In an effort to improve me, my dad would take me, on wet Sunday afternoons, to places of interest.

We’d take the coach from Balham High Road and visit south-east England stately homes, castles (usually in ruins) and majestic gardens.

My thoughts, while walking round these places, would be: I’d love to slide down THAT staircase; where would you put the boiling oil to dissuade uninvited guests and what magnificent begonias (I  was a teenage boy)!

And why did most statues only have one arm?  Had they all been in some ancestral scything accident?

For me, the places which housed the Earls of this and the Dukes of that held no appeal.

I wanted to go to the Gift Shop: the treasure at the end of the National Trust-owned rainbow.

I wanted to get a tea towel with Churchill on; a mug decorated with Sir Philip Sidney poems and Kendal Mint Cake sponsored by Rudyard Kipling. 

Oddly, I would also buy coloured slides.  Strange, as I didn’t own a projector.  Perhaps I secretly hoped I’d be invited to someone’s for tea, where the parents had a slide projector and would ask, “does anyone have any slides of Ann Boleyn, some eleventh-century turrets or flowering clematis?”.    Remember, I was entering adolescence 😊

Everyone back on the bus, please.