Coming completely fresh to Parade’s End, in the new BBC adaptation, I found concentrating on the plot and characters challenging enough, without giving any regard to the locations. Quite early on there is a scene outside a grand house in the North where the Benedict Cumberbatch character, Christopher Tietjens, grew up. I discovered later this… Continue reading
Browsing Category Travel
How Dylan found poetic inspiration above a Camarthenshire estuary
“Jack Kerouac, all the beat poets, were obsessed by him. When he spoke at 92NY, he was about to finish without reciting a poem of his called Fern Hill, and the audience started to chant ‘Fern Hill! Fern Hill!’ It’s kind of staggering to think that a poet of his time would sell out this enormous… Continue reading →
LA drive to the hill of dreams – how I made it to Hollywood, without a nomination
I wrote this in 2011, more in tribute to the liberating power of satnav (then very new) than as a homage to Hollywood, which is really a world-wide community of sitting with strangers in a darkened space and being transporting to the far corners of the imagination by images and music. ‘Hollywood is on a hill,… Continue reading →
Across Turkey by train
The first 30 years of Turkey’s tourism story has been utterly dominated by air travel, and more recently cruise ships. It’s the rare intrepid visitor who drives all the way. But now the train is becoming a realistic travel option within Turkey, and even an alternative way to get there. While we continue to fret over… Continue reading →
Under Milk Wood – 70 years on
The BBC first broadcast Under Milk Wood, “‘A Play for Voices”, on the Third Programme on 25 January 1954 (two months after Thomas’s death). The play featured a distinguished, all-Welsh cast including Richard Burton. Dylan Thomas knew Under Milk Wood was good, even in its hurried, jumbled, unfinished form in which he gave several performances in 1953, with a cast,… Continue reading →
90 years ago, Patrick Leigh Fermor sets off on his great walk to Constantinople
Irongate Wharf, the exact spot where Patrick Leigh Fermor left England in the Stadthouder Willem, as he recounted in A Time of Gifts 90 years ago this month, on the ebbing afternoon of Saturday, December 9th, 1933, a young man of 19, shrugging off a hangover, with a backpack borrowed from a friend, walked under… Continue reading →