Diane was keen to see all that Cheddar had to offer, and luckily we had a spare 15 minutes so I was able to comply. Ha ha, I am funny. In reality there is enough to do in Cheddar to keep you occupied for almost an entire day. Please go on holiday there if you get the chance.
I was able to show her the haunts of my youth and I pointed out the place where I had helped clean out the river as a young teenager. I remembered picking up a rubber johnny (presumably used) as it drifted past me and holding it up to the other volunteers, who all recoiled in horror. But a bit like my viewing of Dave Allen a few years earlier, although I knew it was something rude I didn't quite know what it was. Or at least hadn't made the mental leap to understand that a prophylactic discarded in the river had probably been soiled in some way. Luckily the dirt of the River Yeo (or whatever river it is that runs through the gorge) will have killed anything worse that might once have lurked there.
We also went round the caves -a new snazzy hand held voice guide for Gough's, but the exact same monotonous, repeated recordings in Cox's that were in use in 1985 when I worked there. As there weren't many people around this left Gough's cave eerily quiet (I was used to it being filled with the sound of commentaries, even when empty). Diane asked me if I'd ever been tempted to stay in there overnight, maybe with some friends for a party involving sex and drugs. But luckily (given that I didn't know what a condom was really for) I was too boring and goody goody at the time to abuse my position in this way. Though I can see her point now and wish I'd done that. Like I wish that I had danced in the rain. I did know a few good hidey holes in Gough's Cave where we could probably have secreted ourselves til closing time, but Diane needed to get back to London for work. Who was the square one now?
The museum has gone way up market though and has some very impressive and slightly scary displays about cannabalism, including a gigantic rotating skull with one of its eyes pulled out and tufts of hair on its top, which must leave quite a few kids having nightmares for weeks. Well done Cheddar Caves.
We even climbed Jacob's Ladder, which consists of a set of 250ish steps up the hillside, to a look-out tower (now satisfying called Pavey's Look-out Tower, named after the eccentric Cheddar resident who tried to blast his own cave using dynamite who I've always wanted to write a film about). The view is almost worth the exertion.
In an attempt to make this arduous and unpleasant hardship seem like something you might want to do on holiday, the Cheddar Caves team have added a series of signs which explain how the world has changed over the last 250 million years. Taking each step as a million years, it is only in the last ten steps of the journey that apes have existed on this planet and modern man's time here would take up merely the thickness of a sheet of paper on the top step. By the time you're there though, you rather wish that the Biblical scholars had got it right, so that your journey would have only been the equivalent of climbing on to a piece of paper. Alas that's not the case.
I also revealed one of my other youthful crimes as we ascended the ladder. In the old days you could pay for admission to each attraction separately and so sometimes if you were on the admission booth of Jacob's Ladder someone would come and pay the 50p to ascend (rather than having purchased one of the tickets to see all attractions). What I would do in these cases is just take the 50p and wave the person through without giving them their ticket. In this way I was able to make upwards of 50p a week on top of my wages (on the rare occasions that I was actually working in this booth). This scam was rather put in the shade by one of the managers of the caves, who rumour says was later sacked for her duplicity. She would relieve the ticket sales staff in Gough's cave for the lunch hour, but apparently she had a roll of old tickets from a few years ago that she secretly took in with her and sold to the punters, which meant she could pocket the fiver or so she was taking from each of them as these tickets were not in the records.
A better and more lucrative scam perhaps, but she got caught, whereas no-one knows about my crime to this day. Ha ha ha. Oh...ooops.
