Touring England in the Olden Days

Two of our actors were at the railway station in Totnes, Devon, where they had been working, trying to get to Bath for the next day's work.

We have a huge number of days' work going on around the country at the moment - about 350 days of it - and one of my jobs is to work out which actors do which days.

Luckily, when I was a child I had a board game called Touring England. Each player picked a number of cards from a pile - ten, I think - and each card had the name of a town on it. Then, setting off from your home town, you had to work out the best way to visit each town and then come back home. You had to throw a dice and moved your counter around the map of England, dot by dot, until you had completed the circuit and the first one back won.

Brilliantly simple, it was. "An entirely new and up-to-date Map Game" it said on the cover. "Requiring skill and judgment" and, further, "EXCITING INTERESTING EDUCATIVE"

Oh, all right then, I'll show you if you promise not to make any comments about how old it looks.

Enough! I said NO comments, thank you! Just remember I was Very Small Indeed when I used to play this, okay?

Anyway, I loved it. Here's what the board looked like:

All right, I know there aren't any motorways. They hadn't been built yet, okay? And there's another tiny flaw: look at this:

You see that bit that sticks out on the left in the middle? That's a country known as WALES which has somehow entirely been omitted from the title of the game. As you will see if you look back at the cover - no, don't make any more pithy comments about how old it looks whilst you're doing it, thank you - the title should surely be "TOURING ENGLAND AND WALES".

But EDUCATIVE it was. Because it taught me where all the towns are. And then, years later, when I needed to plan some work in lots of different towns for actors, I could still remember where they were without having to look at a nasty modern map with lots more clutter on, and this was very helpful.

So, back to the two actors who were, you may remember, trying to get from Totnes, where they had been working, to Bath, where they were about to work. Which should have been quite easy, according to Touring England, with both those places being in the South-West and all.

They rang the bed-and-breakfast that they were booked into, to say they'd be arriving at about half past eight.

"Hmm, said B and B Man grumpily, "our check-in desk closes at eight o'clock."

Our actor - let us call him Julian, for that is indeed his name - managed to sweet-talk Mr Grumpy - that isn't his name but if I knew it I would tell you - into letting them check in at half-past eight, though he made it clear that this was way beyond the call of duty.

At this point Julian noticed that the other actor, whom we shall call Keir, because that is his name, was looking at him somewhat anxiously.

"Our train's just been cancelled," whispered Keir. "Don't tell him."

They arrived about nine, and after a bit of a struggle they did manage to gain admission to the bed and breakfast.

"What time would you like breakfast?" asked Mr Grumpy.

"Well, we need to leave here at eight, so half-past seven would be good."

"HALF PAST SEVEN? Oh, that's far too early to have a cooked breakfast. I'll have to leave you something cold."

In the bed and breakfast was a little notice pointing out that guests who were staying more than one night are not permitted to enter the premises between the hours of ten in the morning and five in the afternoon.

Ah, Britain! "The-Customer-is-Always-Wrong" land of stale sandwiches, which I remember so vividly from my childhood too. Some things never change.