Good Friday ride

I have finally realized that trains can take you to and from the start of cycle trips, and exploited this to the full over the Easter weekend. I'd initially wanted to go to the Norfolk Broads, but the line to Norwich and Yarmouth was being fixed; so I contemplated Ipswich, and remembered what was near there.

Here's the route; I thought that it would be impossible to miss the bridge at Woodbridge, I was expecting some mighty arc of steel forged by an East Anglian Brunel. This is not the case - the river Deben becomes suddenly unexciting just off the top of OS map 169, and the bridge is a pathetic little thing, so, looking for a Pont-du-Gard, I found myself most of the way to Wickham Market (and cycling down one junction's worth of the A12) before deciding I had made a mistake. Found a lady gardening in Campsey Ash who told me how to get back, and the return route was through Rendlesham, which is of course appropriate for visiting Sutton Hoo.

It's a pleasant museum, with a reconstruction of the contents of the burial, lots of interviews with the people who'd made the reconstruction trying to give an idea of how fiddly it was to make such elaborate cloisonné items, and one or two of the real artefacts borrowed from the British Museum; for some reason I'd thought that the whole of the British Museum's collection of items from the tombs had been transferred to the National Trust for display, though on reflection the idea of the British Museum deaccessioning that many pieces should have been up there with Ian Paisley calling a press conference in Tel Aviv to announce his conversion to Islam.

This one's for hilarityallen who was complaining in the pub about the inadequacies of Saxon ribaldry: she's right.

Gratuitous exercise, part 2

It became Saturday, and my knees didn't fall off, even after swimming a kilometre; I know swimming's good for me, but there are few sights more tedious than the bottom of the middle-speed lane at Parkside Pool for the thirty-eighth time. I went to Charles' halfth birthday party at rmc28's house, and watched simont's amazing videos of animated Newton Set fractals; it's an idea that I too had had some years ago (see here), but I'd run into the limitations of video compression and lost interest, whilst Simon had treated it as an exercise in choreography and executed it wonderfully. I think you can just about generate the fractals in realtime in high definition on a Playstation 3, but a PS3, particularly since you'd also want an HDTV to plug it into, is a little expensive to get one on spec just for that purpose.

Sunday was also sunny, so I got myself and my bicycle on a morning train to Thetford, and proceeded to Lynn, wishing everyone I passed on the way a happy Easter. This is a nice mix of landscapes, sandy heathland in Thetford Forest with the sound of smallarms fire coming from behind fields full of happy sheep - lots of Thetford Forest was taken over by the military just before the first world war and is still used - and then green rolling fields from about Watton, and a new 14-megawatt wind-farm at North Pickenham before reaching the flint houses of Swaffham in time for lunch. I cannot recommend eating at the Red Lion on Swaffham marketplace; their 'steak baguette' has a filling of the consistency of kebab-meat, cut insultingly thin. On past Narford Hall, a map-reading error took me half way to Castle Acre where I met a nice elderly couple who had their own map, and finally a sweep down the A1076 from Gayton into Lynn. There are some silly road names here.

Sculpture outside the police station in Watton:

Narford Hall unfortunately turns out (according to Google) to be the ancestral home of one of England's more virulent contemporary fascists; but you can't really blame the house for that: