Life's about experiences. These are mine.
While many place still remain closed the National Trust has opened the grounds of a number of its properties. In order to limit numbers you have to go on to their website the Friday before and make a booking. Given that we are off this week we’d decided that it would be nice to go …
Sandwiched between the good weather and the shops reopening is our “holiday” week. Originally it was going to be spent at Centreparcs but that has been shoved out by 13 months due to the Covid situation. Our employers are keen that we use up some of our leave entitlement and so here we are on …
I started to write this post a couple of months ago and then ran out of steam as Covid started to take control – thankfully not to me but the country and wider world as a whole. I revisited the post again as next week we were supposed to be going on holiday and while …
God, who we all know is Alanis Morissette, is clearly not very happy with the inhabitants of planet Earth. Those hints about climate change were clearly too subtle for many so she decided that another forty days and forty nights of rain leading to flooding might clue some people up. When that didn’t have the …
Continue reading “Relative Strangers (and God). The Mill at Sonning, 14th March 2020”
It has become progressively busier over the three days that we have been in Seville partly, we belatedly discovered, becuase yesterday was a regional holiday, Día de Andalucía, when the locals celebrate what little independence they have been granted from Madrid. It seems this localisum is an international thing with smaller and smaller areas looking …
Continue reading “Seville 2020 – Day Three – Up the Giralda”
Seeing the queues outside the Real Alcazar yesterday we took the precaution of prebooking a slot for today. I’m glad that we did as it was busy both inside and out. Real Alcazar sounds like it should be a football team (at least I think so) in the same vein as Real Madrid and Real …
Continue reading “Seville 2020 – Day Two – The Third Best Football Team in Spain”
Over breakfast this morning Helen and I were debating the weighty topic of whether to risk going out without a coat this morning. Our weather apps concurred that it was only eight degrees outside. Eight degrees in the UK in February is enough to send me running for my coat along with my hat and …
Continue reading “Seville 2020 – Day One – When is Eight Degrees not Eight Degrees?”
A familiar response when I tell people that we are off on holiday is “again?” I am aware that we go away a reasonable amount and do plan our trips away a long time in advance but nevertheless it does always strike me as an odd response. This has come up a number of times …
Last last year I read Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants, the first novel in his Century trilogy. The book follows the fortunes of a number of families in the UK, US, Germany and Russia. One family comes from a mining community in South Wales and the story paints vivid picture of life down the mines. …
This has taken me longer to sort out this year than it did for 2018 but here, finally, for you delectation is my 2019 in numbers. Once again these figures have been culled from a number of sources including Exist, last.fm, Audible, Swarm and a couple of spreadsheets that I keep. Healthily I managed 124,000 …