I’ve mentioned a few times that Malvern has a real small-town feel, and that I find it pretty much impossible to go around Waitrose without bumping in to someone I know. On Saturday I met a current colleague, an ex-colleague who retired a few years ago, and some close friends of my mother who have […]
For those of my colleagues who were wondering why I was logged on and working from home today, the above photo should give a clue! There was another 9cm of snow overnight, and it snowed lightly on and off all day. Some of the mounds where I’m piling up the shovelled snow are now nearly […]
I cleared the drive daily over the weekend. Friday was by far the hardest – thereafter the additional snowfalls were little more than an inch per day (and a bit less last night) so it was much easier to shovel it off the drive. Still unaccustomed exercise though! The roads were clear enough this morning […]
Well, it snowed pretty much all day yesterday. I spent about two hours in the afternoon wielding a snow shovel, trying to clear the drive of about 4″ of snow. But more came down in the later afternoon and overnight, so I was back out again this morning, shifting a further inch. Fortunately, my neighbours […]
The city of Lima was founded by the Spanish on the site of an existing Inca and pre-Inca settlement, and some mud-brick ruins remain, somewhat incongruously squeezed in between residential buildings in the suburbs of Miraflores and San Isidro. Knowing I was interested in such things, my driver had taken me past one of the […]
The Temple of the Moon was on one side of a valley. On the valley floor were the remains of houses of the original inhabitants, and on the other side was the Temple of the Sun. Despite its name, given to it by the Spanish, it’s probably not a temple at all but more likely […]
On my last day in Trujillo, I was taken to a magnificent site called Huaca de la Luna, or Pyramid of the Moon. This is a site built by the Moche people, so dates from the first to eighth centuries AD. The mountain was apparently sacred to them, so they built a temple right at […]
After visiting Chan Chan, I was taken to my hotel in Trujillo. It was a very comfortable hotel, just one block from the main square. I was shattered after a long day, and just wanted to collapse on my bed for an hour or so before dinner. But there was some renovation work going on […]
Chan Chan is huge – an adobe city over 20km^2, made up of ten “palace complexes”, of which only one is open to the public. The site is so big that the Pan-American highway cuts through the middle of it, and as we drove along I could see adobe walls on both sides of the […]
Clearly, I wasn’t going to be able to escape Christmas totally this year. Since Peru is a predominantly Catholic country, at least nominally, the Peruvians were enthusiastically celebrating. On just about every street corner in the cities there was a nativity scene, ranging in size from a foot or so cubed to fully life-sized figures. […]
