Day 2 back on Wharram Percy and I’m noticing things that weren’t there last year, or possibly yesterday. The shower pump goes “Kevin! Kevin! Kevin!” until it runs out of water, like the head of Orpheus floating down the river Hebrus. Also, one of the walls in the dining room/guest bedroom has a series of knotmarks in the wood that make a little repeating mural of small nervous dogs barking “No, YOU shut up!” at each other.

The Trent & Mersey is our first narrow canal, with single-boatwidth locks and bridges amusingly designed to be narrower than your vessel and lower than your head. Andrew was primed for some hilarity this morning and handed me the tiller for some crash-bang-wallop slapstick with the local canal architecture while he and Paula pretended their tears of mirth were just fear for their insurance.

We’re at the unconvincingly-named Alrewas, which is obviously an anagram rather than a real Staffordshire placename, but guidebooks and websites have been systematically edited to fake-derive it from the Old English for “damp place with an Old English monosyllable-load of alders”. It’s a strange mixture of heritage chic and Privet Drive. On a Sunday afternoon it’s completely still and empty, as if you just missed a John Wyndham novel. Andrew’s guide instructed us to keep our eyes peeled for a hilarious misspelling of Coronation Square, which four passes with two pairs of eyes on each failed to find, unless the hilarious misspelling was “Post Office Road”.

As you’ll have seen from Andrew’s preceding photo-essay, Alrewas’ big destination is the National Memorial Arboretum, a former gravel works turned into a gigantic collection of war memorials. A fascinating and unsettling theme park of mass bereavement encoded in overthought public art and arboriculture, it’s a huge open-air one-stop pilgrimage site for all the hundreds of regiment-specific or institutionally branded remembrance organisations from Adjutant General’s Corps to Yorkshire Regiment, with a few surprise guests like the Spiritualists’ National Union, The Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity, and Cardiac Risk in the Young. As well as a mammoth metadirectory of all the ghastly international horrors British service personnel have found themselves slaughtered in since the Boer War, there are memorials to 9/11 (a miniature Twin Towers) and victims of overseas terrorism, and one of the most powerful showpieces is the Shot at Dawn memorial to soldiers executed by their own in WW1 for various offences deemed to demonstrate lack of commitment that would nowadays be recognised as combat trauma and PTSD. John Major, the Prime Minister who approved the NMA in the nineties, was dead against the campaign for a mass pardon, but campaigners got their monument in when the NMA opened in 2001 and the pardon duly arrived five years later under the Blair government that had ousted Major’s.

To get to the NMA on foot, which to judge from the packed carpark doesn’t seem to be a thing that is done, involves a dash across two carriageways and a sliproad of the A35 using a pedestrian crossing marked by faint russet stains of past attempts. By the time we got there we were footsore and sun-scorched enough to settle for a sit-down tour of the main highlights in a miniature train which trundled swiftly round the monuments with an audio commentary briskly demystifying the complex narratives and sensitive symbolism on either side of the tour in twenty words or less each. The cumulative effect was deeply unsettling; we wouldn’t have missed it (except Paula, who did, having presciently decided that fooling around with a boathook would be at least as much fun) but were rather relieved to put it behind us.