Until the day we went fishing in Tenby, my infantile palate had been accustomed to, and welcomed with great enthusiasm, cosy comestibles such as roast lamb, soft boiled eggs with marmite soldiers and bags of sherbet lemons after Sunday school.
Then I met mackerel. Continue reading
Oh Labour party, whatever have you done? A pink van to entice women voters? 
Really? Don’t women get patronised enough with pink gardening shears, pink screwdrivers, pink tool boxes, pink fizzy alco-pops, pink bloody everything?
This looks like the sort of van that goes round Freshers’ Fairs dishing out chlamydia testing kits and fruit flavoured condoms to 17 year olds.
I’m surprised there isn’t a rotating mirror ball on the roof, eyelashes on the headlamps and tinsel round the tyres. Does it fart glitter out of the exhaust pipe too? Continue reading
For over a hundred years, this underground reservoir in Clayton, Lancashire held a bellyful of water – 300 000 gallons of it to be exact – until it was drained in 1992. The Chorley Historical and Archeological Society made two applications to English Heritage for the reservoir to become a listed building but it was deemed to be ‘neither rare nor an exceptional example of its type.’
Its empty belly is now being be filled in to provide building space for a new housing development but before sending the bright, shiny bull-dozers in, Kingsway homes opened the reservoir to the public. Excellent! I love murky places where nobody ever goes so my partner and I hot-footed it over there with our cameras.
Trig point at Pendle Hill.
Pendle Hill in East Lancashire is a great big sheep-strewn lump of a thing. If it were 53m higher it would be a mountain but it’s not so it has to be content with being everybody’s favourite whale-shaped hill for the rest of its life.
Any local can tell you about the Pendle Witch trials of the early 1600s. Twenty people, mostly women, were hauled off to Lancaster and tried for witchcraft. Four were acquitted and the rest were hanged. Continue reading
Strange scrabbling noises at the front of the house this morning prompted me to stick my head out of the bedroom window.
A young man with a purposeful expression was climbing up a ladder.
Now a purposeful young man on a ladder may sound promising but I hadn’t ordered one and as he was clutching a bucket and a squeegee, there was no mistaking his intention. Some tactful questioning revealed that he was, as I suspected, a window cleaner at the wrong house.
‘Uhh, I had a few beers last night, don’t really know what I’m doing this morning,’ he said, switching his direction to reverse and dropping his squeegee on his descent. Continue reading
The exuberant paintings of the East Side Gallery, Berlin are often provocative, sometimes poke fun and often depict the dark side of the Communist regime.
The gallery sits on the banks of the River Spree in former East Berlin. The ‘canvas’ is a 1.3km length of the Berlin Wall, one of the few remaining sections still standing. The gallery was founded in 1990, the year after the Wall came down, and features over 100 paintings from artists all over the world.
Naturally the Wall was loathed by the people of East Berlin; it was vandalised and scrawled with graffiti during the Communist era but the East Side Gallery, with its collection of bright paintings is a physical reminder of the regime that divided families and pulled friendships apart.
One of the most famous paintins is by Dmitri Vrubel of a kiss between Brezhnev, former Soviet leader and Honecker, former GDR leader. The caption translates as My God, help me to survive this deadly love.
I was delighted by the Ampelmann, East German traffic light man, when I visited East Berlin in 1987, during the Communist era.
His jaunty hat looked in danger of slipping off in his feverish determination to get to the other side of the road, causing me to spend an unhealthy amount of time pondering the artistic merit of our traffic light designers in the UK.
I was back in Berlin last summer and thrilled to see the lively Ampelmann was still there, encouraging everybody to either march across roads or stand with our arms outstretched on the corner. 
The Ampelmann is a much-loved, very familiar symbol of the former GDR and he still stands (or marches) happily on across roads in Eastern Germany today. But his life wasn’t always so carefree.
He was conceived as a child-friendly traffic light by Karl Peglau who felt that humans, especially children, would respond more quickly to an image than to a changing light so his secretary, Anneliese Wegner, designed the two Ampelmannchen. Continue reading
At the top of the Campanile, San Giorgio Maggiore Island, Venice, you will find fresh air, fabulous views and a peaceful retreat from the sweaty throngs of the mainland below.
The tiny island of San Giorgio is just a short hop on the vaporetto (water bus) from San Marco. In the 10th century the marshy land was drained and the island given over to a Benedictine monastery which became one of the most wealthy and influential monasteries in the world until it was flattened by an earthquake in 1223.
No matter. After a quick rebuild, it was business as usual until the Republic of Venice was dissolved and the monks were kicked out. It became a free port and the city’s artillery was later stored there. Now the monastery is back, together with an arts centre, open air theatre and a perpetual dribble of Venice-fatigued tourists in search of respite. Continue reading
The Bridge of Sighs links the Doge’s Palace and prison. Hapless convicts were bundled straight from the court, across the bridge, to the prison which is why the limestone palace on the right gleams prettily in the sunlight while the prison on the left of the canal looks, well, like a prison, I suppose.
The Bridge of Sighs is carved from limestone, was built in 1602 and links the two buildings high above the water. No getting out of that one then.
This gondolier seems quite unconcerned by the contrast between the gleaming palace on the right and the grotty prison on the left.
‘Torcello’ means ‘tower and sky’ but I thought it sounded like something you could eat or drink that was both sweet and delicious, possibly alcoholic. Bearing this in mind, and as it’s only a short hop on the vaporetto (water bus) from Burano, it would have been just plain rude not to visit.
Everybody streamed off the vaporetto in the same direction, as though they all knew, by some means of collective consciousness, which direction to go. We all trotted for the best part of a kilometre, under the searing sun, down a pathway, paved, pink and pretty, which ran alongside a still, green canal.
An unexpected busker was playing the accordion, temporarily drowning out the cicadas screeching in the parched bushes. I tossed a euro coin into the cap slung on the ground in front of him and he nodded, ‘Grazie.’
The ponte del diavolo – devil’s bridge – looked new and scrubbed, no sign of beelzebub though so to make up for the disappointment, I imagined a troop of horned, villainous, little devils in red sequinned suits dancing across it.
