Wednesday 2nd November 2011

Your wife's got beautiful skin, shame it's not round her body no more.
It just came away in my hands as I asked her up to dance

Castles are wonderful places. Wonderful places to visit and run around and photograph. They are even better when they have a tearoom or a cafe. But it has to be a modern one, the tea room, none of this original malarkey.

Castles were designed to protect. They were also a penis substitute, a bit like Ferraris and Lamborghinis are today.
The bigger your castle the bigger you thought your penis was. There were plenty of exceptions to this rule however as mostly the people that commissioned castle building were more likely to be rich than well endowed.

But castles were also designed to be dangerous places. You probably wouldn't be allowed to build one today, not with all our barmy Health & Safety rules and regulations. The drawbridge would have to have safety netting under it to stop anyone from falling in the moat and there would have to be steps up the outside for emergency access.

Just think of the problems with the oil heating room too. Some self-righteous official would have a heart attack just thinking about the risk assessments for a room that is designed to heat huge vats of oil in for the sole purpose of pouring it over other people.

I remember when I was a young lad I was nearly killed in a castle. There was a re-enactment going on and all these people were running around with swords and lances and bows & arrows and things. I choked on a segment of apple in the cafe and turned blue. I have never eaten anything remotely associated with apples of castles to this day.

Castles are invariably built on hills. There is a common misconception that this is to make

it harder to get to. This is total nonsense. The reason castles are built on hills is because of people like George Clarke and Sarah Beeny. They thought it would be a good idea to have a nice view and a bit of a lake and the only place to put a lake on top of a hill with a castle on it is either in the castle itself, in which case you run the risk of Trenchfoot, or around the perimeter of it, so they are responsible for moats as well.

Castles these days are, more often than not, in a state of dis-repair. This is not because no one has any money to do them up, oh no, it is because they have loads of money because the are not done up. Who wants to go and see a perfect, pristine castle? No one, except maybe a knight in shining armour and you don't get many of them for a pound these days either.

Tourists like crumbling castles and it is for this reason that so many of them are. Not to save money but to make money.

Sandal Castle in Wakefield has a hill but not much castle. The pikeys have pinched most of it. The hill on which the remains sit is the very one that was besieged by the grand old Duke of York. Honest, it is. I stayed on Duke of York Avenue, right below the castle. Number 190. Having been up to the top of the hill many times, I can assure you that when you are up you are up, and when you are down you're in Duke of York Avenue. (this paragraph copyright of Macduff)

In summary, most castles were built long ago and the majority are uninhabited.