My first morning in St Petersburg was too hot by far and I got off to a bad start by having a pitched battle with a first a metro machine that refused to sell me a smartcard and then a metro machine that was extremely reluctant to sell me tokens. Add to that my local … More Peter & Paul Fortress: my first day in St Petersburg
This is another of those subjects I’ve been looking forward to writing since I started this series in January. W for Westman Islands. The Westman Islands are a ragged little archipelago off the south coast of Iceland. They’re the tops of submarine volcanoes that have somehow exploded above the surface. The youngest is Surtsey which … More The A-Z of Iceland: W for Westman Islands
I used to enjoy walking but in recent years I’ve gone off it. So I make a point of going on as many Region walking weekends as I can. The last time was South Wales nearly two years ago. They often clash with other plans. But this time I was available. This was a Level … More Bits fall off me on Dartmoor
On April 16th this year, I suddenly realised that those eternal behemoths of days gone by might not be there forever, waiting for me to get around to visiting them and so Project #BeforeTheyBurnDown began. The very next morning I booked flights to visit the Sistine Chapel; that very weekend I went off to Winchester, … More A Pilgrimage to Canterbury: The Blogger’s Tale
B for Bananas, Z for (you’ll find out!) and V for Volsungs were, to be honest, the reason I started the A-Z of Iceland series. I’ve been looking forward to this one. It’s time to introduce you to the Volsungs Saga! Icelanders are prolific writers. Always have been. I suspect that’s got something to do … More The A-Z of Iceland: V for Volsungs Saga
It was the morning of my first Russian domestic voyage. I was starting small: Moscow to St Petersburg, but how to do it? It’s a short hop on a plane. When we did it on the school trip in 2002 we took the overnight train. But my mum, already delirious with panic over the idea … More The Sapsan high-speed train: a bullet on a coffee table
Of course, there’s so much more to Moscow than the Kremlin and Red Square and I’m really not the person to talk about it because I wasn’t there long enough to do much more than moon over the tourist centre but I do have three other things to talk about. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour … More Moscow: I also went to a cathedral and some parks
Going inside St Basil’s Cathedral is exciting but it’s not exciting like going into the Kremlin. Even though it’s a standard tourist thing to do in Moscow and a lot of it is now a museum complex, it stills feels illicit, transgressive, as if you’re breaking into a high-security spy headquarters where ordinary civilians, let … More The day I was incarcerated in the Kremlin
I can’t believe we’re so close to the end of the A-Z of Iceland. We’re at U already and today we’re going for one of my favourite subjects: the underground. In its way, there isn’t a lot underneath Iceland. It was formed less than sixteen million years ago when two tectonic plates tore apart and … More The A-Z of Iceland: U for Underground
One of the things my Brownie parents comment on the most is “It would be nice if she could have gone to camp”. Yeah, it would, but we don’t have a camp licence in the unit, we’re struggling to keep the unit running week-to-week and we don’t have as much free time as you might … More My first Brownie camp
I Am A Polar Bear 