Last day of May - and here in England it is shockingly cold. Day after day the wind blows and the sun is a fitful visitor. Sarah and I went to Kirby Lonsdale in Cumbria last Friday night: an unexpectedly appealing small town, full of cobbled alleyways glimpsed from the streets, ancientness everywhere, and the people who have taken over the Sun Inn have revamped it so that while it remains a good pub, buzzy and friendly, it has also become a terrific restaurant, and very reasonably priced. We stayed there instead of in Sedbergh, where we had a function to attend next morning: a town with no decent pub or place to eat whatever. Weird how some places are just hopeless at hospitality and life and others, no bigger, do it well. It's the same in rural Georgia (where I've been researching in the footsteps of Blind Willie McTell, who was born near the small town of Thomson). Some little places nestled in the rolling hills have a downtown that has revived and has evening life; other places that look the same size on the map have rolled over and died, leaving nothing except out on their strip-city fringes, where the fast-food chains and dull obesity rule. The weather is better in Georgia than Cumbria though.