In the summer of 1968 I was holed up with my cousin in my parents’ house on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border. We were both in our early twenties, low on funds and single. I might have said that we were “house-sitting”, but I never heard that expression until several years later. We spent the time fell-walking […]

That would be me and, of course, it raises the question of what constitutes a holiday. The Office for National Statistics uses the criteria of four or more nights away from one’s main domicile taken primarily for recreational purposes. I can get to about five hundred provided I am allowed everything including courses, conferences, sports […]

(This is a pretty contemporary topic, almost a news story and the sort of thing I usually avoid: overcrowded tourist destinations, the havoc wrought by cruise ships and how to avoid all that.) In Venice, published in 1960, James (later Jan) Morris described being on a vaporetto on the Grand Canal on a misty winter’s […]

July 2023: war raged in the Ukraine. Fire raged in a dozen Mediterranean countries. There were unprecedented heatwaves all over the Northern hemisphere. In all the big and historic cities of Europe crowds jostled and congregated in front of any famous painting or building. So we went to Lincolnshire. I had more or less the […]

The most jaw-dropping thing I have read in a twenty-first century newspaper was a culinary item. The writer was recommending what most Southern English people would call blackberries but I would call brambles. There was a time, they said, when you could just go out to the countryside and pick them, but urbanisation and modern […]

Some time in the Spring of 1966 the dean of University College, Oxford sidled up to me in the quadrangle and began to mutter. He was called Tony Firth and he had a very distinctive and widely imitated style: a slight figure, head on one side, given to sidling and muttering and much use of […]

For us June 2022 had become the era of the postponed trip. There was the trip to Northumberland, postponed since before Covid and the trip to Madeira postponed since March when we actually had Covid. But most of all there was the road trip to Europe with the four granddaughters who live in the same […]

We gave up on M. Macron and his country about a week before they gave up on us. That is to say we abandoned our plans for a skiing trip in January because of all the tests and documentation required and the possibility that we wouldn’t be allowed into restaurants or cable cars and then […]

Nineteen months, March 2020 to October 2021: the longest time in our adult lives we had stayed in our own country. It wasn’t a bad life because we walked, cycled, played tennis, spent lots of time with grandchildren, gardened and even traveled within England – Norfolk, Northumberland, Isle of Wight. My cooking improved, I played […]

It would be normal to think of the Scots as the second biggest nation in the British Isles with a population a little under five and a half million. But there is arguably a bigger tribe with a population over five and a half million, which is British expats. Expatriates are people with a country’s […]