The weather late yesterday afternoon was absolutely atrocious. There was a major storm, pretty much directly overhead, with non-stop lightning flashing between the clouds and thunder rolling around the hills. The wind was so strong that the trees in the wood opposite were thrashing around alarmingly, and indeed one came down and completely blocked my […]
I generally enjoy an Alan Ayckbourn comedy, so when I saw that Malvern Theatres was showing Absent Friends, one I’ve not seen before, I decided to get myself a standby ticket to the Saturday matinée. His comedies are usually pretty dark, uncovering the unhappiness lying behind middle-class lives, and in particular middle-class marriages, and this […]
Christopher’s iPad has finally reached the end of its usable life, after just over five years. It’s a first generation device, and I’ve not been able to upgrade the operating system or apps for a long while now. Apps and websites have gradually stopped working, so even though there’s nothing wrong with the hardware, it’s […]
Christopher’s stepfather, Peter, goes to stay with some friends of his in mid-Wales for a week’s holiday most summers. To get there, he pretty much has to drive past the end of my road, so we try to meet up for a pub lunch either on his way there or as a stop on the […]
Even Mykonos wasn’t all bars and tourist traps. If you looked hard enough, there were faint signs of the small sleepy fishing village that it must have been before the cosmopolitan jet-set and the party-goers discovered it. This row of windmills is the iconic “picture postcard” view of Mykonos, and was between the harbour and […]
As I mentioned, the open-air museum island of Delos is only reachable by ferry from the neighboring island of Mykonos. It really is the archaeological highlight of the Cyclades, and even some of the cruise-ship passengers were persuaded to forgo the hedonistic delights of Mykonos Town, Paradise Beach, and the allegedly even better Super Paradise […]
The coach driver on Naxos spoke good English, and was very eloquent about the problems facing the Greek economy. His take on it was that the islands have coped much better with “austerity” over the past few years than the mainland. He reckoned that was partly because the islands’ economy is heavily reliant on tourism, […]
I thoroughly enjoyed Naxos, the next island we visited. It was larger, more fertile, and less touristy than either Santorini or Mykonos, and had a very relaxed atmosphere. We caught a SeaCat ferry there from Santorini, and arrived in the little harbour in Chora, the main town on Naxos. The first sight we saw on […]
We started out on Santorini, where the highlight for me was our visit to the Bronze Age town of Akrotiri, which is very reminiscent in many ways of Pompeii. The town was completely destroyed and buried under 60m of ash when the volcano of Thera blew its top (in 1500BC if you ask an archaeologist, […]
I got home from work this afternoon to find a parcel waiting for me – the results of my glass fusing. I’m very pleased with the three bowls I made. The first two are pretty much as I had imagined them. The last one, which looked rather unpromising in its raw state, has come out […]
