No trip to Bergen would be complete without a stroll among Bryggen's 18th-century wooden waterfront buildings, which once served triple duty as merchants' homes, offices and warehouses, but which today house pubs, restaurants, crafts shops, and at least one aromatherapist.
The area is handy for the Oval and full of the stone houses, pubs and churches of the 19th-century Anglo ascendancy.
If its variegated houses, pubs, accommodation for occasional surgeon-barbers and dentists and for all I know even brothels, do not enchant you, then it can't be the sort of perfect sunlit day I had there on Monday.
So here we were on a sunny afternoon in Southend-on-Sea, an hour's rail ride east of London, walking toward Roots Hall, a scruffy old soccer ground that seemed to sprout like a tree fungus out of the row houses, pubs and fish-and-chips joints that surrounded it.
It can also give venues like concert halls and stadiums a way to provide patrons with in-house pubs, as an added value thing to help bring them in the door.
