Cathy was so obsessed with Led Zeppelin she flew to Belfast, then took a train to Giant's Causeway just so she could lie down in the spot featured on the cover of Zeppelin's album 'Houses of the Holy'. We visit singer Robert Plant's old home and I consider his fascination with the word 'baby' and Lord of the Rings.

In which I explain how the M4 is a time machine: drive east from Swansea and you travel from a Viking settlement to Londinium, a great city of Rome.

Bram Stoker passes through a whalebone arch into a time shift, buys an ice cream from a van owned by Stranglers' drummer Jet Black. Sir Henry Irving morphs into Christopher Lee. Monkey Puzzle Trees do something even more astonishing.

Diane Perry became a Buddhist nun spending twelve years meditating in a cave in the Himalayas. Is that any way to live?

Glastonbury is the capital of These Weird Isles. Forget the Festival, wander into town. It is the epicentre of the age old longing for some half hidden Celtic twilight, a nostalgia for a time that never was, a home of sorcerers, eccentrics, tarot readers and crystal magic. If towns are rock bands, Glastonbury is Hawkwind.

The Potteries was once the centre of the ceramics industry in Britain. But the industry in this country was slow to produce porcelain, the secret of which was first discovered in Dresden by an incarcerated alchemist and trickster.

Rambling through a churchyard in Amersham to see the grave of Arthur Machen I discover the resting place of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in the UK. A small amount of digging reveals the prosecution was led by a Buddhist, the same barrister who represented the Crown in the trials of Derek Bentley and also of Timothy Evans, both hanged, and both later declared innocent and whose unfortunate lives were told in major films: 'Let Him Have It' and '10, Rillington Place'.

Suffolk is a county of clouds, and on the coast, in a holiday chalet in Kessingland, we struggle to remember codes, and are not easily calmed by the decor.

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These Weird Isles - the second of two podcasts in which I explore Japan - islands as weird as the UK . I discover a space at the centre of the Japanese belief system and reflect on how the Japanese must perceive the British.

The first of a two part interlude - Those Weird Isles: Japan. Next time - Kyoto.