Travel journals

3 - 6 December 2024   The Thursford Christmas Spectacular A few days in North-west Norfolk, not the most exotic destination, indeed not...

VAL DI NOTO 28 September - 3 October 2024       A few days in Sicily, to a part less visited than some, namely Noto and its surrounds...

1-21 February 2024 Three weeks on our favourite island in the sun, Bequia - avoiding what has been a particularly dire February in...

22-27 December 2023 This was four days over Christmas, in Vienna - all part of a package tour, not a thing we’d done before - or at least...

27-29 October 2023 This is hardly a travel journal, just a note of a short weekend in Paris, to which we hadn’t been for some years, even...

June 2023 This was my fourth and Mary’s third visit to the wonderful music-fest at Queille, the ancient chateau south of Carcassonne, not...

23-28 March 2023 A long weekend in Amsterdam with two objectives: to catch up with some old friends from Allen & Overy days; and to see...

1-23 February “Bequia isn’t the same”, warned a friend. “It’s all changing – restaurants closed, the Frangipani Hotel deserted”. All doom...

25-29 November 2022 A long weekend in “low season” Rome, surrounded nevertheless by hordes of tourists. It turned out on our arrival to...

This isn't really a travel journal. It's just a short note that I wrote to a friend who is going to Florence and wanted some tips. It is...

3-10 September 2022 A week in the south-west Peloponnese, staying with our kind friends Christopher and Sarah Cornell. We visited (among...

This is a belated addition to my journal about Arezzo and Perugia, which I said that I would attach to it and then forgot. The legend has...

13-20 May 2022 Arezzo is quintessential Italy. We sit before dinner in a square sipping Aperol Spritze, watching hordes of elegant...

28 January – 22 February This was our first visit to Bequia since the lockdowns, the first for two years, going as usual via Barbados,...

1-8 November 2021 This is our first attempt at foreign travel since the Covid pandemic – going to Hamburg to see our friend Gerhard (who...

I decided to come back from the summer spent in Beaumes de Venise via Lyon, never having been there, except possibly as a student staying...

20-22 July 2021 I am sitting, as I write, in the most splendid, restful place imaginable – at the Hotel L’Estelle in the Camargue. It is...

Foreign travel is pretty much forbidden these days, so here we are in Norfolk. Staying with our immensely generous and welcoming host...

I took a detour on the way back from Beaumes de Venise – leaving after two months of relative normality, to face the rigours of 14 days’...

This is our umpteenth visit to Bequia, via Barbados, for most of the month of February; this time spending slightly longer in Barbados,...

This is our fourth trip to Germany, on this occasion to Rheinland-Pfalz (the Rhineland Palatinate) in the west, probably prompting the...

A visit to the biennial music festival at Queille in southern France, characterized this time by even more exceptional music than before,...

This is my second and Mary’s first visit to the wonderful, even unique, Queille music festival, held every two years in the depths of the...

This was a short visit or rather long weekend, staying with our generous friends Martin and Tessa in Canalicchio, just south of Perugia,...

I am starting to write this two or three days into our stay on the Caribbean island of Bequia, where we come now for three weeks in...

Two weeks in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, both southern India, all organised by our good friend Jane Points, whose business Points South...

We are in Rome for a week of sightseeing in November, blessed with warm sunshine and blue skies that miraculously lasted the whole week....

Are the Fates conspiring against us? We spent three days in an unusually cloudy, even rainy, Umbria, at the same time as London was...

This is a note about our annual three weeks in the sunshine of Bequia. I recognize that the readership of this particular travelogue may...

This is a note about our annual three weeks in the sunshine of Bequia. I recognize that the readership of this particular travelogue may...

This isn't really a journal. It's from a letter to a friend giving some recommendations about what to see in Rome. Here are some ideas. ...

I am slightly unused to the joys of extravagant hotels – of the type that investment bankers stay in and permit their lawyers to do too. ...

I was hoping that our arrival at Gatwick for our annual spell in Bequia wouldn’t prove to be an omen. All Virgin Atlantic computers were...

We are on our way to southern India, more precisely Kerala, to escape – as we often do – the rigours of Christmas. We are looking...

We are in Washington DC, recuperating from the flight, in our room in the Crowne Plaza Hamilton, named after the great founding father...

We got off to a bad start. Arriving at Victoria and looking forward to being whisked to some breakfast, we find that the Gatwick Express...

Germany again. Having become enamoured of Germany and the Germans during our visit to Eastern Germany last year, we are embarking on...

Our trip to Italy got off to a bad start. The flight to Rome was to leave Gatwick at 8.00 (so I thought). Applying my normal 3-hour...

Music in the depths of the French countryside (near Mirepoix in the Languedoc) organised by an English woman, performed largely by...

This is a note – or journal or memoir, whatever – of our three weeks in the Caribbean, escaping the cold and the rain of February. I am...

I am writing this, sitting in the very Moroccan sitting room of our two-level suite in a distinctly Moroccan riad – trying to ignore the...

Mary and I did a tour in late October/beginning of November 2014 to Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Munich. The reason for the tour was to...

9 – 26 October 2013 In writing this, I’m having even more difficulty than usual in working out who the audience is. Mary and I are...

20 November to 4 December 2012 Why am I writing this? We have just come back from a spectacularly wonderful two weeks in Rajasthan, but...

I am writing this as a record, before I forget it all, of our exploration of various paintings and other things – but most importantly...

I last wrote a journal when we were last on an animal safari (in South Africa) I think about 10 years ago. Here I go again. The reason...