If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Stratford is grim. Actually, it’s a dump. What a shame it’ll be the transport hub of the 2012 Olympics, and visitors from all over the world will have to walk its dirty, grimy streets and shelter from the rain […]

This picture pretty much sums up the weather we’ve had all week. Rain when we were in the car, and sun whenever we got anywhere. This was the one instance when we got both at the same time. Nothing could have been timed better.
So today, Thursday, we turned the car properly south and headed home […]

Car prepares to cross the causeway to Lindisfarne as Rich takes its picture in case we lose it in the mud and it’s never seen again.
We took the car north. A long way north. Basically to the hump-back bit of where England almost turns into Scotland.
(Well, actually, we went further than that, as we spent […]

High Force
High Force is one of those places I’ve heard about my whole life. It’s a wide and tall waterfall on the River Tees that has been part of one side of my family history for many generations. So how I managed to get to the ripe old age of 33 and never see it […]

Vroom
I’ve not been away since the epic trek from Athens to Budapest, that saw me narrowly miss a car bomb in Bulgaria, and get pounced on by the Bucharest security guards as I took pictures of Ceausescu’s dirt grave.
So it was quite exciting to be setting off for a week long break, heightened somewhat by […]

Over at the house, the floor was dug up for a whole week as a gas man came to replace all of my pipes, seemingly got bored half way through the job and buggered off for seven days. The new plumbers I’d been talking to about fitting the bathroom took an equally long time to […]

Rich plants a sprout plant
It’s been a long time coming, but we finally planted out the vegetable patch today. Now that the railway sleepers are in place it’s a proper raised bed, with plenty of room for root growth and space for branches and leaves to spread out.
So we started digging at the back wall […]

Ocean’s 11 made sense. There were 11 gangsters in the group, and they were headed up by Danny Ocean. They were, in the most literal sense, Ocean’s 11.
Then came the sequel, Ocean’s 12, and then another one, Ocean’s 13, and each time around the name got just a little less accurate.
Fortunately that doesn’t matter. Neither […]

I laughed out loud on the train tonight. Not a little giggle, but a full-blown fnar, complete with powerful nose snort that made the three rows ahead and three rows behind turn around to look. This went on for at least three pages of my book, and I was forced to stop reading for a […]

Sunday was educational (and Saturday was rainy and spent alternately sheltering in a nice coffee shop on Ipswich dockside and re-watching Moonraker) as we buzzed along to the end of the A14 for the second time in a little over a month. This time it was to Bruntingthorpe aerodrome, as guests of the VW press […]