This evening I was supposed to meet up with Anni, SFG, Mat and Andy in Stoke. Sadly, Anni couldn’t manage it. This was a little awkward as I desparately needed to get my laptop back from her, but she had the best of excuses – Ed is ill. Ed’s one of the cats she adopted [...]

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A few days in London for various reasons. Primarily (at the time I organised the trip) was the visit of Noa, the lovely Israeli I met in Goa and caught up with again in Jerusalem. She was staying with friends and I managed to find myelf yet another couchsurfer (Lynne) and a friend of a [...]

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After a night out with Tony and June, who kindly put me up for yet another night, I drove down to Leeds to see Gosia, Robert and Magda for dinner. We ate a pretty decent pizza in the city centre before Gosia gave me a bed for the night in her “under construction” home. My [...]

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If you divide the UK into parts, then Scotland makes 35 countries since I departed (I flew out of Cardiff airport to get to Barcelona in June). I popped up by train to get my mum’s car which was kindly donated to me to save me buying a clunker for a few weeks. This also [...]

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I didn’t do a lot today other than pop into Newcastle. Tony and June picked up some copies of the Chronicle for my parents (I made page 3 – all of it!), and I bumped into Peter Beardsley at the Monument. He was publicising some BT Wireless thing, but I took the opportunity to add [...]

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I woke quite early and walked onto the deck to see that we’d already passed Tynemouth (and therefore the mouth of the Tyne) – I missed it by maybe three minutes! Not to worry. I marveled at the enormous cranes lining the banks as we slowed down and the pilot (is he called a pilot?) [...]

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Quite a general posting this for the whole country, as far as I could find. Overall, the Netherlands were great. Wonderful people, dead easy to get around and so forth. Ideal for cycling. Cycle paths (and therefore safe walking) is possible not just within towns and cities, but between them all. Superb. An issue, however, [...]

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[Quite a backdated post, this - I'm writing it on the 15th of October! I apologise for the delay, but as I hope you can appreciate I've been spending a lot of time traipsing around and visiting friends and family.] Today I plodged from Amsterdam to Ijmuiden, the main port north and west of the [...]

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