I had my doubts about this one. My next stop was Birmingham. oneWorld doesn't do London-Birmingham direct, and in any case, I wanted to make a big detour, like via Moscow. That would yield me bulk miles and Status points, even thiough it would chew up a whole day's travel.

But my TA put me onto Aer Lingus Heathrow-Dublin-Birmingham. I think the fact that until recently she'd lived in Dublin might have had something to do with it.

A bit of drama in leaving the hostel. My flight out of Heathrow was reasonably early, and I wanted to check out, get to Heathrow and spend time in the lounge there before the Tube filled up. So I was up in the dark, slipped out of the bunkroom to have a shower, and realised just as the door closed, that I didn't have my room key on me. Bugger. I had my shower and shave, looked downstairs for the desk bloke, but the place was deserted. Found a book in the library, went back upstairs and sat outside my room hoping for someone to wake up and let me in.

I checked down at the desk periodically and eventually found the bloke, who gave me a key. So I probably lost an hour there.

After my experience in Paris, I was very leery of subway transfers. I studied my map and selected Earls Court for my transfer, rather than the more convenient South Kensington. Here I could use an elevator to move my bulky bags up and down. It must be a nightmare for wheelchair-bound people to get around the system.

I'd flown into Terminal Four and out of Gatwick on my last trip, so this was my chance to see the "real" Heathrow. Can't say that I like it - give me Hong Kong or Changi any day. Those are big airports done right. Heathrow just grew and grew!

On boarding, my fears were confirmed. The Airbus 320 was a single class flight. One where you buy your own snacks. Discount Economy and that meant I lost a few of the Status Points I was depending on to get to Platinum. If I'd been booked Club Class on BA, I would have done fine. Oh well, a lesson learnt.

I declined the "Full Irish Breakfast" option on seeing another passenger receive one. Greasy and unappetising. Compared to what I'd had on Cathay Pacific, this was really bad food.

The customs and immigration fellow in Dublin asked me how long I was stayin g in ireland. "Oh, about two hours!" I said. He looked disgusted, but stamped my passport anyway.

The reason I wasn't staying in transit was that I had a BookCrossing mate meeting me. There he was at the exit, the famous "SirRoy".

"Fancy a drink, mate?" he asked me.

I was thinking of a cup of coffee, because I generally don't like drinking alcohol while flying, but before I knew it I was sitting in an airport bar, a couple of beers and bags of crisps between us, swapping stories with yet another person I'd never met before but was an old internet friend.

I moaned about my Aer Lingus flight and he said they'd gone downhill over the years, but "you're lucky you aren't flying RyanAir. They have supercheap fares, but they save money by not cleaning the plane between flights. If you travel in the evening you are literally wading through the rubbish on the floor!"

All too soon my couple of hours in Ireland was over, and SirRoy poured me back through security. I suspect he drinks a lot more in everyday life than I do, but Lord it was fun to find a friend in a foreign land.

Another A320 to Birmingham, where I was met by yet another BookCrosser, the wonderful Dubnordie, who had spent several years in Dublin and knew SirRoy well. "How many beers did he pour down your throat? Would you like a few more?"

As it happened, I did, and we found a bar at Birmingham's New Street Station before catching a train to Shrewsbury. She had some timetables for me, because the next day I was scheduled to be interviewed on BBC Radio Shropshire before making a quick trip back to Birmingham for my flight out. I'd been told that because of Easter, I might have problems on the roads and that train travel would get me from the studio to the terminal in good time.

They had an interesting system here. One platform, two trains. Platform (say) 5 would be divided into 5a, 5b (and possibly 5c), with two different trains going to two different places. DubNordie knew the system and got us on the correct train to Shrewsbury. She gave me the window seat, the darling, and I looked out on the passing countryside with keen interest. Rural Britain is an amazingly pretty place, fields and copses and hedges, dotted with quaint villages clustered around antique churches.

At Shrewsbury, we were met by Mr & Mrs F-B, a retired couple. Two more darlings. He is an ex-lawyer, possessed of a dry sense of humour and a way with words; she immediately set to mothering me. I loved them both on sight. They gave me a quick tour of the town, passing by the castle and the Abbey, both featured in Ellis Peters' books about Brother Cadfael. Some glorious old buildings, but as Mr F-B noted, "The Sixties have not been kind to Shrewsbury."

There were some ghastly swathes of British Post-War Brutalism plopped down amidst the half-timbers and thatch. Their house in a suburb was comfortable and charming, and I was given a guest room of such soft luxury that I sighed with pleasure. No bunkbed and shared bathroom down the hall!

We sat and drank tea and talked BookCrossing. I produced more Tim Tams and demonstrated their use as a straw. And as evening drew close, we climbed into the car again and set off for Bridgnorth, where BBC Radio Shropshire was supporting a "Big Night Out" at the skittles alley of a local pub.

We passed through more of the green and pleasant countryside that made me think that we could do with a bit of it in my parched corner of Australia. "There's the Wrekin," Mr F-B noted, "if you travel east from here, you won't strike higher ground until you get to the Urals."

A quick look at Much Wenlock, another unbearably cute little English village, and here we were at the pub. The Shakespeare Inn, an authentic English public-house miles off the tourist track. I settled down to steak and kidney pie and a pint of something large and brown.

People started coming in as I relished my way through the savoury feast. BookCrossers and local fans of Jim Hawkins' radio programme. Jim himself appeared, a jolly fellow with a silver tongue, a heart of gold, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of music, especially modern rock. Along with Jenny Kendall-Tobias from BBC Radio Guernsey, he was my preferred evening listen, via the internet and streaming audio.

Some time ago he'd interviewed Steve Lucas, a prominent British BookCrosser, and they had watched as the emails came flooding in from around the world. There's nearly half a million BookCrossers, and it seemed like a sizable percentage were sending in emails and text messages and even calling the station as the show went to air. Jim was converted on the spot, and set up a weekly "BookCrossing update" every Friday. I was to be a star guest at the next update tomorrow, but in the meantime, here we were on a Thursday evening in an English pub with a skittle alley.

Did I get to mention that one of the self-identified perks of my job is that I get to hug beautiful women? Well, I do, and I hugged a few English roses this evening. Something about BookCrossers, they tend to be warm and generous people. One of the young ladies was collecting money for a trip to Namibia, where she would work as a volunteer for a year. Now there's inspiring for you! I told her to take plenty of photographs and to send back a lot of reports.

The skittle alley was in an outbuilding of the pub proper. Most of it was a smooth wooden floor. Well, smooth-ish. On one side a long wooden rail made a narrow chute for the balls to be returned, and on the other a long narrow bench allowed spectators to sit and watch the action. At one end was an area for the skittlers to gather, along with a blackboard, and at the other a section of floor swung up to reveal a pit into which balls and skittles fell.

You must put away any but the faintest notion of ten-pin bowling here, with polished floors, identical pins, electronic scoring and automation out the wazoo. Skittles is hand-made all the way. The ball was just a wooden ball, not especially smooth. In fact it reminded me of a coconut. The skittles were about the right size, but very rough. Hard to balance them, too - they were like bottles with a neck at each end, and the bases were small and not entirely flat.

There were nine pins, set up in a diamond formation. I was puzzled as to why there weren't the more usual ten pins, but one of the locals explained. "Well, they used to be ten skittles hundreds of years ago, but peeople was gambling on them, you see, and Parliament passed a law making it illegal to play ten-pin skittles. So we had to take one away."

A creature of logic, the Englishman. I can just imagine what they did with the surplus skittle.

Nobody was quite sure of the rules to the game, but luckily a bit of research had taken place, and a paper was distributed. Teams were arranged, and each member of a team was allowed three bowls. Scoring was one point per bowl, but if you knocked down all the skittles before your three goes were up, they were set back up and you got another go. In theory, you could get 27 points out of your three bowls.

After each lot of pins or tree bowls, one or two men would jump into the pit, set up the pins and send the balls rolling back. And a scorer would chalk up the total on the board.

There were variations on the basic rules, and we tried one of those after a mug or two of cider. I liked the game, because there was enough element of luck in it, what with the imperfections of the equipment, that you could only go so far with skill and technique. My own approach was to hurl the thing as fast as ever I could and hope that the energy would send the skittles crashing like dominos. In fact, as I discovered, it was quite possible (though unlikely) that you could have only the two corner pins left standing, and bring them down in one go.

All in all it was a happy, noisy, fun game. When one game was over, Jim Hawkins brought out a little recorder and interviewed some of us as to our impressions. I can't remember what I tipsily said, but I think Jim was glad to have an Australian accent in amongst the rounder English tones.

Steve Lucas had turned up - Shrewsbury is only a motorway hour or so away from London, despite my flying to and from Dublin to get there - and he was a surprising winner in the "elimination" game we finished the evening with. This was a variant of the basic game in which each player bowled a single ball. If you failed to knock down any pins, you were eliminated. The key was that the pins wre not set up again after each ball, so if there was only one pin standing and you were next up, you'd hope like mad that the current player would knock it down so you would get a whole fresh set of nine to aim at.

And so the evening finished. I'm a confirmed believer in English pub life now. Good plain food, drink and company, all of them with traditions stretching back down the centuries. I wonder how English rural society coped with the influx of Americans during the war, when whole air bases and training camps would be established on short notice on vacant farmland, and suddenly the village pub had to cope with hundreds of strangers all at once.

Did they spend hours searching for a tenth skittle that had long ago rotted away in Westminster, or did thy have someone to teach them the rules? Perhaps next time, I'll ask the old gent in the corner chair by the fireplace.