and music sound as clear as if I had dropped the needle onto her latest record. I look at the spotlight beam and see swirling hazy air, it moves through the spotlight beam making it seem that the beam is hoovering up the smog from the hall.

When Imelda speaks between songs there is no mumbling, introducing songs, and telling tales of how they came to be with a gorgeous Irish twang and a very nice line in self-depreciating humour. We feel like we are part of an extended family, being let in on the secrets of a distant cousin.

A couple of rows in front of us there are a group of well refreshed fans who whoop at irregular intervals and wave their drink laden hands around with an abandon to where said drinks may end up. They are loud and enjoying themselves, but two couples from the row separating us from them get up and move to empty seats elsewhere in the Rausing Circle to get away from them, glaring angrily at them as they relocate.

During the set Imelda May goes walkabout and ends up singing four songs from the midst of chairs on the auditorium floors. These include a cover of U”’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, and an updated version of “Molly Malone”, whilst suggesting that there may well be a “Great Irish Songbook” project in the offing.

Back on stage she has a couple of other special guests joining her. Ronnie Wood comes out to play guitar, and Bob Geldof arrives for a couple of songs. Fortunately they gave him a mouth organ instead of a microphone, so no preachy rants from him tonight, and although he’s no Stevie Wonder, at least he isn’t singing.

The set ends, but no one moves, everyone knowing she will be back, and she is; for a two song encore with the special guests. She has sang and spoken for two hours, and as Helen and I start to make our way down the stairs, the well refreshed group are shouting for a second encore, an encore that will never come, as we know from the fact that Elgar is now being pumped through the speaker system in to the whole auditorium.

We leave the building into the fresh London night, the roads still as busy as they had been hours before in rush hour. We shuffle on to a bus amongst the throng of people heading home or to their hotels for the night, it will be Thursday before we are home, but it was such a great experience, we aren’t going to care about that.

Have We Been This Way Before? – 22nd September 2017

Another day, another day out, the last full day of the holiday, and we found ourselves on another little unplanned detour, having missed the turn off to Roche, then the second turn off to Roche, followed by the third turn off to Roche, with no one noticing any of them, we suddenly found ourselves on the wrong side of the A30 with no turn offs forthcoming. It wasn’t until we hit the A39 and part of the route back from Newquay the previous day that we could redirect ourselves back to St Austell to get back on track.

On the way back we went through the village of High Street (though I wasn’t able to confirm whether High Street actually had a High Street), where we encountered a driver who thought driving towards us on the wrong side of the road, whilst attempting to mount the kerb was somehow our fault. They though that flicking us the v’s was the appropriate action to take in the circumstances, and we manoeuvred around them to carry on rather than getting out of the car and beating them to death.

Once back on the right track we found ourselves on the same road we used to get to the Lost Gardens of Heligan earlier in the week, apparently still lost despite all the road signs pointing the way to it, and we flew (figuratively) through London Apprentice again before ending up in Mevagissey.

After the rookie error of letting the olds get the parking ticket, for the wrong length of time obviously, we started to walk around the village and the harbour. It is split into the inner and outer harbour, and at the time we were there this was indicated by the sand bank one and the water filled one, as we had hit low tide again.

After walking to the end of the far breakwater, getting a great view of the whole village climbing the slopes leading down to the harbour, we left most of the party in the local museum, while we resituated the car after the initial parking snafu. When we came back we found that the museum was one of those lovely unpretentious places that just tried to get every possible piece of history about the village squashed into the building.

We stopped for lunch overlooking the inner harbour, having got fresh fish and chips (or a burger in my case) from a stall on the quay side as the rain attempted to start falling. A nice Cornish ice cream followed before wandering around the local tourist trap type shops.

The tourist information was located in the book shop, which also sold a variety of records, CDs and DVDs, and it was difficult to resist looking around thoroughly. It was even harder to resist the little shop just around the corner that was crammed with boxes of vinyl in no particular order. It was sat there, calling to me, but I managed to resist, the shop didn’t even a name, temptation it would seem, finds every man in the strangest of locations.

I may have resisted the temptation, but the endless line of tourist tat shops were just too much for some of our party, with lots of various bits and pieces being picked up as souvenirs and potential future presents. I suppose it can’t be helped, but I am concerned about just where on earth we are going to put it all on the journey home, it looks like there will be more bags than there were coming, but no space for any of it.

The Normans See Doc Martin – 20th September 2017

The rains started today, yes they were due to, but not until late afternoon. After the usual snide remarks along the lines of “it was lovely when we got up”, three of us headed for Restormel Castle at Lostwithien, which unfortunately wasn’t next to Withien, but was instead another fifteen miles away on windy Cornwall roads.

My dad would have called it Irish mist, which as far as he was concerned covered any type of rain except a torrential downpour, but in this case was probably nearer in spirit to what he meant. It was that fine rain that you can’t see falling, but manages to soak through everything making you thoroughly wet.

A Trip To Truro – 19th September 2017

On a rare day of escape for the two of us, we headed to Truro, main roads all the way once we got out of the backwaters around the lodge. When we got to the outskirts and saw the words “park and ride” we decided that that was probably going to be the best idea, rather than having to struggle around an unfamiliar town trying to find possibly non-existent parking spaces.

Park and ride was a great idea, but we turned off too soon and ended up on a quick tour around the very empty cattle market. When we then took the next turn off on the main road, it looked like another wrong turn, past all kinds of mechanical building vehicles and long blue wooden fences, over muddy roads, through an obvious building site, but then the park and ride appeared at the end of the road.

A Walk In The Country – 21st August 2017

On a lovely Saturday afternoon we decided to take Charlie out somewhere different for a walk for a change. It would give us the opportunity to try one of the walks from one of the “AA 50 Walks In….” books that I had picked up in a charity shop a few weeks before. The Kent, Surrey and Sussex books were sat on the Kitchen table awaiting perusal, you would have thought that living in Sussex, that one would make the most sense, but when looking at the walks in the Surrey book, you come to realise just how close Crawley is to the Surrey/Sussex border.

We were going to go early afternoon, and had picked a nice circular route around Oxted, but a few hours were lost to the sofa and reading and watching TV stole more time than planned, so a shorter walk was picked instead. A four mile walk starting and ending in Charlwood, it was marked as an easy route, and good for dogs.

Alarm bells should have been ringing though, as the starting point for the walk was at The Rising Sun pub, which is no longer a pub, but is an Indian restaurant instead. We parked down the road at The Greyhound and headed off for the first part of the walk in the book. A turn in to Chapel Lane led us down past the Providence Chapel, a lovely building that looks as if it has been transported directly from middle America in the nineteenth century, not something anyone would expect to find at the end of a small road in a small English country village.

The Crawley Crawl – 5th August 2017

It’s the morning of the pub crawl, and for the first time in seven years, there is no rushing around, no hurry to go and get a train to get up to London. For only the second time, it’s a Crawley crawl. We can take it easy and wander up to the local, which happens to be pub number one for the day – The Downsman.

I leave a few minutes before Helen, so that I can stop and pick up a paper, that as it happens I won’t read until the following day, on the way. I get to the pub just as they are opening their doors for the day, spot on noon. As is pretty much always the case, I’m the first one there, I mean it would be no good to be the organiser of the pub crawl and then turn up late myself. As I get in the doors it starts to rain, a little light shower, just enough to get a fine coating on my other half Helen as she caught up, and then Simon, a first time crawler, well on one of my crawls anyway.

Three people in pub number one isn’t a massive amount, but it’s not a disaster either, it matched the amount for last year’s crawl, and any amount above one is always going to be better than the year where no one else turned up until pub four.

Get your ass to Bruges – 1st July 2017

I had been to Belgium before, having got the Eurostar from London to Brussels, I had been across the Channel in a car by ferry, but it was time to pop the cherry of travelling to Belgium by car, using the Eurotunnel.

We set off slightly later than intended on the Sunday morning, but still early enough to beat the rush to the coast for another scorching hot day. From getting out of Crawley onto the motorway, the brakes were not required until coming back off the motorway at the Folkestone Eurotunnel terminal about eighty minutes later.

Having not used the Eurotunnel before, we were surprised to pull up to a check in booth only to find the touchscreen check in point on the passenger side, and laughed that it was a good job there was a passenger in the car, as without the use of go-go-gadget arms from the driver it would be difficult to complete the check in. It wasn’t until the homeward part of the journey at the Calais terminal that we noticed the little flags above the lanes to indicate which side the check in terminal would be.

Two Castles and a Meze – 28th May 2017

The Saturday of the Bank-Holiday weekend had been far too hot to do anything, so they had agreed they would go out and do something on the Sunday instead.

There had been no rush to get up on the Sunday morning, and they had ambled about having something more akin to brunch than breakfast before heading off. They had decided upon two English Heritage sites near each other, and had got directions and printed off maps to get to the second one of the two.

The first choice of site for the day, as they finally got going as the afternoon started was going to be Rochester Castle. They had been to Rochester before, but with it being November, they had arrived at the castle too late in the day to get admittance to the keep. Since then they had become members of English Heritage, so it wouldn’t cost them anything going now. They knew how to get there this time because of the previous visit.

Lunch in Limassol – 26th April 2017

The couple were sat in the shade under the umbrellas in front of the Twins Café. They had stopped for a drink and to get some lunch.

The café stood at the junction of 3 roads, and when the sun was to the south east, the tables would sit perfectly in the shade of the Agia Napa Orthodox Cathedral across the road from them. It was a great location to watch the world go by.

They had spent the morning wandering around the old town and harbour in Limassol, and were taking a well-deserved break from the sun and the heat.

On another corner of the junction sat a large branch of the Bank of Cyprus, and a steady stream of people could be heard tapping in their pin numbers on the ATM to the side on the main doors of the bank, as the beeps resonated across the small square.

Further away in the shade of another building, a more functional late twentieth century concrete and glass monstrosity, was an old man on a bench. He was facing the Cathedral, and had a bicycle leaning against the bench he was sat in, and a couple of roughly made wooden items sat on the ground in front of him. He was one of those people you would normally walk past without seeing, a kind of human wallpaper if you will, if it wasn’t for what was on his knees.

It wasn’t automatically obvious what the item on the man’s knees was, but whatever it was, it was making an almighty racket. At regular short intervals, the implement on his knees was being manipulated to make a sound akin to various cats being strangled in an echo chamber.

On closer inspection, the implement on his knees was actually a guitar, though it was hard to believe it, as they had never heard a guitar making noises as bad as this one. The noise from it was a constant irritation, that tried to drill a hole into their heads as they sat there for lunch. With every brief respite of more than a couple of seconds it appeared the man had stopped torturing the world, but then he would start up again.

The couple had tried to go into the Cathedral across the road, and although the gates to the small courtyard and grounds were opened, none of the various doors dotted all around the building were open, all of them being locked to keep the public out, something that appeared to be the norm for most churches that they had wanted to investigate whilst on the island.

As they sat there admiring the building, the drinks arrived. As they were placed on to the table between them, the man started laughing, as a bottle of Pepsi had been put in front of him, an unexpected treat considering the café had the words Coca-Cola engraved into the walls of the building.

He barely had time to pour the drink into the glass full of ice when the food arrived. The spicy burger with halloumi and the chicken sandwich turned out to be bigger than they had expected, and both smelt amazing.

They had only just started eating when the real strangeness started happening. Out of the side road between them and the bank arrived five Cypriot policemen. Dressed in black uniforms with a stripy black and white nautical style t-shirt showing underneath, they appeared to be more of a gang than serious policemen.

There appeared to be three fully fledged policemen wearing US style peaked caps with insignia on, and then two junior, or trainee officers, who had a more canvas looking French Gendarme style caps on. They were having an animated conversation, and they all stopped on the corner of the junction, at the base of the entrance steps up to the bank.

The three senior officers all got phones out and started conversations, as all five of them fully inspected the front of the bank building, going around the base of the steps, and up and down to the front door several times, before one of them posted themselves next to the ATM hovering next to a small queue of people waiting to use it. He appeared to be staring at people as they used the machine, which was making the users somewhat nervous, and the small queue disappeared away from the scrutiny.

Then one of the senior officers said something to the two trainees, and they suddenly shot off along the side street they had come out from. The other two seniors were still eyeing the front of the bank, whilst having animated conversations on the phone. The phone conversations ground to a halt as the trainees hurried back from the rear of the bank, and were replaced with a group conversation between the five policemen.

One of the seniors went back over to the ATM and got some money out before turning around and perching themselves on the edge of the ledge underneath the ATM, much to the annoyance of people trying to use the machine. He only moved when the conference between his colleagues finished, and he walked back down the steps to join them.

Whilst this had been going on, the couple had been sat eating their very tasty food watching the policemen. It occurred to them, that if they hadn’t been in uniforms, then they would really have looked suspicious, and it would have seemed that they were casing the joint instead. Additionally the old man had taken to really going for it on the guitar, striking the strings as if with metal hands, as if he was trying to play some suspenseful music to accompany the goings on outside the bank.

Then there was movement from the Cathedral, as a large black Mercedes cruised past the far side of the building and out to the front gates, the elderly bishop, dressed all in black as well, with a long greying beard, got out of the Mercedes, unlocked the additional gate to the front of the Cathedral, drove his car out of the gate into the middle of the road blocking all traffic going both ways, went and locked the gate again, before doing a nine point turn before being able to drive away from the cacophony of car horns that had started around him.

This seemed to be a sign for the policemen to spring into action, the seniors moved along the side street to the back of the bank, before the two trainees ran up the steps to enter the bank. Or they might have done if entering the bank through the front door didn’t seem beyond them. One of them pulled the left hand door, which didn’t move, he then pushed the right hand door, with an equal lack of success. He pulled the right hand door, pushed it again for good measure, and then went back to the left hand door pushing and pulling it several times without any joy. His colleague ran down the stairs and shouted down the road to his senior colleagues, he must have got some sort of response before running back up the stairs and attempting all the same moves on the door his hapless colleague had done moments before.

The two of them stood there scratching their heads, followed by their arses, before the door suddenly opened in front of them and they both shot inside.

The couple were openly laughing at what they had been watching, likening it to seeing the keystone cops, and expecting Harold Lloyd to suddenly appear, hanging out of an upper story window.

People once again braved the steps to the ATM, now that the front of the bank was police free, and the intensity from the old guitar player had disappeared. Things seemed back to normal.

But not for long, the three senior policemen arrived back at the front of the bank, still all talking on phones, and the two that hadn’t done so previously, were at the ATM, getting money out, before loitering at the front of the bank, looking around somewhat shiftily.

The two trainees suddenly appeared from the rear of the bank in a rush, running up the side street to meet their colleagues beside the front steps. There was a lot of gesticulating, and the phone conversations the seniors were having seemed to be getting more intense, before the five of them headed off in the direction of the old man.

The couple were hoping that they would arrest the old man for crimes against music, guitars and human sensitivities, but apart from getting right up close to the old man and staring intently at him, they carried on walking past him.

The couple had finished eating, and it had been really nice food, they were in no rush and were laughing to themselves about the policemen, and sat, slowly finishing their drinks.

No sooner had the policemen disappeared around a corner and out of sight, the bishop returned, causing chaos on the road as he did the reverse action to him exiting the Cathedral grounds minutes before. It hardly seemed worth the effort of taking the car out for the shortness of the journey he must have taken.

As the couple watched the Mercedes disappear behind the Cathedral building, two more police turned up, this time from the Cathedral side. Both were on their phones again, and had a thoroughly hacked off looking member of the public with them who was carrying a heavy looking rucksack on one shoulder. One of the policemen seemed to be dressed the same of the other senior officers from the group that had just left, but the other one wore no headgear at all, and the couple assumed he must be the really senior officer.

They stood across from the bank continuing with conversations whilst looking the building over, whilst their civilian companion seemed to be looking for a way to escape. He had taken a step through the gates into the Cathedral courtyard when the really senior officer turned and barked something at him.

The three of them only stayed for another thirty seconds or so before they headed off in the same direction that the other police officers had gone just minutes before them.

The old man seemed to have had enough or torturing his guitar and anyone within earshot, and started to frantically pack up his belongings as the latter two policeman walked past him, however the old man seemed to have the same aptitude for packing up his stuff as he did for his guitar playing.

The couple finished their drinks, and asked for the bill, lunch had been more entertaining to them than they had expected it to be, and they had a couple of other places they wanted to try and find and look around before heading back over to the other side of the island and their hotel.

As they paid up, one of the original group of policeman came wandering back towards the bank. He was carrying a heavy rucksack, which looked very much like the one the disgruntled civilian had been carrying as he’d gone by with the later arriving policemen just minutes before. He went up to the ATM and got some money out and then sat on the steps of the bank looking through the rucksack.

The couple paid the bill and wandered up past the other side of the bank, noticing that the policeman on the steps was watching them as they did so. Dismissing that, they carried on heading up to the old market, and then onto the colonial style town hall building, and then finally across to the craft and trade centre. Whilst they were slowly walking around that part of the city, trying to keep in the shade, they saw various policemen from the group they saw earlier, all now with various high end, exclusive label, shopping bags.

With each additional policeman that they passed holding shopping bags, the couple were laughing, saying to each other that it looked like the bags had been retrieved from poor unsuspecting tourists as a tourism tax, either that, or the Limassol police were getting paid far too much!

Their route had taken them round in a big loop and they found themselves heading back towards the Cathedral, as they did, they nipped into a local shop to get themselves some cold drinks for the car journey back. It happened to be the shop they’d seen when they first arrived in Limassol that morning when they had nipped into another café opposite, nominally to get a drink, but more for the toilet stop opportunity it had offered them, and they had noticed that there was a parrot in a cage sat outside the shop.

As they came out of the shop, three of the policemen from before were stood, shopping bags on the floor at their feet, surrounding the parrot and talking excitedly at it. It appeared to the couple as if they were interviewing the parrot. Yet again at least one of them was on the phone. The couple couldn’t understand what was been said, but talked about what they thought the conversation the policemen were having was going along the lines of.

“Yes boss, we’re just interrogating the witness.”

“Yes boss, we’ve got him surrounded, in fact, we’ve even managed to get it in a cage”

“Yes boss, that’s right it’s a parrot, it’s more than willing to repeat everything it’s said.”

The couple wandered off laughing. Their route took them back past the Cathedral and the café they had had lunch at, as they walked up, they could see a little light blue Peugeot 106 hatchback sat in the middle of the junction in front of the bank, with its hatchback open and the back seats down flat.

The other two of the policemen from the initial stake out of the bank were stood on the steps of the bank, still on their phones, whilst checking out the surroundings. As the couple drew level with the car, a man in a pale blue t-shirt and dark blue cargo style shorts and sandals, came running down the steps of the bank with two long saddlebag style canvas bags in each hand, which he threw into the back of the waiting car, before slamming the boot, and jumping into the driver’s seat and screeching off down the road.

The policemen stopped talking into their phones, picked up their random shopping bags, and sloped off in different directions.

The couple, looking bemused, laughed amongst themselves at the fact it looked like the police were guarding the path of a bank robber, and headed for a pit stop at the public toilets they had found on their previous travels around the city, before starting their long car journey back across the island to the hotel.

The old man from earlier sat on the bench outside the toilet, with his guitar propped on the seat of the bike, and the wooden items stuffed in the basket at the front. Up close he looked even older than they had thought earlier. He also looked worried, and refused to make eye contact with the couple, whilst muttering to himself.

The couple found their hire car in the sea front car park, and drove back along the coast road east, passing the ancient Greek remains at Amathus, before joining the motorway. The couple were happy with a nice day out, some good food, and the light entertainment the view from the café had provided with their lunch.

A few days later they flew home to England, and didn’t think anything more about it. Meanwhile, the local Limassol paper had a number of headlines over the next few days.

“The Bank of Cyprus main branch in Limassol was robbed yesterday by a fake courier as police stood by and watched.”

“Spate of thefts from tourists believed to be perpetrated by fake police.”

“Old man found hung by his guitar strings in public toilet.”

“Urgent request for witnesses to bank theft required. Police especially want to talk to a couple seen having lunch nearby.”

“Bishop arrested after road rage incidents.”

“Peugeot 106 found burnt out in Troodos Mountains.”

“Coca-Cola sues local café for serving Pepsi.”