Weston-super-Mare

No-one knew where the Wetherspoons pub was.

I tried the assistant in the Library on the Boulevard, just a few hundred yards from the seafront and town center. No point, even after she'd tried searching on the internet for some time (an elementary task, surely? - Wetherspoons website and then their list of pubs somewhere in the site?).

I asked an old man, walking towards the town centre.

'Sorry, I'm just visiting.' At least he directed me back to the town centre, all delivered with a nice, friendly smile.

Anyway, in the end I rang my brother, J, who works for the town council, and we agreed to meet for lunch at 12.30pm. The pub is called the Dragon Inn and, like many of their places (the one in Barnet, the Cerdic in Chard and the Perkin Warbeck in Taunton) it is a long, narrow affair, all decorated in their customary dark, wooden veneer style interior with a few bookshelves here and there. I've just tried searched the Internet to find out and - within about 15 seconds - it is at 15 Meadow Street.

Fine, really, except that this one was thick with smoke and full of even more small groups of hardcore, daytime drinkers than normal. In Wetherspoons pubs, in the daytime, because their prices are low, you always see people like this, many pissed-up by 1 in the afternoon. They are always middle-aged men, shabbily dressed, though sometimes joined by the odd drunken woman, and they always speak too loudly (almost shouting). I blame it on the excellent range of real ales in Wetherspoons: Spitfire £1.59 and Burton's £1.39.

That was at lunch time, after driving J to Weston-super-Mare in the morning and then, as usual for me, deciding to hang around a while and explore a town that I had never seen before (only very briefly). What else do you do when you've nothing to do anyway?

I drove out to Uphill Downs, in the south of the town, a fine suburb with large Victorian mansions along the way before settling down to bungalows and other retirement-style dwellings. Then a brief treck up the hill to the old church, a disappointing view from graveyard at the top, and a decision to get back to Weston town centre as soon as possible. I had wanted to walk out onto the peninsula at Worlebury, but couldn't work out how to get there.

The Library, on Boulevard, is as good as any other town library I have entered in England. It reminds me of Hove Library, a Victorian red-brick building - not ideal for these modern times - but adapted to the modern age. It's potentially draughty but not today, even though it's very cold outside. They have a few posters of a new Campus Library but there's no information on where it is.

At the entrance there is a fine selection of secondhand books, all for 40p, so I picked up Dinah Lampitt's The King's Woman. I doubt if I'll ever read it and really it's just because my mum says she used to know the author on the train down to Tunbridge Wells, from Charing Cross, back in the 1970s. On the jacket it says the author lives in Mayfield so she certainly would've used the Hastings line.

The library has a display on the Holocaust - something I am becoming more and more sceptical about - and I pick up one of their books, after a brief look at the Lipstadt book on Holocaust denial. I spend about forty minutes reading the Diary of Anne Frank, a well-spent forty minutes.

It's always funny how when you read something that really captures your imagination - a book, a newspaper, the Internet, whatever - the time just flies by and you wish the library would stay open forever.

Anne Frank's diary is not the greatest book ever - a sort of early 'blog', before the genre or term was ever invented - but it is very poignant, especially when you know the outcome. Actually, to read the last ever entry is sad and then the appendix explains how she landed up in Auschwitz and then Belsen before finally succumbing to typhoid. What a dreadful, terrible and tragic story. She was only 15 when she died.

Also, a fantastic copy of Desktop Publishing by Design, the book I used to take on loan from Exeter Central Library several years ago until it vanished, out of print and sold off by the library. At last I am re-united with this masterpiece of DTP and book design; maybe one day I'll even go through it on Quark Xpress.

I found this book in the Oxfam shop - they have two in Weston-super-Mare, one a dedicated bookshop - and got it for £2; excellent.

I went back to the Dragon Inn, at 3pm, briefly, and found the crowd had thinned out; now, at the entrance end, there were about six men just like me, alone, savouring a pint and a cigarette, all looking lost deep in thought. All were middle-aged. We were all sat there - me with a half of bitter - facing out towards the street, all looking out of the window as if waiting for someone or something to happen. I think we all knew nothing ever would happen.

After meeting J in the loud, brash and ex-bank pub known as Barcode, we drive back to Glastonbury in the ever-reliable Renault 19. This pub, Barcode, has very loud dance/techo music playing, even at 5pm on a Wednesday evening; imagine what it must be like at the weekend. Weston-super-Mare evidently is a party town, awash with so many pubs among its small streets and big squares that you could accommodate one hundred 18-30 coaches easily.

We drove through some fine villages that deserved exploration in their own right: Wedmore (the home of King Alfred for a while and the place where he agree peace with the Danish) and Bleadon and Meare. Axbridge, too, which has some fine Elizabethan timber houses.

Then, at about 7.30pm, I return to Exeter on the A303 (but this time not stopping at Cartgate roundabout services). I know the roundabouts by heart now: Podimore, Cartgate, Hayes End, etc. I try to look out for the remains of the old Taunton-Chard canal near Ilminster but it is too dark, though I know the new road passes over its remains.