I was unexpectedly descended upon by old friend Jon Care yesterday evening, which was a pleasant surprise; we swapped notes, sipped beer or tea (respectively, for he was driving) and generally caught up. Having had an eventful week (fraught with geekiness) it was nice to just socialise.

Crashed out 2330, up 0630 as is my new habit, and having caffeined and showered myself into wakefulness, spent the morning doing food prep; my next month’s supply of muesli, bread (50% wholemeal), and a double-batch of fruited scones for a mate who flew back from the USA today, having promised him a post-landing clotted cream tea in order to ease re-integration into the UK.

Dave (for it was he) jumped in his XK8 and shot back to Cambridge towards teatime, so I kitted up on the bike and decided to go out for a bit of a blast. I got as far as Dorchester Oxon before deciding that the weather – although appalling, might just be ridable by day but would be suicidally treacherous by dark, so I aborted plans to head up to Rollright Stones for the Spring Equinox.

Incidentally, the Equinox occurred at around 0640 this morning, for those who may be interested in such things – it’s officially Springtime!

Why risk visiting the stones? (QuickTime VR Movie: [crypticide.com])

Well I do truly believe that the stones are a place of significant power – many of the people I meet there have deeply held beliefs about fairies and pagan gods and crystals and suchlike, but for me the power is much more clear-cut: the stones have the power to draw together the sorts of people who believe in fairies and pagan gods and crystals and suchlike, and such are generally very nice people.

Other, more modern places of pilgrimage exist: New Zealand movie sets, dummy roadsigns at Land’s End or John’o’Groats, the clock at Carnforth Railway Station, Scottish Mountains which only count after you’ve finished running-up all of them…

These are all reasonable places to go, to be, to have as a personal goal or metric of achievement, although I sometimes wonder why people do such things.

Not that I don’t aspire to some of them myself. I just wonder why.

I suspect at least some of their value as a goal is derived from their visitation conferring automatic inclusion of the visitor into an exclusive club. In this theory people become more individual as each new achievement further refines the definition of themselves in terms of the intersection of sets of people who have achieved particular goals – to borrow a phrase from set-theory.

This (to me) explains the kudos of someone’s holding a world record: it automatically puts the record-holder into a unary set, distinguishing them from the rest of humanity by virtue of a single achievement.

Well… maybe. 😎

In the interim: “Why visit Rollright?” Well they’ve been onesuch touchpoint for travelers for more than 5000 years; in their time they’ve probably seen a few million people come and go.

In my book that’s a pretty good recommendation.