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…
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…
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…
The first portrait photograph of me was honest, I thought, no frills, just me as I was that day. sitting in front of the Georgian fireplace in my Lewes home. It was as true an image as photography can deliver.…
I have been reluctant to post my blogs over the last few months of lockdown and its aftermath here in Lewes, UK. I didn’t feel I had much to add to the millions of comments about the pandemic over the…
The hot days of the summer lockdown here in the UK have passed but now it’s second time round for the covid-19 precautions and, in classic English autumn style, it has been raining and, more importantly, it has got cold.…
In July this year, while the UK was still locked down, I was challenged by a friend on Facebook to do the 25 Day Pushup Challenge and, because I can’t resist challenges, I did it. The idea was to do…
I’ve been trying to get back to full fitness now for twenty months, nearly two years, after a difficult eight or so years of ill-health. A brain haemorrhage in 2008, and a pulmonary embolism a few years later, in 2013/14,…
Going to the gym is enjoyable enough. I try to go at least three times a week to the pleasantly eccentric one at the White Hart Hotel, near to where I live in Lewes, UK. The treadmill run can seem…
A friend reminded me the other day that the human body completely replaces itself every seven years. For me, that’s a cheery thought because seven years ago today, just as my home town of Lewes was getting ready for Halloween,…