Category Archives: Travel notes

I suppose the American extended family we know most intimately here in Saffron Walden is the Doonesburies. Talking with my daughter the other day, we suddenly realised that there is a strange shortage of granny interaction there. I mean, Joanie … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I didn’t make this up. I really didn’t. But if you want an instance of the utter self-deluding lunacy of the Kansas legislature, this beats creationism into a cocked hat. The state is broke, of course, and the Democrats had … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I’m gong to Marburg tomorrow, for the rest of the week. I might have posted from there, but I plugged the thinkpad into the Church House switchboard a month or so back, and the inbuilt modem fried instantaneously and so … Continue reading → Continue reading →

OK, OK. I can’t get the cuttings blog working properly, and life’s too short to wrestle with CSS ona Saturday morning. So I will post a bunch of stuff from Conde Nast Traveller and Salon tomorrow. Continue reading →

The last quarrel I had with Anita we were sitting in pine needles by one of our favourite lakes. We were both safely married to other people by then, and chancing a reunion for all the tangled family: a picnic … Continue reading → Continue reading →

What you get when you click more was published in the Independent on Sunday as a travel article, on March 15th, 1992. It isn’t, really. Continue reading →

It turns out the whole country has been mapped, online, at an almost unbelievable level of detail. How detailed? Well, on some of these maps I could point out exactly where you must stand to catch a fish. There are … Continue reading → Continue reading →

These pictures bring back a whole lost world. If you don’t have broadband, don’t bother. I’ve never heard of any of these bands myself, but I have no difficulty believing them. Every weekend, on the open-air grounds in summer known … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Somewhere in Denmark is a man who has gone insane this winter. I have had my mouse pointer chased across web pages by all sorts of things, but never before by grayling swimming through the air. Continue reading →

A square, pale room, seven stories up. From the generous windows, we could see the bow-fronted stucco villas of Headington, with gardens for childhood. In the room were four old women and four beds. One sat completely silent and still, … Continue reading → Continue reading →