The centre of our stay in Cornwall was the delightful fishing village of Port Isaac. Here we rented a little cottage from the National Trust for our stay. The Birdcage - centre of picture The Birdcage was really like no other cottage that I've been in before. It is split over three floors and the main body of the house is though to be over 200 years old. On the ground floor you open the door straight in to the kitchen. Off to the side is an extension containing the bathroom. A very steep set of stairs takes you from the kitchen up into the lounge and a further set of steep stairs goes from ... read more
Silence is golden…
Apologies for the blogging silence. As Liz has pointed out in the comments I left on a bit of a cliff hanger sitting in the dark following a power cut one evening. That threw all my plans to pot and hence I wasn't able to tell you about our planned long weekend away.Mr C and I have just returned from a wonderful break in Port Isaac, Cornwall, where we've been celebrating our first wedding anniversary. It was a truly perfect trip with the most amazing weather for March. There is so much to tell you about, including cliff top walks, National Trust properties ... read more
Britain by train
This week I seem to have been sending most of my time on trains, or in meetings. Out of the five working days this week I have only been in London for one, and am again elsewhere tomorrow. I often have meetings away from my main office, but not normally so many in a week. Being constantly on the go is very tiring in itself and hence I decided to travel everywhere by train this week, rather than driving as I often do (mainly as to save time admittedly). As well as the obvious carbon benefit over driving I do find that there are many other advantages and disadvantages compared to just ... read more
Would you shop here?
I'm always amazed at the obsession with "celebrity" that seems to go on and how some shops and restaurants try to cash in on this. Outside the Belvedere Palace in Vienna we saw the following adverts on a lamppost.The question has to be, would this make you shop here? ... read more
Newspaper sales
I was fascinated to see something like the above on many lampposts across Vienna. Luckily my guide book provided an explanation: it seems that this is the way in which newspapers are sold in Vienna. People are supposed to use the small plastic bit as a honesty box and then take a paper from the plastic bag. The guide book also told us that everyone in Austria was so law abiding that they always pay before taking a paper. It was quite interesting therefore that the only person that we say taking a paper did so without paying! ... read more
Vienna steps
This picture shows what must have been one of the scariest staircases that I've ever climbed. I will provide a full explanation just as soon as I have time, but I can tell you that it was in Karlskirche in Vienna, and did provide Mr C and I with a much closer view of the baroque painting on the dome. ... read more
Trip round Europe
Sorry that I've not been here blogging for the last week. Last week was incredibly busy, but then Mr C and I had a nice, peaceful weekend away planned. We flew out to Vienna last Friday and had a great weekend exploring the city. The slight problem came on Monday. After watching the news in our hotel room that morning there was no surprise when we turned up at the airport to find that our flight back to London was cancelled. In fact, no flights left Austria for London at all that day due to the snow back home!We'd flown with Easyjet and the truth behind those cheap flights is that if ... read more
Travelling Comedians
Nearly twenty years before Sarah Palin was the name on everyone's lips there was another Palin attracting quite a bit of attention. In 1989 Michael Palin took off in the footsteps of Jules Verne and travelled Around The World In 80 Days with a BBC camera crew. There was born my love of travel programmes and started a desire to travel.I've been luck enough to visit some of the places on Michael's trip in the last twenty years, but there are still many more places on my list that I'd love to visit. Various other travel programmes have ... read more
Book browsing
After work on Monday I had some time to kill in central London before meeting up with Mr C to go and celebrate a friends birthday with a meal out. I was determined to leave work on time and have some nice "me time" browsing the shops, so I headed up to Marylebone High Street where you can always find a fantastic array of things to buyThis time I ended up in Daunt Books and spent nearly an hour browsing the shelves. They have a fantastic, unique way of arranging the books, which is quite simply genius. In addition to the usual shelves separated into fiction, non-fiction ... read more
An evening at the seaside
After a day at the River Cottage Festival Mr C and I headed south to the coast and Lyme Regis. Dark clouds were beginning to surround us, but luckily it remained dry for long enough for us to explore the sea front. It was lovely to see a couple of young lads enjoying a hobby that many would associate with people much older. As we explored this part of the beach we found a large number of rock pools to explore. A couple of small fish were spotted, but sadly not much more. This beautiful piece of what I guess is seaweed on a rock really caught my eye. The shades of purple were fantastically ... read more