Stonehenge

Stonehenge has always fascinated me. I first visited it when I was twelve years old. In those days it was possible to wander amongst the stones and, shock-horror, actually touch them. People used to picnic inside the stone circle and at night, according to the News of the World, less innocent activities took place.

It's very different today; Stonehenge now has a Visitor Centre run by English Heritage. It is all very tasteful and controlled and unsatisfactory. There is a chain-link fence separating the nearby road from the site, so the only way to get reasonably close to the stones is to pay £3.75 to a bored teenager in a green shed and pass through a turnstile that leads to a tunnel under the road. Inside the tunnel there is a huge collection of what look like mobile phones, decorated in flags of the world. My husband rummaged through them and eventually found the Union Jack. He pressed ‘play' and a gentleman with the type of English tea-planter accent rarely heard today, started to bark information about Stonehenge through a background noise of feedback whine and static.

We passed by a mural painted on the walls of the tunnel that depicted primitive man dragging the stones across the plains. I hate to be muralist, but quite honestly this painting looked as though primitive man himself had dipped a stick into various substances – swamp water, sheep dung, animal blood – and daubed it, er… primitively, on to the wall. We emerged to find the stones bathed in sunlight and casting shadows on the spongy bright green grass surrounding them.

The stones were encircled by a low rope and I had an irresistible urge to jump over this symbolic barrier and run towards the circle. But, not wishing to be dragged away by English Heritage guards in front of an international audience with cameras, I resisted the urge and continued to shuffle along behind the other tourists. We switched the tea planter off toot-sweet. He was mostly incomprehensible but the little we did hear sounded as though Barbara Cartland and Shakespeare had collaborated on his script. No wonder the Americans looked baffled.

We made slow progress. Every few steps we had to stop so as not to spoil somebody's photo or video opportunity. I rarely take a camera anywhere with me now. To me, a camera is just one more damned thing to lose, or have stolen. I know that in my old age I'll regret not being able to turn the pages of a photo album and conjure up those magic moments in my life. But I'm banking on still having a memory. If I close my eyes I can still see those magnificent stones (though I have to admit that it was only last week).

We went back down the tunnel and walked past the gift shop. My husband clutched at my arm. ‘Aren't you well?’ he said. ‘You've passed the gift shop.’ I looked in the window and saw a heap of small teddy bears dressed in scraps of mock leopard skin, representing primitive man, I presume. In another window were other bears wearing English Heritage sweaters complete with the yellow badge. There should be a society for the protection of teddy bears. They are grossly exploited by the tourist industry. They have to work in shocking conditions with the stink of potpourri in their woollen nostrils and the sound of electronic cash tills ringing in their ears.

I followed my husband reluctantly into the shop. He was in a generous mood. ‘Do you want a pair of Stonehenge earrings?’ he asked solicitously. I smiled a wintry smile and refused his kind offer. There were long queues at the tills. A Japanese woman was obviously intending to lug five jars of Olde English jam back to Japan. A fat American man had bought a giant Stonehenge lollipop, which he looked at greedily and would probably scoff in his hotel room later that night. I left the shop empty handed, which I considered to be a milestone in my personal development. My goal in life is to buy only what I need. Unfortunately I still need rather a lot.

Later we sat on a picnic bench overlooking a fenced-off field full of sheep. One sheep headed off into the distance and the others followed – apart from one which stuck its head through the fence. Sheep are famously stupid, but this one looked like an imbecile and was incredibly ugly. But before you could say Little Bo Peep the woolly imbecile was surrounded by a phalanx of tourists videoing and photographing its ugly mug. I swear that sheep thought it was Princess Diana. It was clearly addicted to fame, because it wasn't until the tourists got back into their coaches that it dragged itself away from the fence and went to join the other sheep at the far end of the field.