St Peter Port, Guernsey, 10 April 2006:

“She usually gets in at ten to ten,” the radio chap said when I asked about Jenny Kendall-Tobias.

Cripes, that was an hour away. But he kindly made me a cup of tea, which I sipped while I waited. I was floating about two feet above the ground. Here I was, not only in Guernsey in the Channel Islands, but in the studios of BBC Radio Guernsey. For nearly six months I’d been listening on the Internet to Jenny’s “Studio One” show, ever since she interviewed Steve “Netstation” Lucas, BookCrossing’s answer to Tom Cruise.

I’d been struck by her enthusiasm, her ready humour, and the ease with which she gained a rapport with her guests. You could just hear the smile in her voice.

I kept tuning in and soon her Guernsey mid-morning show became my Canberra late-evening entertainment. I gave the local radio stations a miss – they were all fluff and commercial twaddle – but Guernsey came alive for me. Out of the small community Jenny managed to find some truly fascinating characters, and I’d find myself sighing each night at midnight as she signed off with her trademark “ŕ la perchoine”, native Guernsey for “later, darling”.

And so, when it came time to book my round the world trip to the Toronto BookCrossing convention, it was a foregone conclusion that I include Guernsey in my itinerary. I wanted to see for myself this wonderful, historic, picturesque and quirky island community.

And the moment in France when my hire car’s radio picked up the distant signal of BBC Radio Guernsey – a fair dinkum radio signal, and not just an Internet podcast – why, but I started smiling for joy and as I write these words a day and a half later, I haven’t stopped yet.

And here she was rushing in the door at five to ten for a ten o’clock show.

“Miss, miss? I’ve got Tim-tams!”

That stopped her.

And before I knew it I was sitting in Studio One itself while Jenny fiddled with microphones and buttons, making last minute consultations with assistants in the outer office, sorting out the first songs and first guests.

The cheerful winners of a local dance competition smiled as they sat down and it just got better from there. What an atmosphere – Studio One in real life was as much fun as on the air.

As I found out when Jenny put me in front of a microphone and made me sip BBC tea through a Tim Tam, asked me about BookCrossing and Australian culture. And the emails came rolling in – Jenny has fans all over the world.

One of Jenny’s guests was an archaeologist specializing in Roman pottery. “Just chip in,” she urged me, and I did from time to time.

But the real surprise came when she suggested he lead a tour through the centre of town that afternoon and invited her listeners to join in. This was broadcasting by the seat of the pants!

Before I knew it the show was in its final moments and I sighed afresh as she smiled “ŕ la perchoine” into the microphone. I was rapt.

More conferences, the morrow’s show was sketched in, and here I was in her car – the famous Skoda named “Bolly” by the fans – as we investigated Guernsey bureaucracy and gathered story ideas.

A quick lunch, a lot of it spent on the phone, and then she led me to St Peter Port’s tiny town square, where a dozen Studio One fans were waiting for the impromptu “Roamin’ through Roman Guernsey” tour. Jenny was lugging a heavy microphone/recorder combo, keeping an eye on sound and battery levels as she shot questions at the expert and manoeuvered her audience around.

Me, I lapped it up. I’ll happily spend all day with my nose in a history book. This was pure gold.

Afterwards I snaffled a quarter hour of freebie internet in the library – a library, according to a plaque on the wall, that was well established a year before the First Fleet sailed into Botany Bay.

Afternoon tea – a delayed afternoon tea getting on for five o’clock - was spent with a photographer, planning publicity shots for the evening’s work. Her phone rarely gave her five minutes’ peace at a time, and we were joined from time to time by politicians and the leaders of charity groups, for whom Jenny puts in a lot of unpaid work.

And then in a rushed half hour, darling Jenny managed to give me a quick tour of the island – narrow roads, fabulous views, unique architecture, the works, before we pulled up outside the theatre where she was playing multiple roles in a musical. Tonight was the dress rehearsal and the island television station was on hand with a crew to record highlights.

Jenny, big tall and beautiful Jenny, had been given a costume that was sequined, stunning and skimpy. “Honestly, a t-shirt is longer!” she’d said earlier when describing it, but when she came down the stairs in a number entitled “Beautiful Girls”, it was perfect. Coupled with a tall feathered head dress and her tail covered in blue feathers, she positively strutted around the stage.

The TV camera and the stills photographer aimed their huge equipment around the set, while I snapped off a few shots with my rather more dinky camera gear.

Time and again the number went through “one more time, girls” and I could see the standard improving. This was their first time in full dress, with stage, lighting and choreography still being tinkered with. For my part, I thought that for an amateur group, they looked pretty darn professional. With another five days until opening night, the thing should be marvelous.

As the rehearsal came to a close, getting on for eleven at night, the cast sat on the edge of the stage while the director gave a quick critique. Jenny was easing off her shoes - “one size too small,” she later commented – and I felt for her, having to spend all night dancing in uncomfortable footwear after putting in a full day’s work.

And still later, the proceedings wrapped up and she drove me back to my hotel, dropping me off outside with the lights of the harbour front spread out behind me like a string of jewels.

I thanked her for a magic day and wished her goodnight, but as her tail-lights vanished down one of St Peter Port’s narrow lights, my wits returned, and I said to the empty night air the words I should have said: “ŕ la perchoine, Jenny!”

My original itinerary for Guernsey went like this:
Sunday: drive from Bayeux to St Malo, Condor Ferries to Guernsey via Jersey, stay at St Georges Hotel.
Monday: appear on BBC Radio Guernsey, evening ferry to Jersey, stay at youth hostel.
Tuesday: taxi to Jersey airport, British Airways flight to Gatwick, stay at London youth hostel.

The problem was that British Air didn't fly in or out of Guernsey, so I had to get to and from by other means.

It was a bit of a mix and I could probably have benefited from some professional help in sorting out my intinerary. However, it got me to Guernsey in time for Jenny's show, and if I got to see other places along the way, this wasn't entirely unpleasant.

The big drawback was that I'd have to take a couple of buses to the hostel on Jersey, arriving after dark and leaving in the morning, followed by more buses or a long taxi ride to the Jersey airport.

By this stage I was getting heartily sick of heaving my luggage about, especially on and off buses, and I didn't really want to leave Guernsey quite so soon.

So on Monday before heading off to see Jenny, I asked the hotel manager if there was a way to stay on an extra night and get to Jersey the following morning. I was thinking of a ferry, but she mentioned that a flight over to Jersey wouldn't cost too much, and yes, they'd be happy to have me stay on another night.

The flight to Jersey was about 40 pounds (just over a hundred Aussie dollars, according to my credit card statement which has just arrived without managing to drain all the colour from my cheeks), so I made the booking, confirmed the extra night and headed off into the gentle drizzle to spend a day and evening with Jenny, returning in time for a good sleep in a comfortable bed in a private room.

If there's one thing Guernsey has besides beauty, it's a traffic problem. Not enough room for all the vehicles to be on the road at once, you see, and so rush hour is fairly brutal. I called up a taxi in plenty of time and was waiting in the foyer when it pulled up.

Jenny had mentioned the "H" stickers on some cars the previous day, and the taxi driver confirmed that they identified hire cars. "We call them horror cars," he said with a well-worn smile, and went on to describe some of the atrocities committed by ignorant foreigners on the narrow Guernsey roads and crowded streets.

For any Americans reading this, take note before you hire a car in Guernsey! Not only will everything be on the wrong side and you'll find driving a lot more cramped than usual, but all the locals will be able to spot you from a safe distance. No anonymous freeways in Guernsey.

States Airport in Guernsey is a tiny place, about the size of Canberra Airport. My "BlueIslands" airline lounge was about the size of a loungeroom, but it had a cheerful staff member to bring me coffee while I hopped onto the wifi.

At this stage I was still using my webmail interface so that when I got home I'd be able to move my messages into my normal email program for ease of later archiving.

This turned out to be a mistake, because I had to be connected to read and reply to my email, and my mailbox filled up anyway. I found that a lot of my rare and expensive internet time was taken up with handling email, when I should really have had it download to my laptop's client, allowing me to deal with it at leisure. Later on when my ISP's miserly 2 megabyte limit was exceeded and emails were being bounced, I switched over.

I dealt with the archive problem by exporting my mail messages in a bundled file to my home client when I returned home.

Flight time came, and a dozen of us were led out to a minibus for a short trop across the tarmac to a Britten-Norman Trislander. We were called out by name in groups of four so as to enter the aircraft in strict order. I missed my turn because the driver mispronounced my name, the noise from other aircraft was distracting but mostly because I was busy taking a photograph.

The bus driver (doubling as ground staff) opened one of the doors for my group of four and folded down the seat in front. I found myself wedged on a very flat double seat shoulder to shoulder with another passenger, my backpack on my lap (no aisles or overhead racks or footroom here!) and locked in behind the seat in front. I had to lean forward to get a narrow triangular view out of the window. Heaven help us all if we made a forced landing!

And didn't the thing rattle and shake as we made our takeoff roll and climbed away! But the views, such as I could get by nibbling on the ear of the passenger in front, were spectacular. Guernsey is a beautiful little island and I promised myself I'd be back one day.

Jersey is a great deal larger than neighbouring Guernsey, and has far more open land. Dairy cattle and glasshouses spread out across the island, but my Jersey experience was entirely limited to what I could see from the air, as I wasn't leaving transit at the airport.

We unwedged ourselves from our cramped seats and walked across the tarmac to baggage claim. I hunted down my thick wodge of airline tickets while I waited for the carousel to begin moving. It had been the best part of a week since I'd needed a ticket and I'd tucked them away in one of my document holders. As usual, my bright yellow bags were easily spotted, and I once again assumed my rolling role as baggage handler.

I went around to the check in counters, but they weren't quite ready to accept passengers for my flight and asked me to come back in half an hour. So I found a seat by a window where I could take photographs of the many exotic aircraft using the airport.

Jersey looks to be a destination for all manner of micro-airlines, and it often seems that the smaller the airline, the more garish the livery. If only I could find my camera...

After a few minutes, it dawned on me that it wasn't with me. Bugger. Eight hundred dollars worth of camera and memory card. Where could it be? I'd certainly had it on the flight over, because I'd been aiming it through my tiny sliver of window at anything remotely interesting.

I remembered having it while I hunted out my tickets, which meant it was probably still sitting on the seat in the baggage claim area. If someone hadn't walked off with it, a very likely possibility.

I hauled my bundles back to baggage claim, but they wouldn't let me in. Not without an escort, go see the help counter. Off I went there, and luckily they were able to tell me that yes a camera had been found, and it was being brought around.

A chap who looked like a cleaner walked up and handed over my camera. No check as to who I was and whether I could describe the camera inside the bag, but I was so glad to have it back I didn't quibble.

Check in was now open and I gratefully relieved myself of my big yellow bags and sought out the British Airways lounge. This turned out to be totally unstaffed, entry via a code given to me with my boarding pass. However, it had juice, coffee, snacks and wireless internet, so I was happy to pass an hour or so there.

Club Class on the 737 to Gatwick wasn't much chop. Three-abreast seating, a barely adequate seat pitch and a snack served during the brief flight across the overcast Channel.

A BookCrosser was waiting for me at Gatwick. Probably interested to see what sort of nut would spend a fortune to go around the world meeting other BookCrossers. We'd never seen each other before, but we worked out who was who after a bit.

I found a coffee shop, where they took forever to prepare a couple of bathtub-sized cappucinos, and we settled down to become friends. BookCrossing is like that - you can fly to some remote and exotic part of the world (like Gatwick) and get a warm welcome and a hug from a stranger.

I gave her a packet of Tim Tams and showed her how to use these chocolate-coated cookies as a straw to drink hot coffee through. She refused to follow my example - a pity, as there are few more yummy experiences. Timing is critical, lest it all dissolve into a gooey mess!

And then it was time to go. Goodbye, a bit of a search for the right line and right ticket, down to the platform and onto the train for Blackfriars. Fields at first, gradually thickening suburbia, light industrial wastelands and landmarks growing visible in the distance, to mounting excitement from me.

When we slid onto the bridge over the Thames and St Pauls loomed above the clutter, Millenium footbridge a silver thread over the grey and the unmistakable shape of Tower Bridge foursquare in the distance, I was almost singing out loud.

So very happy to be back in London!

I staid in the London City youth hostel last April and had a great time. Very well designed hostel in the old St Pauls choir school. Literally a stone's throw from the cathedral it's on the fringes of the financial district and very quiet at night. Apart from the bells every quarter hour, of course.

I checked in, dumped my kit on my bunk bed and hauled out all the laundry I'd been saving up since Paris. Only five day's worth, but when you have a limited amount of clothing, you soon reach the stage where you run out of options, and I wanted to keep mine open.

So I settled down in the basement laundry, balancing my laptop on the ironing board to take advantage of a wireless internet connection.

All my travel clothes are reasonably rugged. I don't have time to separate out whites from the colours, delicates from the normals. Everything goes in one load and then gets chucked into the drier. No ironing. If an item can't hack that, I don't bring it.

And then I put a few books into my big yellow tote bag, added a couple of packets of Tim Tams, and headed across the Thames to the Stamford Arms, where the London BookCrossers were having their monthly get-together.

They've got exactly the right idea. My Canberra group meets in a coffee house, and we sit around all genteel and discuss our books. Not so the Londoners. They arrive, drop their books off onto a table in the pub, sit down at one nearby and get through an amazing pintage (as opposed to tonnage) of beer and cider.

London gatherings are a lot of fun, and there exist any number of photographs of the night showing me with a big smile on my face with my arms wrapped around a gorgeous girl or two.

"Don't you send that to my wife!" I'd say, too late, and they'd smile and nod, but in the morning there'd be an email from my wife asking how the party went...

She's an angel really, and she knows there's nothing in it. Nothing physical, anyway - she also knows how much I enjoy the company of other BookCrossers.

Afterwards, I rolled back to my hostel and slept a happy, cheerful, noisy type of sleep. That's the best thing about my snoring, I don't have to listen to it.

World War II is actually one of my favourite parts of history and I am jealous that you are travelling to all the significant places. Thanks for bringing us on your journey.

Skyring, your reports are just terrific! I get home from work each night and check for the next one -- keep them up. It's next best to being there. Thanks.

Thanks for the amazing report. You have an extraordinary talent to take us along your discovery journey.

Eagerly awaiting next installment

I thought this seemed a little high so I checked the Boeing site:

"The 777 seats from 301 up to 368 passengers in a three-class configuration"

Australian humour

Absolutely brilliant to read, especially as I'm planning my own world trip which will also include Australia. Keep us informed.

Heh. Glad someone picked it up. Hate to think of that gem being wasted.

Sorry for the delay, everyone - I started the next instalment a couple of times and somehow lost it before posting. Grrrr.

I've got a week before my next big trip, so I'd best pull my finger out and finish this one! Stay tuned.

Truely moving..

I cannot say that ever, in my edge-of-the-envelope aviation fantasies, had I dreamt that I would be where I was now standing. In another time and place I would have been shot on sight. Yet here I was, one hand on a huge pair of aircraft tyres, intimately surrounded by the hydraulics and metal doors of a plane that, when first wheeled out of the plant was covered with muslin (although it is hard to think what it could be mistaken for), test flights were done at night, and all negatives of photos taken had to be developed at a secure location in Washington, D.C The ultimate Cold War icon, the impossibly long wings, the eight jet engines, the slab sides, the tall angular tail fin; here was a real life B-52 Stratofortress and here I was, almost a part of it.

The day had started off slowly and easily. My idea of high living is a top bunk in a hostel dormitory (one where you have to get up before you go to sleep), and I had woken with a feeling of contentment, almost luxurious ease. I didn't have a flight to catch today, or be on time for a train or ferry. I could sleep in until, oh, seven o'clock or so.

In fact, I got up early, had a shower and shave, hauled my backpack past St Pauls and over Ludgate Hill to a Starbucks, where I drank coffee and surfed the wireless Internet until eight-thirty, when I returned to my hostel for breakfast.

Last April it was a choice of full English or Continental breakfast, which effectively meant both, and you could cram enough food inside to set you up until dinnertime, but now the sausages, eggs and bacon had vanished and the rather more spartan breakfast was not quite the superb value it had been. Still, it was a nice bonus and a pleasant way to begin the day, checking out the other hostel guests.

Mostly young folk, though there were some in my middle-aged group, and amongst the range of accents I could distinguish more than a few fellow Australians. Around me I could hear people planning their days, puzzling over maps with the aid of mugs of tea and jammy toast, exchanging tips and traps with temporary companions. That had been me last April, when I had walked around the British Monopoly board from Old Kent Road to Mayfair, but today all my planning had been done ahead of time on the other side of the world.

After breakfast I emerged into the bustle of the City getting down to work. The last few late commuters were hurrying to their offices, courier vans were doing a roaring trade, and everyone had a sense of purpose.

Including me, I suppose. But I wasn't committed to any set time. I breezed along the city streets, past St Pauls, past Mansion House, humming happily to myself. It was so good to be back in London on a bright spring morning.

To tell the truth, I would probably have preferred to just bum around London, spending the day with nothing to do but look in here and there. However, on this trip, I was committed to sites devoted to the American WW2 effort and I had found a good one in the UK.

Liverpool Street Station was my jumping off point for the train trip to Cambridge, and although I'd visited here last time on my Monopoly trip, I hadn't actually caught a train - just made my way up from the Tube, took a look around, left a book, and made my way back into the bowels of the Underground.

The place looked exactly the same this time around, with the big difference that my book had vanished some time in the intervening year. I worked out how to buy a ticket - for some reason I couldn't buy one from the ticket machines using my Australian bank cards and had to line up at a ticket window - found my platform and climbed aboard.

Seventeen pounds sixty for a return ticket. That's the same price as thetrainline.com's cheapest, so there's probably not that much advantage to booking early on the web except that you are guaranteed a seat.

As it turned out, my train wasn't anywhere near crowded, and I could relax and stare out of the window as we headed first east and then steadily north. This was really my first time out of London, unless you count trips to and from Gatwick. I caught glimpses of canals (and canalboats - one day I'd like to take a canalboat holiday), English villages and even wildlife amongst the rolling fields and small copses. All very pleasant, and occasionally a gentleman wandered along the corridor with a trolley full of snacks, which he advertised in a practised sing-song.

Cambridge Station, and I deboarded, wandered outside, and looked for my bus. Turns out that the C7 service is one name for the same route in two directions, and you have to take the one south to RAF Duxford. The bus runs every twenty minutes, so I guess I had just missed the previous one.

A very pleasant trip, passing through thatched villages and modern housing estates. Light industry, a huge hospital and towards the end, open countryside. A bit of a snapshot of modern Britain, I guess. No romantic old university buildings. Perhaps they were on the bus route not taken...

RAF Duxford turned out to be a collection of huge hangars, some of them pre-war. Show your bus ticket for reduced admission. Great green airstrip with aircraft operating. To my astonishment I recognised a deHavilland Dragon Rapide, an ancient airliner from the 1930s, doing circuits. Apparently you can buy joyrides on this elderly aircraft.

Another day, perhaps. I was on a mission.

My interest in coming here was the fact that RAF Duxford used to be a USAAF base during the war, and the Imperial War Museum keeps its aircraft collection here, including a display of American warbirds.

As a youngster climbing the promotion ladder of the Queensland University Regiment, we noncommissioned officer undergraduate types were occasionally shown a film to inspire us to leadership. Usually a warry movie with a discussion afterwards, the favorites were Zulu, showing a determined Michael Caine leading his redcoats to a desperate victory over endless hordes of natives, or Twelve O'Clock High where Gregory Peck whips a despondent bomber squadron into shape.

I preferred the bomber squadron, being an aviation nut, and it was grand to see formations of Boeing B-17s flying over Germany, knocking the spots off the Nazis. Gregory Peck drove his men hard, hard as nails on the outside, but behind that stern front he was tearing up. I especially liked the beginning and end of the movie, where the non-flying intelligence officer returns to England years after the war and visits the old airfield, poking amongst the decaying buildings and recalling the glory days. The movie is effectively one long flashback.

South East England is littered with old USAAF airfields. Most of them were grass fields with a square brick control tower, a couple of hangars and a town of tents. And a nearby village that effectively became the personal property of the young airmen. RAf Duxford was one of the larger bases, with some impressive prewar hangars, and it didn't take much to recall the old days when high performance piston and rotary engines ripped the sky apart. Even today, a lone Mustang at an air show has the power to thrill me, and in those war years there must have been dozens of them here, along with mighty formations of Fortresses and Liberators.

I let my imagination roam and soar, and with the Dragon Rapide and the elderly hangars and office buildings, it's not all that hard to go a certain distance into the past.

The hangars are lined up one after the other, and the tourist wanders freely through all, including those where restoration is taking place, and the air twitches the nose with tangs of solvents and paints. Like a giant plastic model, whole aircraft lie scattered into components, and one can imagine a giant hand coming down from the roof and inserting tailfin A into fuselage assembly B, perhaps with a squirt of glue from one of the metal drums piled in the corner.

There are every variety of aircraft imaginable here. Civil and military, jets and propellers, bombers and fighters, Axis and Allies. Some are posed in tableaux, complete with uniformed mannequins swinging props or scrambling into the cockpit. It's a little boy's Airfix collection come to life, and for the second time in my life, I see a Hawker Hurricane, one of the rarest of the old warbirds, because most of them got turned into Hurricats and were catapulted off merchant ships in the Battle of the Atlantic. I used to have a whole squadron of them in 1:72 scale.

But for sheer elegance, a perfect harmony of design, the Spitfire is peerless. It is a sonnet of an aircraft, rounded and sleek. Pure sizzling sex in every line. I love it, and there are Spits aplenty here. The later marks, with their sawn off wingtips, bubble canopies and gigantic props, may have had higher performance, but it is the early marks, the ones that triumphed in the Battle of Britain, that make my heart sing.

I wander, and I linger, and I buy a sandwich from one of the canteens, but the big modern building at the western end of the ramp is my objective today.

This is the American hangar. It's an odd circular domed shape, and it's sunk into the ground at one end, and to the south is a huge glass wall, letting in the daylight. Inside is a fabulous collection of all the greats of American military aviation.

The B-52 I've mentioned, and it was fabulous to see it in the metal. Even the Smithsonian doesn't have one of these on public display. Other big birds include a B-17 Flying Fortress, a B-29 Superfortress, a Liberator, and a SR-71, which still looks like something out of science fiction, even though it's an aircraft of the Sixties. Smaller aircraft in plenty, including a Mustang and a Huey. and a whole bunch of other fabulous planes.

What got me was that they weren't roped off. You could go up close, run your hands along their bellies, inspect details. There was even a set of steps up to the round glass nose of the Superfort, and you could peer into the cockpit. It was stunning, and I was in plane-nut heaven for the hour or so I spent wandering around.

Off the main gallery was a little annex devoted to the men who flew these warbirds. Leather jackets, logbooks, gloves, all the little bits and pieces of uniforms, lucky charms and so on. You could almost imagine the young men who had first owned this kit when it was brand new from the stores, and gradually wore it in, stitched on badges and patches, took it up into the sky a hundred times, and brought it all back to rest here for our curious latter-day eyes.

And at each end of the room was a wall of names, alphabetically ordered. These were the men who didn't come back, and they number into the thousands. I left a book about the air war under one of these sad lists.

Such a waste. These young Americans should have been at home, going to college, starting families, sitting down to Thanksgiving dinners, and instead they came to England, where they devoted their lives to killing other young men. Sure, it was all part of a crusade to save the world, and I don't downgrade their sacrifice at all, but I do regret it.

From this distance, it all seems so pointless. Germany and Japan are friendly nations now. If only they had been so then, without the necessity of bombing them flat.

I wandered regretfully back out into the daylight, past a row of faded British airliners. A de havilland Comet and a Vickers VC10, once at the cutting edge of jet airliner technology, now just hulks, beaten by time and distance and weather into shabby greyness.

There's Concorde inside another big new display hanger at the eastern end of the field, but that isn't open yet. I'll save that for another trip.

I browsed briefly through the bookshop, found my bus stop and took the morning's trip in reverse, all the way back to London, where I met another Canberran at Marble Arch for a beer or two in a corner pub.

He'd been down to Portsmouth and seen Nelson's Victory, and we swapped travel stories before parting, me back on the tube to St Pauls, where I packed my bags and snored my way into the hearts of my room-mates.

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.

How I came to be in Frankfurt via Welshpool is another story, but I'd like to pay special credit to the young cabbie from Amber Cabs who got me to the airport with time to spare. Not much time,but that certainly wasn't his fault!

ElhamIsabel was there at the gate to meet me and I have rarely been more pleased to see a friendly face!

We had a quick tour of Frankfurt and the German language via my hostel, called the Frankensteiner Place, before meeting with about a dozen locals, books and hugs exchanged, Tim Tams slammed, and then off to my hostel.