This is the last commissioned piece I wrote for a national newspaper. I completed it before breakfast on March 24th, 2020, the day the first lockdown started. It was never used. Wales has more castles per square mile than anywhere in the world, still magnificent and solid, from the centre of Cardiff to placid West… Continue reading
Browsing Category Travel
Slimming down Wales’s scenic railway survivor
Good things are happening on the railways of Wales. New trains, electrified lines, faster journeys, more late trains, more frequent services, extra seats and the promise of new services, such as a competitor to GWR speeding up trains from West Wales to London.(Due in late 2027.) But it’s not all advance and improvement. We… Continue reading →
Parade’s End Country – Ford Maddox Ford’s south coast setting
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 →
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 →