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Lifted Spirits
Things are definitely looking better. The UK’s vaccination programme is racing ahead impressively quickly, and last Monday the Government released the so-called roadmap to recovery, with “earliest possible” dates for a number of the stages of the route to normality. For those of us waiting patiently to resume travelling the world, this is music to our ears. With some kind of perfect symmetry, these announcements coincided with some beautiful weather as early Spring sunshine brought clear blue skies and glorious days throughout the week. We even had a spectacular full moon – the “Snow Moon”, the second full moon of a calendar year. Living both near the coast and in…
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Photographic Memories #12
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories…. Photo #12: Stromboli A bit of poetic licence here as there’s 3 photos instead of the usual 1, but then it’s not often that you get the opportunity to climb a living volcano after dark and look down on the fiery inferno below. This was the Aeolian Islands, 2011. A boat trip from our host island of Lipari to the volcanic Stromboli included an afternoon stop…
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Photographic Memories #11
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories…. Photo #11: A Sri Lankan Welcome This photograph recalls one of our most humbling experiences in all our days of travel so far. In August/September 2015 we travelled across Sri Lanka from west to east, making our way from Colombo to Trincomalee, via Kandy and Sigiriya. On our first day in Sigiriya we were introduced to Mangala, one of the few local tuk-tuk drivers able to…
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Cold Snap
Is it just me, or is anyone else irritated by the fact that, in the context of COVID, the world is referring freely to the “British variant” or even more geographically specific, the “Kent variant”, when ex President Trump was consistently vilified for referring to the pandemic as the “Chinese disease”? It’s called “COVID” because phrases like “Asian flu” and “Spanish flu” have been outlawed by the WHO as racially divisive, so how come the “British variant” is acceptable? Maybe it’s just me. Anyway, just as we sit here confined to quarters unable to travel, we get a little bit of the world – indeed a little bit of the…
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The Difference A Year Makes
It’s not always easy to stay positive and optimistic during this COVID lockdown, a mood not helped by an extremely dreary English winter as our weather does its absolute best to justify its bad reputation. Whilst some parts of the UK have witnessed significant snowfall, our South East corner has been deluged with what seems like incessant rain, borne out by this detail: January brought 151mm of rainfall when the historical average for that month is 50mm. Three times normal, and it feels like it, too. Many days have been simply too wet to take a walk, and the countryside is now so saturated that the fields and footpaths are…
