I was staying at Fawlty Towers overnight again last week. It’s about six months since I was last there, and it’s got a new General Manager in the meantime who seems to be something of a new broom sweeping clean. Several of the members of staff who were there last time have left, some in […]
…..but this time it was entirely my own fault. I’ve had a really busy week at work. I had an all-day project progress meeting at our Hampshire HQ on Wednesday, then on Thursday I had an “away day” and customer workshop at a conference centre near Windsor, which involved staying overnight, with more plenary sessions […]
I’ve been doing a considerable amount of travelling recently for work, which has involved passing through a number of rather chocolate-box villages in Wiltshire. There are lots of thatched cottages built with honey-coloured stone, rather like in the Cotswolds. But what has really caught my attention is the gardens of a number of the cottages. […]
This weekend it would have been our twentieth wedding anniversary, and I’ve understandably been feeling a bit down. I thought that the best way to cheer myself up and get through the weekend would be to force myself to go out and do something. I checked what was on at Malvern Theatres, and found that […]
I’ve been on another “Behind the scenes study day”, again organised by my favourite archaeological travel company, Andante Travels. This time it wasn’t a museum I visited, but rather the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, otherwise known as the Oxford University carbon dating laboratory. The […]
The last of the snow finally melted overnight on Wednesday, when some heavy rain washed away the last of the piles around the garage. I can now see my garden properly for the first time in several weeks, and it’s not a pretty sight! My herb garden seems to have been particularly badly hit by […]
There are a couple of exhibitions on at the British Museum at the moment, which I particularly wanted to see. I don’t get down to London very often, so I decided to take advantage of staying at my parents’ on my return from Germany, and do both exhibitions in one day. Both “Ice Age Art, […]
Augusta Treverorum may have been well connected to all the places that mattered in the Roman Empire two thousand years ago, but the modern city of Trier is not particularly easy to get to. The nearest airport appears to be in Luxembourg, and it doesn’t seem to be in the “portfolio” of city-breaks provided by […]
Since Christopher and I had often thought about visiting “Roman Germany”, albeit without actually getting around to doing so, I thought it fitting to take some of his ashes with me to scatter somewhere appropriate. This is the spot I chose – into the Moselle River running through Trier, at the base of the original […]
I’ve always been interested in ancient history, and for several years now I’ve wanted to see some of the Roman ruins in Germany. However, it never managed to get to the top of Christopher’s and my “to visit” list. So, since I had a few days off over Easter, I decided to do a city-break […]
