If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!So now the flat smells of burning as the heating goes on for the first time since spring. Winter has well and truly arrived. As a season it always seems such a good idea until you actually get there, […]

01h00: It’s so cold my ears sting. How did that happen? I turn my back for two weeks and winter arrives. The long walk from the station didn’t help, but I was back in Chelmsford way too late to retrieve the car before it was locked in for the night, and in fairness I wasn’t […]

What a fortnight. London - Paris - St Remy - Avignon - Lyon - Geneva - Milan - Rome - Venice - Paris - London. And a whole load of little places in between. Thousands of miles by train. A fair few by boat on the Venetian canals.
Sleeping on swaying top bunks in communal railway […]

So we made it to Rome, eventually. We passed across the border into Italy, accompanied by smiley border police and their guns who checked our passports two times each a day late.
But that’s certainly not a bad thing. By not travelling at night we got to pass through the mountains in daylight, and the views […]

Oh, it’s all getting very complicated. We’re stuck on the wrong side of the Swiss border at the moment. Everyone is being very nice, but when euros don’t work here, you arrive without a hotel and no ticket back out things get a bit sticky. We spent hours walking miles last night trying to find […]

Last day in the office for a fortnight. Woohoo. I am so glad to be having a break. I know it’s only three weeks since I was last off, but I feel exhausted. We’re working harder than we have for months at the moment and to be honest I feel a bit guilty about leaving […]

It’s so late it’s tomorrow already. It’s been like this all week. Three weeks, in fact, since getting back from Wales, in fact, and so September entries on here are looking decidedly spase. Last September I missed not one single day.
Where is the time going? I guess it’s working late every night to make up […]

No news is good news. If you don’t mind spending your days as a talking head.
I’ve never got the hang of charging my phone, so it’s usually run down and switched off for at least a day before I start to wonder why I’m not getting calls. So plugging it this morning after two days […]

It’s like living in a laundry here at the moment. And so hot! The flat is covered in half-dry clothes, trapped in a washing cycle between two weeks away from home cat sitting and two weeks away from home travelling Italy on the trains.
It looks like Pompeii is off the menu now - it’s too […]

Five. In the morning. Not the time I wanted to be getting up, yesterday morning, but it had its compensations. The cat thought it was good I was out of bed, and as I drove across the flood plain the fog was hanging low across the damp land like limp fallen clouds.
I missed the train […]