SugarCube's Insomniac Asylum

If you live in England it happens all the time. The whole country is thick with history.

Just down the road from my home town, Coventry, lies Stratford-on-Avon, birthplace of William Shakespeare. I have been inside (and outside) his house, I have stood in his bedroom and bumped my head on the low beams of the ceiling, I have walked the same warped and uneven floor that he walked.

But my real interest is in things even older than that. I have been to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and gazed at the tiny exquisiteness of Alfred's Jewel, the link between us in the modern world and the founder of the English nation. If I may coin a phrase, it stirs the roots of my being.