Britain votes for its next government tomorrow. It is definitely the end of an era. The polls (haha) tell us the present Conservative government is heading for a crushing defeat – maybe the worst in its nearly two hundred year history. If so, a depressing era in British politics will come to its well-deserved end….

My poem Aleppo will be on display at Pleiades Gallery, Manhattan, New York City from 11 June until 6 July where it will be displayed with Heather Stivinson’ s exhibition Borders and Boundaries. Opening reception: 13 June, 6-8pm. It will be followed on Saturday 6 July with a special event: Ekphrasis: A Poetry Reading with…

I live just up the street from the Lewes Chamber Music Festival, now in its 12th year, and I’m just back from the final concert of this year’s truly inspiring festival. The theme was Schoenberg and friends, and the festival director kept to her brief with a series of concerts that explored and celebrated the…

Donald Trump found guilty on all charges in hush money case. He is guilty of so much more. A Greek tragedy in British English – Noun (ɡriːk ˈtrædʒədɪ  ) (in ancient Greek theatre) a play in which the protagonist, usually a person of importance and outstandingpersonal qualities, falls to disaster through the combination of a personal failing and circumstances with which he or she cannot deal Collins English Dictionary….

John Singer Sargent, self-portrait, 1906 Ladies is an old-fashioned word in 2024, we say women, or even other less gender-specific terms, but, in the 1880s and 1890s, in Europe and the US, it was lady if you were a lady, and woman if you were female, but not a lady in the class-conscious world that…

Last Thursday (16th May 2024), I finished a three-year marathon, reading the whole of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (155 poems in English and in French) at my weekly on-line poetry event called Wolfie’s Poetry Surf which will have been running for exactly twelve years this coming Thursday. I’ve hosted poetry events in my…

I was thinking about nostalgia today – you know the things ain’t what the used to be feeling. Well, I’m not really someone who dwells in the past, or so I think. I like the present, my day today, and I’m quite keen on the future too. I’ve found recently that more than a few…

I’ve been catching up with the blogs on my website, sadly neglected for over a year, but now back in action. In fact, I’ve neglected it for longer than that, considering I hadn’t posted anything about my foreign travels since 2015, when I went on two trips, to Italy https://wolfiewolfgang.com/it-was-all-mistake-my-three-inspiring/ and to Portugal https://wolfiewolfgang.com/my-time-in-lisbon-portugal-was-pure/ During…

It was like coming home when I looked out of the window of the apartment in Lahti, just as it felt like leaving home when I said goodbye to the cottage in Virtaa, near the little town of Sysmä, after a week’s break in Finnish rural paradise (see previous blog https://wolfiewolfgang.com/away-from-it-all-at-the-centre-of-all-things-in-rural-finland/). I’m a bit like…

It is early September in 2023, I am sitting in a rocking chair in a cottage, a converted 19th century log house, in a little village called Virtaa, 7.7 kilometres from a small town called Sysmä. The cottage is in the grounds of an old manor house, Virtaan Kartano, owned by Juhani and Tiina Stjernvall….

I was in Germany in April 2023, I’d been to Leipzig for the Bach 300 festival before catching a train for ten great days in Berlin. A city I last visited in the late 1990s, just a few years after Germany’s reunification and the city was still like a building construction site. Then it was…

Even people who don’t think they like classical music know and even like at least some of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750). Those who love classical music are mostly in consensus that he was probably the greatest of all the classical composers. I certainly feel that he stands tall not just…

I was checked in at the Old Metekhi Hotel over-looking the Mtkvari River in Tbilisi, Georgia , on 13th September 2022, after a booking that had been made in 2019, long before Covid changed everyone’s plans. I was here to be the best man at one of my oldest friend’s wedding, a wedding that had…

On the 7th September 2022, during the second week of my trip to Finland, I got a ferry across the Gulf of Finland, in the Baltic Sea, from Helsinki to Tallinn, the capital of the Republic of Estonia. From one country bordering Russia to another, six months after Russia invaded Ukraine, another of its ex-Soviet…

I was in Finland in August and September 2022 and, when I was staying in Helsinki, it was relatively easy to get a train for the 24 mile journey to a place I had read about often and wondered what it would really be like there. I mean Ainola – the home of Jean Sibelius…

In September 2022, after a wonderful time at the Sibelius Festival in Lahti, I stayed on in Finland for another week and moved to Helsinki, a place that everyone I know who has been there to told me that I would love it. I did. I love the way it manages to be a capital…

My first sighting of Finland, land of lakes, forests, saunas and music, seen from the air on a scheduled flight to Helsinki. It all started six months earlier, in the Runaway Cafe on platform two at Lewes Station, UK, my home town. I am not talking about my journey to catch the plane to Finland….

This was in June 2022, my first foreign trip after Covid decided to keep us all home for a couple of years. I had been going on holiday to Italy annually for ten years. I love the place, the culture and the language. Cerco di fare uno sforza per parlare italiano ogni volta che posso….

I spent a week in Naples in January 2020, and on a sunny winter’s day, I took the train to Pompeii, the ancient Roman city that was destroyed by a cataclysmic eruption of the volcanic mountain of Vesuvius in AD 79 The eruption lasted for two days and killed at least 1,150 of the inhabitants…

On the 6th January 2020 I returned to Naples not realising it was going to be my last foreign journey anywhere for two years. On 31st January two Chinese tourists in Rome were tested positive for the Covid virus and the Italian government declared a state of emergency. The first case of Covid was documented…

In December 2019, I spent a week in Milan. It was raining, no surprise there for this part of Italy during December. It was wet but achingly beautiful. As a fashion-shopping mecca internationally, not even the rain could dampen its elegance and style – especially as the rain appeared to be here just to highlight…

In September 2017, when I was looking at Mount Vesuvius from Sorrento, across the Bay of Naples, I thought of Pliny the Younger (born 61 AD), as you do, who wrote a detailed description of the catastrophic eruption of the volcano (79 AD) that killed his uncle, the great Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, who…

I’m looking back at some of the photographs I have taken on my Italian holidays over recent years for blogs that I am only just getting down to now. In the summer of 2017, the year before I went to Puglia (see previous blogs), I spent two weeks in a tiny fishing village of Marina…

Nicola, or simply, Nic, was my effervescent driver and guide for a day trip from Polignano across southern Puglia in June 2018 and, as well as being fun, he was informative and good company. The idea was to head to two famous towns, both beautiful and also, in their own ways, unique. Everyone I met…

I was based in Polignano in Puglia, South East Italy, for two weeks in June 2018, see previous blog, and, from there, I could travel to a number of other interesting Pugliese town and cities. Lecce – Baroque or not. on a particularly hot day, I travelled to the city of Lecce, famous for its…

I take too many photographs, I know. I have too many of them on my computer these days too and, during the last ten years, I have fallen behind in publishing the photographs I have taken on my foreign travels during what has been for me quite a turbulent time. I have finally got round…

Fight by Nikola Stanković I first worked with my friend, the Serbian artist Nikola Stanković, in 2018, when I opened a virtual art gallery, Glinka Gallery, in the virtual world of Second Life: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Seaforth/85/198/29 Nikola Stanković’s outstanding paintings formed our first exhibition there, where I was impressed by the variety of techniques he uses, from…

Tony, a French friend, recently sent me an illustrated French novel by a novelist that I was embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894 – 1961). I googled him, as you do, and discovered that he is not only regarded as one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th…