Life's about experiences. These are mine.
The festival doesn’t really get going until about lunchtime so we filled the morning with, firstly, a trip to The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to see the Roy Litchenstein exhibit. They also had an exhibit of one of my other favourite artists, MC Escher, but we had seen the same one when we …
The Edinburgh festival has been on my bucket list for years and given that this year it also coincides with a “significant” birthday (all birthdays are significant but this one ends in a zero) we thought that we would celebrate by making the trip. Like every holiday we take we plan it within an inch …
We had decided to spend the day in Bath and given that it is easy to get to from Reading we elected to do so by train. It is always cheaper to buy train tickets in advance and as we also had a railcard it made it reasonably cheap too. When we picked up the …
It’s been about 35 years since I last went to the horse races. On that occasion it was Ripon and I was too young to bet (well, directly anyway. I do seem to remember bets being made by proxy). However, I was given a pair of tickets to go to Newbury for last night’s meet …
It was last year, I think, that I first saw London Zoo advertised and thought that it sounded like an interesting idea – to open up the zoo in the evening over a few weeks in the summer and to lay on other events and food too. Tickets are cheaper in advance but, of course, …
Having read in the National Geographic that the drive from Hay to Abergavenny was a “castle-dotted route” that “brims with vistas” it sounded too good to be true. However, there are two possible routes and no clues were given to help us pick the right one. Given that one route was an A road we …
Some years ago the utility room in our house was full of shelves overflowing with books. Then along came the all powerful triumvirate of kids, kitchen and Kindle and all the books went (along with all my LPs). Over the years there has been a pang of regret for the loss of both books and …
Despite stopping overnight close to the “classic” Severn Bridge we elected to enter Wales further North thereby avoiding the £6.50 toll, money that clearly isn’t spent on repairing the road surface on the crossing. This was a much more pleasant way to get to Hay, our ultimate stopping point, than a blast along the M4. …
“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” Well, they built a bloody great big wall running from the River Tyne to the Solway Firth, a total of 70 miles, and over the weekend …
Fresh from an exploration of a hidden London gem on Saturday we visited somewhere that has been hiding in plain sight pretty much all my adult life. For four years I went to Portsmouth University (or Polytechnic as it was then) and twenty odd years later my son did the same. In the intervening years …