these weird isles

Completed in 1828, the statue of Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, dominates St Andrew Square. In 1846, Frederick Douglass, author, statesman, anti-slavery campaigner, visited Edinburgh. He would have seen that statue - but was he aware of Dundas’ role in delaying abolition? Do residents or visitors of the city realise Dundas amendment to William Wilberforce’s act led to the enslavement of a furthe...

John Buchan can’t stop thinking about ham. Alfred Hitchcock is frightened of eggs. Charles Dickens is hungry all the time. In Broadstairs I eat British chips and wonder where the seventy eight steps are now.

I search for mesolithic footprints in the mudflats of the Severn Estuary, avoid a tsunami, then call upon Amy Adams, expert in alien linguistics, to decipher a chilling message.

Scrumping back to Paradise: apples, wassailing and the history of cider.

An octopus searches for the location of a battle that took place in August, 1485. Facts are disputed. Five hundred years later the body of King Richard the Third is discovered in a social services car park in Leicester. The octopus studies the menu in the battlefield visitors’ centre and notices an absence of Welsh dishes.

Westray and Papa Westray, far northern outposts of the British Isles, once a Viking colony, where the plaintive call of the curlew sounds over white beaches of the most extraordinary beauty.

Batman meets Gwen John in the home of my maternal ancestors. I eat some local cheese then experience megalithophobia with the supreme exponents of psych-sludge, Neolithic Axe Factory. (With thanks to the hallucinogenic imagination of Alexander Velky - @alexandervelky - and the nuclear guitar of Tim Mortimer.)

A pint of beer in Guy Fawke’s birthplace, then a walk along the York Walls leads to the discovery of a cafe in one of the barbicans and a rumination on war and peace, life and death and a piece of cake.

A waxed paper sauce pot paradise.

Bass Rock, an island off the east coast of Scotland, where gannets live within a stabbing distance of each other.

Apollo 8, colour TV and Chesterfield’s twisted spire.

A boat trip from Seahouses to the Farne Islands escorted by a squadron of puffins. Alfred Hitchcock makes a cameo appearance.

In search of Bobby Casey, County Clare’s fiddling superstar.

In which Peter Cushing whispers to his roses.

Do not expect to find the white hart.