Being a Croydon boy, it’s sometimes difficult to be proud of the place I was born and brought up, faced with the obvious jokes and the ugly post war buildings. For its faults, of which there are many, Croydon does have things to be proud of. For one, it isn’t… Continue reading
To some January is National Tea Month; to others every month is Tea Month. Tea was first drunk sometime before 1000 BC in Asia, and has become the world’s most popular beverage after water. It made it to Europe only with the voyages of Portugal’s Age of Discovery in the… Continue reading
January 9th 2013 sees the London Underground celebrating its 150th anniversary. Shortly after 1 pm on January 9th 1863 the inaugural train of the world’s first underground railway left Paddington station for the three and a quarter mile journey. Queen Victoria had just celebrated her silver jubilee, and Lord Palmerston… Continue reading
The first time I crossed the equator into the southern hemisphere in Africa (in 2009) I was heading to hospital. It was a four hour journey along Gabon’s Ogooué River on a speedboat with eight roaring outboard motors, about fifty other passengers, and small cockroaches wandering about the lifejacket beneath… Continue reading
Naming Christmas Two crewmen aboard the British ship Cygnet were the first recorded humans to step foot on Christmas Island in March 1688, though the uninhabited island had been first sighted back on Christmas day in 1643 by William Mynors. On 6th June 1688 it was claimed for the British… Continue reading
A man Perhaps the title should read ‘many men, multiple plans, finally a canal – in Panama’ (though it somewhat ruins the palindrome). All I knew of the Panama Canal was that it was a canal in Panama. I win no prizes for knowing that. A birthday gift of Graham… Continue reading
From my recent blogs you might think a horrible death is part and parcel of exploration. Not so. On occasion serious injury or circumcision will suffice, and sometimes just sometimes, you can get away with falling down an elephant pit containing 12 inch long spikes to be saved only by… Continue reading
Long before Richard Burton married Elizabeth Taylor, he (or at least a namesake) was a Victorian explorer fluent in 29 languages. Being barely fluent in one makes me inordinately jealous of the man’s skills, as well as what he termed his “wanderings”. Burton’s wanderings took him through Asia, the Middle… Continue reading
Antoine de Saint-Exupery landed on the sands of Cape Juby in 1926, having leapfrogged his biplane along the North-west African coast from Toulouse in the south of France. I reached the same sands, a rubbish-strewn beach of occasional low dunes, 85 years later. Cape Juby had become Tarfaya, and I… Continue reading
Darwin’s nose It was his nose that led Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands on the second voyage of HMS Beagle, a survey ship captained by Robert FitzRoy. FitzRoy was a well-respected naval officer with a surname to match – George V considered it for the British royal family when… Continue reading
