Oh, this has been a long time coming! I finally bought some Icelandic chocolate and I’m comparing it to its Nordic brothers and sisters for the first time so this is the first of four battles coming over the next few months. In the red corner we have Sirius, the Iceland contender. Sirius is a … More Icelandic chocolate vs Swedish chocolate
Every year, my friend Tom and I go for a “Christmas Adventure”. We started doing it in 2014 and it’s become a beloved ritual. We even managed it in 2020 and 2021 (with special guest Catherine!) – we both had to drive, which meant no wine and we had to keep our distance but it … More A winter’s day at Mudeford: Christmas Adventure 2022
This week I’m bringing you glad tidings from Shaftesbury, a royal town in North Dorset. Why? Well… If you don’t watch Richard Osman’s House of Games, it’s a teatime quiz show made on a shoestring where four celebrities compete to win dartboards, aprons, deckchairs and the like, all emblazoned with the stylised face of … More Shaftesbury: a royal town in North Dorset
Down in the depths of the Isle of Purbeck, you’ll find a perfect chocolate box village called Worth Matravers. It’s all built from local grey limestone, there’s a duckpond in the middle and one of these tiny local pubs perched on the hilltop, with incredible sea views, the sort of pub where you can get … More Walking to Dancing Ledge from Worth Matravers
I don’t really celebrate Halloween. My parents never let me trick or treat as a kid and we never carved pumpkins either so those are both things I just don’t do. Well, by the time I was old enough to not need their permission to trick or treat, I was too old for it – … More Halloween at Upton Country Park
That’s a total clickbait title – for the first time, I deliberately didn’t book a qualification at Try Inspire Qualify because there were none I wanted to do that I haven’t already done. Try Inspire Qualify has a lot in common with Camp Wildfire, actually: a lot of adults taking the weekend off being responsible … More I didn’t qualify at Try Inspire Qualify!
You may – or more likely, may not – remember back in 2019 I started a series called Before It Burns Down, which is a very tasteless title for my plan to visit all the cathedrals, after having realised when Notre-Dame caught fire that these medieval behemoths might not actually sit and wait for me … More The weirdness and wonder of Wells Cathedral
This week, I’ve seen this Guardian article – Three-quarters of UK adults can’t read a map – going around my social media several times. It’s one of these classic “what’s happened to the world??” articles designed to get older readers tutting. Now. This is a write-up of the results of a poll by Ordnance Survey, … More Outdoors 101: A few map-reading basics
Yes, I was a Lumenator in Green Space Dark Skies’ Maiden Castle short film which was released late last week! It’s the first time – and probably the last time – I’ve ever added a video to a playlist called Videos I Appear In That I Didn’t Make Myself and I don’t even actually appear … More I played a Lumenator in a Green Space Dark Skies film!
Let’s talk about how I built up to solo female travel. My first real trip was five days in Helsinki in November 2008 but I’d had a lot of various practice over the years which meant it wasn’t quite such a shock to the system – or to my parents – when I first went … More How I built up to solo female travel
I Am A Polar Bear 