Nostalgia addiction or just good memories?
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…
Category Lifestyle
Away from it all at the centre of all things in rural Finland.
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…
I’m a Berliner now
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…
Trying to be the best man in Georgia
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…
Flying to Lahti in Finland for Sibelius
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…
Tropea – taking it easy in Calabria
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…
Milan – city of fashion, music and art, even in the rain.
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…
On the Amalfi Coast
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…
On the road from Polignano to Matera, via Alberobello
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…
Some other towns on my journey through Puglia in Southern Italy
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.…