Kingston-upon-Hull, or Hull as everybody knows it, has been chosen by Rough Guides as one of its top 10 cities of the world to visit in 2016. As it notes, “things are finally looking up for Hull”, far out in the East Riding of Yorkshire in the East, which is why so few of us go there. It’s… Continue reading
Browsing Category Travel
A Child’s Christmas – in New York and Swansea
This Christmas season, 2015, Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is being performed in two very appropriate places (as well as in many other venues in the English speaking world) – in Swansea, where Dylan was born in 1914, and New York, where he died in 1953. The Swansea production, at the Dylan Thomas… Continue reading →
A Child’s Christmas in Wales comes to Dylan’s home.
Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales is set in epic snow “as white as Lapland”. This year, 2010, snow fit for Dylan’s famous story fell on Swansea.
Continue reading →From old Eastern Bloc crock to cool powerhouse – Leipzig’s soar story
Leipzig, the great city of Bach and Mendelson, has made a remarkable, if belated, advance since the days of the Monday Prayer meetings in St Nicholas Church (Nikolaikirche), the peaceful cradle to the peaceful overthrow of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall. (This is an account of my recent visit.) At first the economy… Continue reading →
How Donegal’s brief encounter became permanent promotion
There’s a key scene in Brief Encounter when Laura and Alec reach the station where they are to part for the last time. She (Celia Johnson) tells him (Trevor Howard) “I will walk past here many more times, but not with you.” I don’t know how often they changed advertising posters at stations in those… Continue reading →
A trip to Planète Mars – gritty, culturally-diverse Marseille
With the start of direct Eurostar trains from London last May [2015], the rebirth of this once run-down and edgy Mediterranean port is complete. Crumbling shops and factories have become cool designer B&Bs, galleries and concert halls. The famous old harbour has been renewed by Britain’s Norman Foster. And they make the perfect bouillabaisse…. Continue reading →