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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…
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Photographic Memories #10
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 #10: Family History Like the poor soul remembered on this war grave, our surname is Sharman; this is the grave of my father’s cousin, Roland. The plaque is one of many hundreds of memorials in the war cemetery at Kanchanaburi in Thailand, built to commemorate those poor souls who perished during construction of the infamous Death Railway as they laboured as Prisoners Of War in…
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Kanchanaburi and Relative History
The gravestone above sits amongst thousands of others in the War cemetery at Kanchanaburi, site of the infamous Death Railway of World War 2, but this one resonates with us. This modest headstone is the memorial to Phil’s Dad’s cousin Roland, who, like so many other young men, died a dreadful death here at the hands of the Japanese during construction of the Thai-Burma railway. He must have suffered unimaginable torment. We have come to Kanchanaburi purely to pay our respects to our family member, some 76 years after his death. We find the whole experience of visiting this headstone surprisingly emotional, given that this was someone who died more…
