Reaching the far north of Italy should be the end of my current journey. Fighting in Italy came to an end on 2nd May 1945, a week before the war in Europe finally ended on 8th May. My great uncle celebrated Victory in Europe Day with his Royal Engineer unit … Continue reading
The cotton tree (nothing to do with cotton I don’t think but it is at least a tree) seems to like the sort of sandy ground that exists between Sierra Leone’s beaches and its loamy earth and on its busy city centre roundabouts. The cotton tree in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s … Continue reading
As I headed for the Algeria-Tunisia frontier my path began to diverge from that of my great uncle more than the 75 years that separated our two journeys. A number of reasons for this existed, some more prosaic than others, for the most part coming down to the practicalities of … Continue reading
I would imagine my great uncle had mixed feelings over leaving Algeria for Tunisia to the east, in an ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ sort of a way, even if his last recorded whereabouts in the country was in a small town called Duvivier (modern-day Bouchegouf) … Continue reading
Leaving a place I’ve come to know and call home always fills me with feelings of anxiety. Yet, in leaving my rented flat in Cambridge after three years I am doing precisely that, and leaving behind another small group of good friends. Standing on the gravel outside the flat’s patio … Continue reading
A few months ago when I was walking from the barren northernmost point of the Isle of Man at the Point of Ayre back towards some sort of civilisation along the lonely cold beaches, with only unrecognised seabirds and the very real risk of rock falls to keep me company … Continue reading
Living in Cambridge has its advantages: friendly Nobel Prize winners, a near complete absence of hills, and countryside almost everywhere. So it doesn’t take long on my bike to end up in a small village of thatched cottages surrounded by fields where it will forever remain circa 1953, only with … Continue reading
The Isle of Man may not be the most exotic place to begin an adventure, but it has its advantages. It is close by, friendly in an I’m-not-too-keen-on-strangers sort of a way, and spectacularly beautiful. It is the sort of beauty that really doesn’t come out in photographs and which … Continue reading
When everything is open to you: opening hours, displays, shelving even, where do you start? Not with a rhetorical question, according to one of my old English teachers. The name of Wigtown may not trip off the tongue in the same way as Hay-on-Wye, but since 1997 the former county … Continue reading
I had wanted to travel using only a vintage-era guidebook for some time. A truly old, and not just out of date, guide was surprisingly difficult to find, but eventually I managed to source one. I would be heading across the North Sea to travel the length of Scandinavia, to … Continue reading