Billy Connolly was on TV the other night. TV1 are playing a rerun of his NZ tour and the other night he went to Waitomo Caves. I know where it is, I've driven past it but I never went there. Shame, cos it looked really cool all dark and weird under the earth. Sort of womb-like and tomb-like all at the same time.



Of course, I might not find it so interesting if the lights went off, me being scared of the dark and all that.

There is an author called Jean Auel wrote a whole series of books about the Clan of the Cave Bear and all those paleolithic rock dwellers that was quite good, well for the first 2 or 3 books. After that you get a bit sick of all the Jondalar-screwing-Ayla stuff and start to wonder whether the lady author has a friend called Bob. If she did, she would be well advised to visit him more often, cos gratuitous explicit cave-sex scenes inserted repeatedly in a fictional setting gets pretty fucking boring after the first 20 or 30 times. I mean, they don't even get kinky.

Now, these caves are not boring. People lived (and screwed) in them over 15,000 years ago. This one goes back over 30,000 years but was only discovered in 1994.

So caves are cool and you don't have to go to France the next time you feel like a spelunk. You can go to Waitomo instead. And you can see the glow worms.

Even Billy Connolly does.