The acronym for Time Off In Lieu is highly appropriate – one only manages to accrue it when one’s been toiling away. And, as Sam pointed out in a comment yesterday, I’ve certainly been building up a fair amount of extra hours throughout January. In fact, for the last two weeks I’ve done a full [...]
Several friends have commented about how interesting they found the picture of the tree roots devouring the temple at Ta Prohm. So here are a few more pictures of that temple, and the neighbouring Banteay Kdei, both being assailed by jungle. You can see the damage that the tree roots are doing – the walls [...]
One of the reasons for going to Cambodia was to scatter some of Christopher’s ashes at or near Angkor Wat – somewhere that had very firmly been on our list of places to visit. All through the holiday I kept thinking about how much Christopher would have loved it – he would have so enjoyed [...]
I managed to see nine temples in the three days I was in Siem Reap – out of the thousand or so temples that are in the Angkor area. And, believe me, nine was enough – even I was getting all templed out by Boxing Day! They are all built on much the same plan, [...]
On Christmas Day, I was one of the first guests down for breakfast. Most people were still sleeping off the Gala Dinner, but I had a full day of sightseeing planned and had agreed an early pick-up with my guide. So at about 07:30 I was finishing my third cup of tea, and just starting [...]
I had a quick look at my photos yesterday, and they are going to need a bit of tweaking (cropping, straightening etc) before they’re fit to post here, and I doubt I’ll have time to do that before the weekend. So I’ll leave the descriptions of the temples until I can illustrate them. I got [...]
I really couldn’t face spending Christmas on my own here in the UK. Last year I went to Venice for the duration, which worked extremely well, but did have the major drawback that Italy is a Catholic country, so everything was closed on Christmas Day. I spent the day pottering up and down the Grand [...]
I missed my team’s Christmas lunch today, as I was at a project meeting at our Hampshire site all day so had to send my apologies. However, yesterday I had my first (and almost certainly last) Christmas lunch of the year, with a group of about 20 colleagues from work. I nearly called this post [...]
My recent relationship with Malvern Theatre is a bit like Samuel Johnson’s description of a second marriage: “A triumph of hope over experience”. I don’t think I’ve had a totally satisfactory or wholly enjoyable trip there since before Christopher died. I suspect that’s partly down to me – I’m hardly finding life a bundle of [...]
I’ve got tons of annual leave to use up before Christmas, and an edict has come down from on high at work to “use it or lose it”, so I booked the day off today. The main task of the day was to get the car serviced and through its MOT test, so I couldn’t [...]
