Life's about experiences. These are mine.
We have a busy year of travelling planned for 2017 which started with a trip to York last weekend to meet some friends. As usual we got the train up from Reading arriving late Friday afternoon to a decidedly chilly platform. As it turned out that was to be the high point as far as …
When I told people that I was going to take a tour around the Reading Prison the general question was “why?” My response is that other than Porridge and on news reports I haven’t been into a prison – not having the pleasure of being at Her Majesty’s pleasure and all that! It’s just not …
It can’t be a coincidence that on both the occasions I have visited Manchester a fight has broken out. I suppose some might see me as the catalyst but in both cases I was an innocent bystander. We had chosen a weekend in Manchester solely because it is equidistant between the homes of ourselves in …
Like many people I have a bucket list of things that I want to do and this week I managed to tick another one off the list with a visit to the Chelsea Flower Show. I’m sure that if I could go back to my younger self and tell me that one day I’d have …
I don’t think that there is any landscape that isn’t improved by a dusting of snow and when it is already a great vista the snow makes it magical (until it melts and becomes a slushy mess obviously!). This last weekend we were with friends in Northumberland and the snow allowed for some great landscape …
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 …
“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 …
Back in August I managed to get up to London to see the Poppies in the Moat installation at the Tower of London and thought that it was incredible. Then Helen came home from work saying that others had volunteered to plant the poppies and that we should too, so we applied. Our first choice …
