I can’t really understand why anyone would do that. It is even stranger as the individual in question was not a paper candidate who unexpectedly won – she was a sitting councillor going for re-election in a safe seat. I have heard that her attendance before the election was appalling: just the bare minimum to avoid disqualification, which didn’t stop her getting re-selected and re-elected but indicates a certain lack of enthusiasm for the job. But why not just stand down instead of all this fuss?

The plan was to go across and help, then pop down the road to visit Jayne’s parents but it turned out they were going to be away, so we ended up going to visit Penshurst instead.

I don’t know if Labour will stand any chance of winning the by-election in Pantiles & St Marks war, thus increasing the number of Labour councillors to one, but it was good to be out somewhere different for a change. I didn’t get the feeling that the 4-storey houses I was delivering leaflets to were necessarily our heartland, but you never know.

After all that we went across to Penshurst, purely to visit the Quaintways tea rooms. The last couple of times we went they had been closed and I remembered it providing fantastic cream teas. Today it was open and we had a slightly surreal ordering process.

Jayne and I asked for a cream tea and we were told that they don’t do it any more, however they could do us home-made scones with butter, jam and clotted cream and a pot of tea. (?)

I have probably said it before, and I will certainly say it again, but I think that the traditional cream tea should be Britain’s distinctive contribution to world cuisine and not roast beef. Its brilliant!

While we were in Tunbridge Wells we saw cyclists turning up at churches there, stay for a couple of minutes and set off again. I thought it was a bit strange. When we got to Penshurst and loked around the church there was a lady sitting outside in a folding chair and the bench in the porch was loaded with water containers and orange squash. Other churches we passed had a tables and chairs outside.

It turned out that there was a charity bike ride/walk going on in aid of Kent churches. The idea was to walk or cycle and visit as many churches in Kent as possible. What a neat idea.

The showers and toilets were quite civilised and there was even a bath. We only have a shower at home so I enjoyed the novelty of lounging in a bath one evening. The shop was well-stocked and open all day every day, and a couple of local businesses came along with food vans and parked up near the play area in the evenings.

The fields are right on a cliff edge and there is a path going down to a private (stony) beach. You can cross the chine by a footbridge and go up to the cliffs opposite to join the coastal path and enjoy some excellent views. Not much good when its pissing down and blowing up a gale, but in normal circumstances this would be a great location.

The site itself is based on a farm and there is a herd of goats, a couple of pigs, some llamas, chickens, geese, turkeys, horses and a water buffalo all knocking around. The kids were always willing to go off to do the washing up as we supplied them them with plenty of leftover fruit, veg and bread to feed the animals afterwards.

We had expected to spend a lot of time lazing around the site and on the beach, but it was a bit chilly and damp for that so we went out a lot. The first day we went to Brading, where everyone thoroughly enjoyed the Wax Museum. I was a bit miffed that I left my camera back at the tent but didn’t let that ruin my day.

On Tuesday we went to Blackgang Chine. It has expanded quite a bit since I was last there (at least 30 years ago) and now has a roller coaster and water slide but there was plenty there I remembered – the dinosaur models, the whale skeleton, the lifeboat exhibition.

Its a strange place as it is still family-owned and has a bit more character than Thorpe Park, Chessington and similar places. It is more basic with fewer rides but more attractions, some of which are endearingly old-fashioned. The park is built on the edge of an eroding chine, but it has been expanding inland quite a bit.

The entry ticket allows you to go back once within 7 days so we kept that in reserve for a cheap day out later in the week.

Actually what we did was left the kids there for a couple of hours to exercise their independence on Saturday while we went off in search of a cream tea.

On Wednesday we went to Carisbrooke Castle, just a few minutes up the road. Not that anywhere is very far from anywhere else on the Island: it is not a huge place.

I like this castle. I still have the same attitude I had as a child and I’m always a bit disappointed when a castle turns out to be just a pile of stone with lots of pictures showing where the walls used to be, or when it is really just a slightly fortified stately home

Despite being 900 years old in parts, Carisbrooke has its walls intact so you can walk around them, and climb the 70+ stairs up to the keep. They also still keep donkeys to raise water from the well.

We visited just in time, as the wind started to pick up by the time we had gone all round the ramparts. When I got to the keep it did feel a bit precarious and I was glad to get down again. By the time we did all the indoors bits it really was getting gale force so we did it all in the right order, but it was a scary night back at the tent with the walls blowing inwards.

We stayed quite local on Thursday. I explored the local village a bit and went up on the cliffs and later on we took a walk on the beach and, despite the presence of a seal carcass washed up there, the kids went for a swim.

On Friday we went up to Yarmouth, watched the boats for a while, got ripped-off for breakfast at the Mariners Cafe (not bad, but very over-priced for what it was) and failed to visit the castle because it is closed on Fridays and Saturdays. Charlie was disappointed, but it didn’t look like much of a castle really.

After Yarmouth we went round to the Needles. This is described as a theme park but really its like a land-based pier. We had been looking forward to taking the chairlift down to the base of the cliffs but when we arrived it was closed due to high winds.

After we had done the tourist thing of filling up glass ornaments with coloured sands, the wind had dropped a bit and the ride started up again so we got to ride down the cliff. It was still a bit blowy, but not too bad.

On Saturday we started by going back to Brading to visit the roman villa at Charlie’s request. He is very interested in history. Jayne and Chrystal are as well, but Chas is a bit more obsessed. The villa is in a new building, only a few years old, and a remarkable bit of award-winning architecture. To be honest I found the new building more impressive than the villa it was built to contain. Like most roman villas its just a few mosaics, an indication of where the walls were and a lot of imagination.

Our national inclination with antiquities is to preserve them, but I sometimes wish we were more inclined to restore and renovate. Even cleaning and touching up the colour on the mosaics and replacing the missing bits would be a start. I would be fascinated to see a proper villa with walls and roofs, even if it was not all original. This approach works well on the HMS Victory but doesn’t get tried enough on buildings.

After the villa we dropped the kids off at Blackgang Chine and headed for Godshill village. Godshill is popular because it is pretty, although the popularity makes it less pretty as every other building is a tea room or shop, but I guess that is unavoidable. There are still a few ‘unspoilt’ villages on the island where you can look at thatched cottages and churches, but none of them has a model village like Godshill does.

The model village is a fairly accurate miniature of the real Godshill – as it was before it got taken over by commercialism. It is so accurate that the model village contains a model of the model village. And that model is accurate enough to contain its own model of the model village. I don’t know if it gets any more recursive than that as I didn’t take a magnifying glass with me.

After seeing all those tilt-shift photos on Flickr where photos of real places are made to look like models it was fun trying to take photos of a model to try and make it look like a real place. On the way back to the campsite we remembered to pick up the kids and enjoyed an evening playing cards while the wind and rain came back in force, trying not to think of how we would get the tent down in such weather.

When Sunday morning came it was calm and dry so we got everything together a lot more quickly than we expected, and got up to Ryde with loads of time to spare so we had a look in the town before going to the ferry terminal and had a breakfast twice as good as in Yarmouth and at half the price and still managed to get onto the ferry before the one we were booked on.

Quite a packed week, but we still didn’t see half of what is on the island and will have to return at some point in the future and hopefully with better weather, or in a cottage instead of a tent. The wind and rain did get us a bit down, but we kept telling ourselves that we were still more comfortable than a lot of people in Gloucester, Tewkesbury and other flooded areas.

After a much-needed Dorset cream tea at Studlands to help us recover from the damp of Kimmeridge Bay, we were going to go into Corfe Castle village to see the model village and let Charlie climb a few huge hills which he had his eye on since the last visit.

That was the idea anyway, but when I asked him if he wanted to show Chrystal the clifftop walk we took before they both decided they would rather do that instead, so we went into Swanage and dropped the pair of them off as close to the lookout point as we could and went off to Durlston Head to meet them there.

Its not a really long distance, but still it was a bit worrying waiting for them at the other end, not knowing how long they would take – expecting them to take a detour down the zig-zag path on the way – but it was important to them to do it on their own and feel a bit of independence.

While waiting, we had a look around the parkland and visitors centre and then a tea and biscuits in the Lookout Cafe while enjoying the view. When the sprogs turned up and had a drink themselves, we wandered down to the dolphin watching point but did not see any dolphins.

While everyone else climbed the path back to the car park I did a bit of bollard-hunting.

I know it sounds like a bit of a sad hobby, but I had read about how a lot of bollards from London ended up in Swanage when John Mowlem was involved in building works there. A notice at the Durlston Head visitors centre explained further that the ships taking purbeck stone up to London for building used to load up with old bollards, cannons, streetlamps and the like for ballast on the return journey. Wherever possible these were re-used rather than wasted and Swanage had a bit of a reputation as London-by-the-sea because of all the London cast-offs around the place, including a clock tower from the old London Bridge and a facade from an old London guild house used for the front of the town hall.

Many of the bollards still have the name of the London borough where they used to be, and I thought they would be fun to see. Most of the ones I found had ‘City of London’ on them but there were a few ‘St Martins’ and a couple of ‘Goodmans Fields Pavements’.

Before too long, even I was bored of bollards, and went to catch up with the others. Chrystal had decided that she wanted to walk back to Swanage. Charlie didn’t fancy it though. I offered to walk back with her and she said I would just hold her back – cheeky mare!

Despite some misgivings we agreed to let her walk back on her own and went down to Swanage to wait for her. As soon as we got there it started pouring and we worried a bit but then she turned up, having taken only 15 or 20 minutes for the whole journey.

She says that she wants to join the infantry when she is old enough, and going by what we have seen, I don’t think she will have any problems with the route marches. Even the map-reading will be no problem – she tells us that she knows how to work out the grid magnetic angle for doing map and compass work. We don’t even know what it means except that its something to do with magnetic North, true North and map North.

So that was it. We all had a good time. I might dislike camping, but I love the area and the chance to take loads of photos of scenery, tanks, castles and steam trains , the kids like nothing more than climbing rocks, exploring caves and scaring the life out of us, and Jayne loves living under canvas, eating in the open air and seeing the children happy.

After that we headed out to Kent. Yesterday I promised Jayne a cream tea and , in my opinion, the best cream tea to be had is in Quaintways tea shop in Penshurst, Kent, so thats where we headed.

After negotiating the dangerously tiny roads we reached Penshurst, and the first thing we saw was that the tea shop was closed! Apparently they are closed on Mondays, but for bank holidays they stay open and close on the Tuesday instead.

How was I to know?

We had a look around the village, including the church, churchyard, and a group of ancient buildings called Leicester Square, then went on to Penshurst Place. It is a long time since I visited Penshurst Place – at least ten years – and it has changed a lot.

Not the house itself which doesn’t even appear to have been dusted since my last visit, but the ‘visitor facilities’. You used to enter via a gate in the garden wall, paying at a small sentry box sort of affair, but now there is a large gift shop and ticket office a lot further along.

It seems like all the investment has been going into that, and upgrading the tea shop, and building a ‘venture playground’, rather than do anything to the building and its contents. The public areas of the house are distinctly shabby and threadbare, with huge cobwebs and dust everywhere.

There are some paintings which may be quite good, but they are very poorly hung – high up on the walls with lighting arranged to reflect on them so you can’t see them properly. Some looked suspiciously dark, as if they needed a good dose of restoration.

If anything, Penshurst Place suffers in the same way Arundel Castle does, from still being a family home in part. Only a part of the house is open to the public and the rest is still occupied by the Viscount De L’Isle or someone like that. As a result all the guide books over-emphasise the importance of the family and are written with the sort of toadying reverence you would expect. All of the guides are pensioners who are probably in awe of the local nobility.

Personally if I visit these places I am a lot more interested in the building itself than in whichever chinless wonders have lived in it over the years. With each new room I could feel the call to arms in the class war getting louder. The gardens are nice though.

But before going back through the gardens we had a cream tea in the tea rooms. It was nowhere near as good as the Quaintways tea shop! A proper English cream tea is a bit ritualistic. Maybe not as formal as the Japanese tea rituals, but even so the experience is not enhanced by self-service, pushing a tray along a counter and carrying it over to pick up all the sachets of sugar, cutlery etc. The journey home deserves a post all of its own…