lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo...

Rather than go on at great length about our recent trip to Switzerland, Germany and Austria, I'm just going to leave you with some photos.

OK, and maybe a bit of aimless waffle too.  My gaff, my rules.

Here's the view from the mountain hut in the middle of the Swiss mountains where we spent the night celebrating the wedding of our friends Sina and Patryk. We slept in bunk beds and swam in a mountain lake fed by snowmelt from the snow-capped peaks.  Yes... it was bloody cold. The night sky (including the Perseids - at least the one that I saw) was absolutely stunning.  Switzerland is a beautiful country... absurdly expensive, but beautiful.  I also bought this t-shirt.  Look at that pipe!

My wife with a Maß of beer in Munich.  My beer (she likes the froth), but I love this photo. I also love the fact that they only serve beer in portions this size after 5pm.  Nevermind the Picassos, Durers, Gaugins, Monets, Rembrants, Rafaels and Leonardos we saw at the Pinakothek galleries in the 24 hours we were there... THAT'S culture!

We saw these in the 7th District of Vienna.  They also have one's with boy/boy and boy/girl.  Apparently they were very controversial when they were first put up, but I think it speaks volumes for how far a Catholic country like Austria has come in recent times.  It's such a simple gesture of inclusion, isn't it?  We travelled between Munich and Vienna on the train. Over the course of the 4 hour journey, we chatted with the nice German ladies heading to Vienna for a long weekend. They were asking what we would recommend they visit, and my wife turned and asked what I thought.  I was genuinely stumped.  I've been many times over the last 15 years - we got married there, for goodness sake - but, although I've been to many of the galleries and palaces and museums, a trip to Vienna will always be about seeing our friends and enjoying spending time with them.  This time was no different.  I do need to go back to the Kunsthistorisches museum, but given a choice between that and a trip in the Punto to the Wachau to drink apricot juice and wander up to the castle where Richard Lionheart was kept prisoner... then I'll take the Wachau everytime.

It was a lovely break.

warm wind carried on the sea...

It’s not very often that you go away for a holiday and come back to work feeling as though you’ve had a much longer break than you actually have… so as this is exactly what’s just happened to me, I’m trying to enjoy it whilst it lasts.

Our break consisted of six days in Gozo, and then back home to spend a few days with a good friend of ours from New York who was passing through on her way back from Africa. In Malta we dived and looked at beautiful churches and some somewhat underwhelming Neolithic dolmen.

"Can I raise a practical question at this point? Are we going to do 'Stonehenge' tomorrow?"

They like cats here too, and you can see them everywhere.  This one quickly identified us as suckers and claimed possession of a prime slot near our breakfast table every morning.

And angels.

"Don't blink. Blink and you're dead. They are fast. Faster than you can believe. Don't turn your back. Don't look away. And don't blink.  Good luck."

Great views everywhere though.  Beautiful skies, magnificent cliffs and clear, blue seas.  Nice to spend some quality time with my wife for a change, too!  She's alright.

Back in Nottingham, we visited the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest (named after an actual major, would you believe?), stopped by the disappointing castle and visited the Trippe to Jerusalem (the last time we were in New York, our friend took us to McSorleys, the oldest bar in the city, established 1854. The Trippe was founded in 1196 and they started a crusade there, which must have seemed like a great idea in the bar the night before. Marissa was suitably impressed and then we quickly moved on to a better bar with fewer tourists for a drink).

It was fun and great to see her and spend some proper time together.

Although I was only off work for 7 days in total, breaking it into two like that really seemed to make it last. It’s been good news/bad news since then though: the good news was that I didn’t come into work until lunchtime today and that it’s a bank holiday weekend coming up. The bad news was that the reason I was late coming into the office was because I was attending a clinic at the hospital.

Swings and roundabouts. Ups and downs.  Still, good holibobs.

crème-bouffant...

In the old days, before I was stupid enough to decide that I wanted to run a marathon, going on holiday usually meant leaving my running shoes at home.  These days, six weeks out from the big day, my training programme doesn't really allow such luxuries.  Perhaps I wasn't going to be able to run forty miles in a week as I have for the last couple of weeks, but I couldn't justify doing nothing.

Well, not that five days of fairly hard skiing is exactly "nothing", but you know what I mean.

So I took my trainers and managed to go out for three runs whilst we were there.  The thing about running in a ski resort, I have to tell you, is that at least half of your run is going to be up the side of a mountain.  To compound the problem, you're also at altitude.  These two simple truths made these three fairly short runs difficult.  You wouldn't think it possible, but sometimes a little three miler can be more painful than the fifteen miles you ran at the weekend.

Not surprisingly, before the week was out, Runkeeper had some news for me:

Running up a mountain three times is apparently more altitude gain than my usual runs around the rivers and canals of Nottingham.  You think?

Mind you, look how steady I kept my pace in that bottom chart.  Not exactly the fastest run I have ever managed, but not disgraceful under the circumstances and after a full day's skiing.

After running the first time on my own, for the next two runs, I dragged my wife out with me.  As you can see, she was delighted by the whole experience.

And when we got home, we went out on Sunday morning for a sixteen mile run.  I can confirm that skiing seems to be pretty good cross-training for running: it gives the thighs a good workout, but gave my poor weary hips and knees a break from the pounding.  Five days on the piste actually left my legs feeling pretty good.  Tired, but differently tired to running alone.

Also, skiing fashions.  What's not to like?

so mystic and soulful....

Vienna is a beautiful city. It might even be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It’s one of those places where history permeates the very streets: whether it’s wandering through the cobbled mazes behind the Stephansdom, imagining that you’re Orson Welles in the Third Man or looking at the Hofburg Palace and imagining the might of the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On a much smaller scale, you can appreciate this history in how the long Turkish influence on the city – they laid siege to Vienna in 1529 under Suleiman the Magnificent and were only really finally turned away at the Battle of Vienna in 1683 – means you can get a damn good cup of coffee (even if many tourists still inexplicably flock to Starbucks). It’s the city of Mozart, Beethoven, Hayden, Strauss; of Freud, Wittgenstein, Schrödinger and Mendel; of Klimt, Schiele and Hundertwasser. It’s a great place for a weekend break.

In fact, we’re just back from doing exactly that…. Only we didn’t really do anything much to take advantage of the cultural attractions of this fascinating city. We were there for the best part of four days, and I didn’t really do anything cultural beyond going for a run on the Prater past the Riesenrad. Even then, I was thinking of the milkman with exploding balloons from the Living Daylights rather than the significantly more highbrow scenes from The Third Man.

It might mean nothing to Midge Ure, but I love Vienna, but it’s for much more personal reasons than any of that cultural shizzle listed above: we have some really good friends there. These are people that C has known for longer than 30 years, dating back to the school pen-pal scheme that first introduced her to her best friend. That family became her second family when she was au-pairing in Vienna and a long way from home and they also welcomed me with open arms when I first rolled up some years later. It’s no coincidence at all that we got married in Vienna and it’s why we keep going back.

So, I didn’t spend my long weekend absorbing culture in one of Europe’s great capitals, I spent it eating wurst and schnitzel and drinking beer and wine with some of the finest people there are. Plus they have cats.

It was great.

hell...

Holidays can be pretty tough.

You have a couple of weeks away in the cold, clear mountain air with the people you love; you enjoy excellent food and drink excellent booze; you spend your time in relaxing, pleasurable pursuits and do your very best to forget about work.

Yup, holidays can be hellish all right.

You can usually see it in the photos, if you know what you're looking for.  It's always the same.  Yes, there might be a smile on the face, but look at how hollow and empty the eyes are.  Is that the face of someone enjoying themselves?  I don't think so.

Thank goodness we all went back to work today.

 Just for good measure, and to make sure the terrors of my holiday were well and truly behind me, I also made sure I had a dental appointment at 9am today before I went into the office. I think that did the trick and I should be able to forget about all leisure pursuits for a good little while to come and enjoy a properly cold and dark few weeks in the office in the depths of winter. I hope we have another cold snap so I can fall off my bicycle in the frost on the way to work in the gloomy pre-dawn light, perhaps in freezing fog.

That's what life is really all about, after all.

It's great to be back.

nothing else can save me....

Whilst sitting on a little boat in a harbour last week, I noticed a sign.  My Italian is a little rusty, but it's one of those languages that, if you use your imagination, you always feel as though you can make sense of it.  It was some kind of notice to passengers about what to do in the event of an emergency.  Not panic and run around screaming, I think it said.  Anyway, what really caught my eye was the use of the phrase "SOS".  Save Our Souls, I thought as I idly completed the acronym in my head.

Then I stopped dead.

Is that an entirely universal phrase, or have I just lazily slipped into the assumption that the English (or at least another English speaking nation) invented the phrase and that the rest of the world simply adopted it?

Well, Britannia did rule the waves, after all.

Perhaps SOS stands for something completely different in the Italian acronym?

Curious, I looked it up when I next got the chance.

According to wikipedia:

"This distress signal was first adopted by the German government in radio regulations effective April 1, 1905, and became the worldwide standard under the second International Radiotelegraphic Convention, which was signed on November 3, 1906 and became effective on July 1, 1908...In popular usage, SOS became associated with such phrases as "save our ship", "save our souls" and "send out succour". These may be regarded as mnemonics, but SOS does not actually stand for anything and is not an abbreviation, acronym or initialism. In fact, SOS is only one of several ways that the combination could have been written; VTB, for example, would produce exactly the same sound, but SOS was chosen to describe this combination. SOS is the only 9-element signal in Morse code, making it more easily recognizable, as no other symbol uses more than 8 elements".

Interestingly (to me, anyway), the development of audio radio transmitters rather rendered morse code redundant, and in 1927, "Mayday" was adopted as the internationally accepted audio equivalent of SOS.

As an aside, given that electrical telegraph systems were only invented in 1836, and Morse Code after that, what was the equivalent distress signal for ships before that?  I suppose waving flags is only really useful if there's another ship close enough to see you waving.... and if they're close enough to see that, couldn't they also just see that you're sinking and might appreciate a helping hand? (and apparently flag signalling was only really set down in the late eighteenth century anyway.  It's a real time suck, this, isn't it?)

So, there you go: my casually glib assumption corrected.  Also on this holiday, I learned that my assumption about the origins of the phrase "Indian Summer" was also (most likely) completely wrong.  Never let it be said that I can never admit to being wrong.  Credit where credit is due: my wife had that one right.  I actually confused an Indian colleague of mine by explaining to him what the phrase actually meant.  He just couldn't get his head around the fact that the generally very mild English weather could in any way be compared to a summer in India, where the temperatures - he told me - are often in excess of 45 degrees!

that's what I go to school for....

You'll be pleased to hear that I'm not going to go on and on about our holiday.  We spent five days on the island of Salina, one of the Aeolian Islands just off the coast of Sicily and it was lovely.  Daft though it sounds, we don't often go on holiday just to relax, but actually that's what we did this time around.

Just look at the view from our hotel room.

Enticing enough that even we spent some time just chilling out around the pool, reading a book or just having a snooze whilst listening to "X&Y".  Coldplay certainly aren't to everyone's taste, and I don't really like much of what they've done since this album, but sat around a pool in 30 degree heat, this just hit the spot perfectly.

Salina is a pretty small island, with towns huddled around a pair of extinct volcanos.  We were staying in a lovely hotel in Malfa, and it was nice enough, but the main draw really is the ocean.  We planned to do some diving when we were there, and just look at the colour of the water.  Beautiful.

Salina is volcanic and there's very little sand on the sea bed.  What this means is that the water is crystal clear and visibility underwater is something like 30m, better than anywhere else I've been, including the Great Barrier Reef.  We dived into caves filled with shrimp; we saw a shoal of around 100 barracuda; grumpy looking eels; we swam along lava tubes; we actually saw the line where the warm top layer of water began to mingle with the colder water from the depths..... it was pretty good.  The water was so good, in fact, that we got up early a couple of times and walked the ten minutes down to the little stoney beach near our hotel for some snorkelling before breakfast (crabs, urchin, hundreds of fish, you know: the usual).

As I said, the Aeolian islands are volcanic, and several of them still have live volcanos.  This was the view from the terrace bar of our hotel, with the perfect cone of Stromboli pouring out smoke across Panarea.  We took a trip across to Stromboli during the week and hiked up to a viewing platform in time for sunset.  It was a long, hot hike, but the payoff was spectacular.

I've stood next to an active volcano before, in Ecuador, and felt the ground shaking beneath my feet.... but I've never stood on an actively erupting volcano and felt the heat from the lava as it flowed down towards the sea.  Astonishing.

Best of all was I got to spend some quality time with my wife.  She works very hard and is away from home an awful lot.  Turns out she's quite good company when she puts her mind to it.  It was a fantastic holiday.  Not even the insane Italian driver who drove us back to Catania airport at about 150km/h, the flight home delayed by three hours, the 0230 arrival home on Sunday morning or the pouring rain that greeted my cycle to the office this morning could completely ruin.

This is what you go to school for.

somewhere cold and caked in snow....

Gone skiing.  See yooz all laters.......

these streets will make you feel brand new....

I've been to New York several times before: with work, as a tourist and to visit friends.... but I'd never seen it snow here before.  It was beautiful.  We flew out on New Year's Day and it snowed the very next day.  About six inches fell in the city, and the temperatures dropped to something below -20C plus windchill (and boy, when the wind whips down the cross-streets off the rivers, the wind in New York really does chill).  As the new mayor, Bill de Blasio said as he declared a state of emergency across the city, it was "deceptively cold".  No kidding.

Still, it was okay if you wrapped up warm and weren't in a hurry.... we got up pretty early on the Friday  (thanks jetlag!) and got out to Central Park by about 8am before it was overrun by the sledgers.  It was lovely.

The city came to life slowly that morning, but it definitely didn't grind to a halt.  The streets were mostly pretty clear - the law says it's the responsibility of every building to clear the sidewalk in front of them, and fearing litigation, most people comply.  The snow ploughs had been out all night, so traffic was moving fairly smoothly and an enormous amount of salt was put down.  Apparently the freezing, salty slush that accumulates at every kerb is so painful on the pads of a dog's feet that most of them wear little wellington boots.  Quite the look.

The snow was nice - and the timing of our trip was perfect to avoid disruption at either end - but we weren't here to sightsee, we were here to hang out with our friends.....

Well, that and to enjoy a hotel that had a 44th floor penthouse swimming pool that overlooked Central Park.  We weren't really able to go running, but we were able to swim with what must be one of the finest views in the world.

We met Jane when we were travelling through southern Africa in May 2010 and we met Marissa when we went to Cambodia and Vietnam in the August/September of the same year.  In spite of being very different, they are both totally New York and they are both excellent company and both generously gave up their time to show us around the city.  Mostly, this meant eating enormous quantities of food in excellent restaurants (soup dumplings, mexican, pancakes and french toast so sweet that I think I got diabetes just looking at them, biscuits and gravy, BBQ....) and drinking booze and playing card games in some of their favourite bars.  I very much enjoy doing the tourist thing and looking at skyscrapers and museums and things, but you definitely get a completely different experience of the city when you are shown around the city by New Yorkers.  It was great to spend some quality time with them and with my wife, who for once didn't have anywhere else to be or anything else to be doing.

We did a bit of shopping, a lot of walking, went to the cinema to see "Nebraska", had a hidden statue of Lenin pointing towards Wall Street hidden away in plain sight on the top of a building pointed out to us by a fascinating cab driver, saw the hundreds of identically dressed hipsters in Williamsburg in Brooklyn (seriously, with their natty moustaches and their hats and their thick-framed glasses, do they really think they've being individuals?).   Brooklyn is nice enough, but if I was choosing a neighbourhood in NY to live, then I think I'd go for somewhere around the Meatpacking district or the West Village, maybe just off Bleeker Street.  Judging by the houses, I doubt I'd be able to afford anything, but they have really nice old record store there, so.... that would do nicely.  I bought some records, obviously.

Anyway.  It was a great trip.  Only four nights, but not a moment wasted.

New York is a great city and I can't wait to go back.  The people alone make it worthwhile.

cream. get on top (?)

I promise I'm not going to go on about our trip to Devon all week, but I can't very well finish talking about it without mentioning the food, can I?

In a word: amazing.

cream then jam or jam then cream?

Cream teas, obviously.  On the important question of clotted cream then jam, or jam then clotted cream, C deferred to me because my family are from Devon.  It's been so long since I had one that I'd actually forgotten how it was done.  Initially, I went for cream and then jam, but at the wedding in Tavistock, the scones were presented with the cream on top, which now I think about it seems to be much more sensible.  I can hear my paternal grandparents turning in their grave that I don't know this.  On the list of crimes in Devon, getting this wrong is probably only a little behind ordering a gin and tonic without using Plymouth Gin or asking for a "cornish pasty".  If it's anything like putting milk in your cup before the tea or afterwards, then one of these ways of putting a cream tea together is WRONG.  Which one, though?  Hmm.

Speaking of pasties, I had one of them too.  It was only from a little kiosk by the church in Widecombe-on-the-Moor, and it only cost me £2.50... but pound for pound it was probably the best thing that I ate all week.  As we sat there enjoying working our way through this massive heft of pasty, the kiosk was overrun by French bikers, on a roadtrip to the UK and extremely disgruntled by the picnic lunch laid on by the UK chapter of their club.  The guy we spoke to was muttering darkly about army biscuits with a strange liquid butter.  I think he was talking about a cream tea..... he was trying to order a cheeseburger, and was extremely sceptical when the lady behind the counter suggested a pasty instead.  C. intervened, and he sat down next to us and tucked in dubiously with his pocket knife and a fork.  Much to his surprise, he found it delicious, and was astonished to find that - apparently unusually for England - it was seasoned properly and was nice and peppery.

We ate well in our hotel too, both for dinner and with the full English breakfast each morning (and the St Austell beers were pretty good too).  The obvious highlight of the culinary week was our trip to Gidleigh Park... only two miles up the road from Chagford, but home to a two Michelin starred restaurant run by Michael Caines.

We had the eight course signature menu, accompanied by a "flight of wine", and for three hours we were able to sit back and enjoy some outstanding cooking and to enjoy the whole experience of having a sommelier explain the wine choice with every course.  It was amazing.   In fact, just so I can enjoy the thought of the meal all over again, here's the menu we had.

A delicious glass of properly good champagne accompanied by some appetisers (including a remarkable tomato consomme)
--
Warm salad of native lobster with a cardamon, lime and mango vinaigrette
served with a glass of Rias Baixas O'Rosal 2012 Terras Gauda
--
Terrine of foie gras with madeira jelly, truffled green bean salad
served with a glass of Mosel Riesling Kabinett 2011 Joh. Jos. Prum, Kabinnett, Wehlener Sonnenuhr (I'm no expert, but I thought this was the most harmonious combination of wine and food).
--
Cornish salt cod with Beesands crab, chorizo, samphire, tarragon and lemon puree
served with a glass of Seresin Chiarascura Chardonnay, Pinot Gris & Riesling 2009 Marlborough
--
Cornish duck with cabbage, smoked bacon, roast garlic, turnips and spice jus
served with a glass of Bergstrom Cumberland Reserve Pinot Noir 2010 Willamette Valley
--
Dartmoor lamb, boulangere potato and confit shoulder, fennel puree and a tapendade jus
served with a glass of Les Baux de Provence 2005 Henri Milan, Le Clos
--
A selection of South West Cheeses: Sharpham Elmhirst, West Country Cheddar, Little Stinky, Beauvale Blue
served with a glass of Port Lbv 2009 Quinta do Gaivosa (delicious, but a course made totally worth it just to hear a French sommelier explaining how the complexity of the port brought out the flavour of the "Leetel Steeenkee".)
--
Exotic Fruit salad: passion fruit sorbet and crystalline of pineapple
(it's always good to have a pre-dessert course, right?)
--
Plate of Apricot: apricot and almond nougatine parfait, apricot mousse and sorbet
served with a glass of Ruedera Chenin Blanc 2009 Stellenbosch.
--
Coffee and petit fours.

Words can hardly do justice to how good this meal was.  I preferred the white wines to the reds, on the whole, and I the foie gras and the salt cod were my two favourite courses, but it was a truly exceptional meal and I now want to go back as soon as possible with friends.  It's not an everyday kind of a meal, but once in a while it's a real treat.... not cheap, for sure, but still much better value than many of the restaurants in Nottingham.

I think I need to take more exercise to work that lot off.  Starting tomorrow, I'm going to cycle to work.  On top of everything else, obviously.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to learn how to fold up a shirt.

rabbit, rabbit, rabbit....

As you know, I like a bit of history.

I didn't actively go out seeking history on our holiday in Dartmoor last week... well, I suppose I did a bit: visits to castles and various National Trust properties probably count as seeking out history right?  Well, anyway.  I accidentally stumbled across some history as I was browsing the little shops in the centre of Chagford.

There's a little art gallery there, and it seemed to have an unusual number of pictures and sculptures of hares.  Now, I like hares.  They're beautiful and interesting animals.  To this day, I regret that we didn't buy a lovely ceramic sculpture of a hare that we saw when we were in a cafe in Ashbourne.  I paused to have a closer look at the pictures in the gallery, and saw that there was a leaflet there too about something called "The Three Hares Trail".  It turns out that there are a number of churches - seventeen, to be precise -  around Dartmoor that all have at least one roof boss depicting an ancient symbol of three hares or rabbits running in a circle and joined by their ears to form a triangle at the centre of the design. The symbol is a puzzle for each creature appears to have two ears yet, between them, they share only three ears.  I was intrigued, and as one of the seventeen churches was in Chagford itself, I headed over to have a look.

The symbol in Chagford is on the roof directly over the altar.  The little flyer detailing the history of the church that I picked up on the way in explained that the hares or rabbits were often associated with the tin miners in the area (who bred rabbits in warrens for food) and that the three represented the Trinity.

Hmm.  The leaflet I'd picked up in the gallery had mentioned that the three hares symbol can be found all over the world and many thousands of miles apart. According to the Three Hares Project, the earliest known examples of the motif date back to the 6th Century AD and are on the ceilings of Buddhist cave temples in Dunhuang, China - an important trading post. The symbol is also associated with Buddhism, Islam and Judaism as well as Christianity.  Not to mention the fact that the hare itself is an animal with strong links to magic and to paganism and has long been associated with fertility, the moon and the female reproductive cycle.

A sign of the Trinity?  Perhaps, but it feels as though there are other meanings going on here too and that the symbol's presence in these churches does not have such a straightforward interpretation.

Later that same day, we went out to Widecombe-on-the-Moor to have a look at the church there and to go for a walk on the moor.  There's a boss of the three hares on the roof there too, again close to the altar.  Again, the literature in the church itself links this to the Tin Miners (who paid for the addition of the famous church tower) and with the Trinity.  Looking at the positioning of the boss on the ceiling here, and it is surrounded by other bosses representing images that don't seem at all Christian to me: there are several Green Men, a boss featuring Gawain (of Green Knight fame, of course), bosses of Oak, Wormwood and Myrtle.

The boss of the hares here itself is called "The Hunt of Venus"... is it just me who thinks that the whole Trinity explanation of the significance of this symbol has been added somewhat after the event?  The whole thing reeks of paganism.  Not that this is a bad thing.... surely the story of Christianity is, above almost all else, a story of the triumph of adaptability?  Where do you think the Easter Bunny comes from?  Or the Christmas Tree? Or the celebration of Christmas around Midwinter?    These links to paganism are not to be feared or explained away, surely they're to be celebrated?

We went to a family wedding in Tavistock on the Saturday, and funnily enough there was a boss with the three hares there too, only this time the creatures depicted were categorically rabbits.  I suppose they superficially look the same, but anyone who has ever seen a hare with their own eyes will know that they're unmistakably hares and not rabbits.  These were rabbits.

Still, I was intrigued by the little slice of history that I'd stumbled across.  Every day is a school day.

Especially if you're a history geek.  It's everywhere and it's brilliant.

over the moor, take me to the moor....

In the last few years, I have been lucky enough to do a fair bit of travelling.  When we go on holiday though, we tend to go abroad.  In 2010 alone, when we took some time off work after my diagnosis with MS, we figured that life was too short and spent 9 months or so travelling around Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, USA, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Canada, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Austria.  That was an amazing year and we saw and did lots of incredible things.  Since then, I've been to Kenya, Tanzania, Canada, Austria.... just not the UK.  Sure, we go to Glastonbury most years, but that doesn't really count.

For the first time in a long time, we spent last week on holiday in Dartmoor National Park in Devon.  We walked, we did some diving, we attended a family wedding and we ate some lots of really good food and drank lots of some really good beer.

You know what?  Some of this country is incredibly beautiful.  Easily as lovely as almost anything that I have seen abroad.  I really should make more of an effort to discover more of it.

This is the White Lady Waterfall in Lydford Gorge.  My grandparents, my father's parents, used to live in Plymouth, so I spent many summer holidays in this area.  It was really nice to enjoy them again some twenty-five years later and to realise that I really should have paid more attention to the places my parents dragged me around when I was younger.  We even joined the National Trust, for goodness sake.  That makes me old, right?  I've put the membership sticker in the car, but it feels weird having it there and I've kept the backing to the sticker in case I decide to take it off again and keep it in the glove compartment until we need it next.

The view up from the Devil's Cauldron at Lydford Gorge.  Since I was last here, they've replaced the rickety, damp plank held up by rusty chains with a much more sturdy looking walkway, but the view remains just as splendid as it was before.

A sheep on the moorland above Widecombe-on-the-Moor in the heart of Dartmoor.

A Dartmoor pony and her foal.  It's a breed of horse entirely native to the UK and is hardy enough to survive the sometimes extreme conditions out on the moors, where they roam wild.  When we were walking, there were lots and lots of suckling foals.  They're wild, of course, but unlike Gerald the Gorilla, they're not livid and they actually seem pretty placid and tolerate having you walking around them.

Widecombe church is apparently sometimes called "the Cathedral of the Moors".  Well, I don't know about that, but I did eat a delicious pasty from a stall just over the road from it.

The weather was pretty good when we were there, but it can be famously changeable out on the moors.  We went for a walk near to Hound Tor - which apparently inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write his famous Sherlock Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The moorland is capped with many exposed granite hilltops - like this one - known as tors.  As I'm sure you already know, the granite upland that makes up the National Park dates from the Carboniferous period of geological history.

They do a pretty mean cream tea around here too, AND Plymouth Gin is the discerning cocktail maker's gin of choice.  What more do you need to know?  My dad's family are all from Devon, so I'm practically local.  Certainly more local - at least in genetic terms - than some of the very posh sounding old people who seem to have bought up a load of the houses in Chagford, where we were staying, anyway.... but who can really blame them for moving somewhere so beautiful? A place where they serve local ice cream with a topping of fresh clotted cream?

It was lovely.... just don't trust your satnav to take you anywhere around here.  It might be technically taking you on the shortest route, but take my advice and buy an atlas instead.  An atlas will show you roads that are big enough to leave more than about an inch on each side of your car between very solid looking dry stone walls.  That way you don't have to worry what you're going to do when you meet a Land Rover coming in the other direction.

I'm just saying.

all the power's in the hands of the people rich enough to buy it...

After months of unrest and violence, escalating in the wake of the removal of President Morsi at the beginning of July, Egypt has declared a state of national emergency.  The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is advising that, "In view of continued unrest and the evolving political situation in Egypt, the FCO advise against all but essential travel to the rest of Egypt".

Sad, but also fairly predictable.  When C. and I were looking around for a diving holiday at the start of February, we considered Sharm el Sheikh, but decided instead to go to the Canary Islands.  The Red Sea resorts were supposed to be okay then, and the FCO has specifically excluded them from their current advice not to travel to Egypt... it's just that we decided that it didn't seem right to be enjoying a luxury resort in a country when people were fighting and dying in the capital.  Lanzarote might not have been as hot as the Red Sea at that time of the year, but my lily-livered, Guardian reading liberal conscience slept a lot sounder.

I have a 23 year old colleague in my office called Emma.  She's training to be a project manager and she's hard-working and tenacious and all of those good things.  She also has a lovely air of, if not exactly naivety - that would be going too far - then definitely innocence.  She asks the most remarkable questions in the most unguarded way.  She's not stupid, but she's also not very worldly and isn't afraid to say the most astonishing things.  She asked us the other day to confirm that gravity had nothing to do with magnetism, which we were clearly happy to do.  Schrodinger's cat fairly blew her mind, and she also seemed to struggle with the idea that the Earth is a planet and not a star, no matter what it looks like in the sky in that photo taken from orbit around Saturn.  As I say, she's not stupid by any means, but she's quite innocent and not afraid to ask questions about all sorts of things that she doesn't understand.  She's lovely, actually, and she's a good person to have in the team.

Anyway.  A few weeks ago, Emma was looking to book a holiday for October.  One of her friends was suggesting Sharm, and she wanted to know what I thought.  I told her that, although it was probably safe enough, I would book elsewhere and outlined my reasons why.  She looked thoughtful, and then when I saw her next, she told me that she had booked that holiday in Egypt.  She then proceeded to spend an awful lot of time, every single day, fretting about the political situation in Egypt and wondering if everything was going to be okay and if she was covered by her insurance if she had to cancel.  You can well imagine that today she's been going out of her mind about it.
"If you're worried, then why did you book it?"
"Well, it was really cheap".

I suppose there's no arguing with that kind of logic, is there?  I have to admit that I wouldn't feel comfortable sat in my all-inclusive resort - no matter how cheap - as people die in violent clashes with the security forces in the country around me.  Even less so now than when we were booking that trip in February.  I suppose that's a conscience I can afford to have.