venta

Hello, folks. I've not been around for a couple of months - not for any good reason, just that life has been getting in the way somewhat and apparently reading here has somehow fallen off the list. If you've posted anything you really want me to know about, could you flag it up?

Anyway, I have to get back to writing down what I get up to or I will literally have no idea in a few months time.

This Easter, my grand plan was do to fantastic amounts of nothing, to bond with my sofa, and snooze. However, ChrisC counter-suggested that we shoehorn in a night away somewhere. For reasons that were not especially apparent, he settled on Lewes as being not too far from London, and potentially interesting. After some Googling we found a B&B, and booked (no thanks to Expedia, which seems to be quite blasé about pubs-with-the-same-name when you are following links). When we pooled what we actually knew about Lewes, it turned out to be (a) they like setting fire to stuff on Bonfire Night, (b) they have a castle, and (c) um, that's it actually.

However, it all worked out reasonably well, so here is my guide to how to have a slightly surprised 24 hours in Lewes.

Get up moderately early (for a bank holiday Saturday), and trundle down the M23. Remember delightedly that the route has two of my favourite UK placenames ever signposted from it (Warninglid and Hassocks, since you ask). To try and maximise our touristing time, we grabbed lunch at a services on the way.

Arrive in Lewes around midday, and park. Walk in the opposite direction from the one you really intended, get massively distracted by the Harvey's brewery shop, buy a crate of beer, carry it back to the car, start again. Lewes (or at least the bit you mostly want as a tourist) is conveniently strung out along one very long high street. It's also appealingly historic, with buildings of all eras crammed in together, and plenty of the sort of shops that it seems like it might be interesting to stick one's nose into.

So potter about looking at stuff for a while. We did that, until the slightly more organised one looked up the castle opening times and pointed that it actually shut at 3:45pm and, it being around 1:15pm, we might want to get on with it. (Note for the pedantic: organised, but not actually very good at reading. That is the winter closing time, and despite it being bloody cold and rather damp, it isn't actually winter at present.)

Hotfoot it along the street to the castle, buy a joint ticket for that and Lewes' other big draw, the Anne of Cleves House. The castle is actually quite small and, even taking in the auxiliary exhibitions, and climbing the keep for the lovely views, we were actually done almost bang on 3:45.

It is an ongoing gripe of mine that it's really hard to know how to plan touristy things: is this a one hour castle or a full day castle? Some places conveniently mention how long you might want to leave to visit; I find I invariably take longer. I am considering pioneering the idea of the "attention unit", which is a national standard for How Much Stuff there is to look at, and it is left as an exercise for the reader to work out the conversion rate from attention units to hours for their own personal interest level, inclination to read all the labels, and attention span. Since it's my standard, I am defining an attention unit as being about an hour for me. Anyway, it was quite a small castle.

It was also - as noted - really quite cold, so maybe now would be a good time to stop for a coffee. Lewes is positively crawling with cafés. I had hot chocolate and a vanilla macaroon. I actually don't think I've ever eaten a macaroon before, they're not at all the texture I expected.

After that, take a stroll around the priory ruins, and Southover Grange Gardens. This would have been absolutely fabulous had it not intermittently rained on us. We did get a nice rainbow, briefly, though - behind us, but fortunately we were alerted by someone walking in the opposite direction saying "oh, what a beaut!" We also dodged some of the rain by nosing around the work displayed by the Sussex Guild, who have some genuinely lovely crafts to admire.

This'll take you nicely through to check-in time. We stopped at Berkeley House, which was splendid. We got a friendly welcome, got introduced to the important bits (breakfast schedule, wifi password), were furnished with proper fresh milk, and got the kettle on.

After all that pottering, this is an ideal time to go flop with a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit. To stick with the theme, download and listen to a Mark Steel lecture on Thomas Paine (a Lewes native).

I strongly advise you not to follow my advice for the next bit: walk 15 minutes in the wrong direction, away from your dinner destination, to the Black Horse. This was based on the flimsy evidence that the Black Horse's website claimed it had a bar billiards table, and so we thought we'd have a pre-dinner pint and a game or two. As it was, the chap behind the bar dismissed the idea with a cursory "nah, love, we took it out". I got my pint, which was nice, but no game of bar billiards. Look, I know bar billiards tables are massively cost ineffective for pubs to run, but we have repeatedly demonstrated that we are willing to schlep surprisingly long distances to hang out in pubs and drink their beer just so that we can play bar billiards. Just ask Steve at the Pembury.

On which note, does anyone know any other pubs in London that genuinely, definitely, have bar billiards tables? Note that any internet resource you find on this will be hopelessly out of date, and any pub you remember having a table a while ago probably doesn't now. Bonus points for anything closer to West London than the Pembury. Oh, except for the Glass Thingy in Soho which we avoid on account of all Sammy Smiths pubs serving terrible coke.

But I digress. Anyway, have dinner in Le Magasin. The combination of wanky website and quite sinister photos on Google maps nearly put me off, but the food was really good. I had a very robust mushroom and blue cheese risotto that practically had to be scraped off the plate, followed by miso-crusted trout with lots of veg (and my own giraffe of a very gooseberryish sauvignon blanc).

Stroll home and tuck yourself in for the night. Oh, move the car from that car park too: it closes at midnight because there is a Sunday car boot sale. Leave the business of parallel parking on a hill in a small space to the person who didn't have a giraffe with their dinner.

Berkeley House has the slightly unusual set up of a large, communal table for breakfast. We were the only ones down, and chatted to the proprietor as she cooked our breakfast. Yes, the granola pots had nuts in, but she could make an extra one without? Genuine nothing-is-too-much-bother hospitality (and excellent cooked breakfast to boot). The remainder of the guests showed up, and we actually had a jolly nice chat among ourselves, covering nice walking routes from Lewes, the flaws of Newcastle Utd's current manager, weddings, and the unexpected fun to be had around Dungeness nuclear power station (Derek Jarman's garden, apparently).

Start your Sunday with a nose around Lewes' flea market, which is a rambly building full of the most surprising stuff (but if you need a nice pillar box, or some mismatched cutlery, or a hybrid taxidermised monster, it's the place for you). Drift gradually round to Anne of Cleves house, which is a large (and quite staggeringly chilly) Tudor affair with surprise ironwork galleries attached. (The ironwork was a little disappointing - possibly it could have been really brought to life by a guide, but the information on display was both very dense and detailed, but also not actually very helpful or informative.) There isn't a huge amount to see, so you'll probably have time for a less damp wander around Southover gardens.

We nosed briefly into another pub which B&B lady had assured us definitely had a bar billiards table (it didn't - though it did have a Toads table, which is a weird Sussex game which we'd have been quite willing to take instead if only the regular pub tables hadn't been placed in such a way you couldn't actually play... honestly, pubs, if you're going to have bar games at least make them a viable option! But I digress. Again.)

And then in the course of wandering back to the car we found a pub clearly geared up for an Event of some kind, which turned out to be a pantomime animal race. So at that point we felt obliged to kill time until the race happened, obviously. Who wouldn't want to watch a squid race a ... thing-with-antlers, anyway?

And then we took ourselves off home again. We actually went via Wakehurst, which is "Kew's country garden", but it's kind of the wrong time of year. Large areas are closed off for various inexplicable garden-related activities, and see also "damp and cold". However, we were passing, and being members of Kew gets us in for nowt, so we pootled around there for a while. And got incredibly muddy. So that part of the weekend should be regarded as optional :) But if you fancy a quick bounce out of London (it's also very viable as a train journey) I'd highly recommend Lewes.