Category: Travel

Big Bang Theory

I enjoyed sounding the gong to announce meals at Barmeath in my childhood. Under my grandmother’s instruction my technique improved from loud bashing (think Top Cat summoning the gang) to a subtler, gradually increasing crescendo, beating around the edge of the gong, culminating in a final stroke, fortissimo, to the centre.

A Marshal of France

The Gers countryside rolls attractively, when seen from a car. On foot the hills seem steeper and it took two hours to walk to Lectoure.

La Vie Rurale

  Gers is a department in the south west of France. It is musketeer country, created from part of the provinces of Gascony and Guyenne around the time of the French Revolution in 1790. The fourth musketeer, d’Artagnan was Gersois.

An Admiral of the Blue

Bradford on Avon to Bath, along the K&A canal, is not far – maybe ten miles. Almost immediately on the outskirts of Bradford is a 14th century tithe barn, so over-restored that it looks like a (successful) stockbroker’s second home. I have read that the interior is worth seeing but it was not open early… Continue reading An Admiral of the Blue

Burton in Bradford on Avon

The overuse of superlatives is jolly annoying. So after praising the Norman church at Devizes to the skies I’m embarrassed to tell you that Bradford on Avon has a better one.

Roger le Poer, Pumping and Pele

Roger le Poer, better known maybe as Roger of Salisbury, is a Norman who rose from being a priest in a small chapel near Caen to being Bishop of Salisbury, Lord Chancellor and Lord Keeper of England in the reign of Henry I. This is (maybe) his effigy in Salisbury Cathedral.

A Transatlantic Journey

Gap year commissions in the army have changed over the past forty years. Now you have an eight week course at Sandhurst, serve for almost a year and get paid £18,000 a year. When I did one in 1973 it was a bit different.

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Belize Revisited

“I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry” (As You Like It) and she was when we met in a bar near Embankment station.

Limestone Way, Day Three

Staying in pubs, the customer expects a comfy bed, wi-fi, an en suite bathroom with a shower and “products” – that’s little plastic capsules all full of the same grunge labelled shampoo, conditioner, and shower gel; most places, more or less, deliver.