Life's about experiences. These are mine.
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 …
I’d never been to Canterbury before last week and that’s a shame as it is a lovely place. Even better was that the sun came out after nearly three months with enough rain to make Russell Crowe consider building a boat. The heart of Canterbury is the cathedral. I made the mistake of assuming that …
I’ve decided that Birmingham gets a bad rap. This last weekend Helen and I spent the weekend there, ostensibly to visit our younger son who is studying at university there but also as a chance to spend a weekend away. And Birmingham is really not as bad as people make out. In fact it is …
Having lived and studied in Portsmouth for four years I have been down to the historic dockyard a number of times and seen the Mary Rose. While it has been undergoing its restoration over the last 30 years it has been housed in what was little more than a plastic hanger. That has now changed …