Padas White Water Rafting – Team Capsize

On a white water rafting trip with two people who cannot swim to save their lives, you KNOW a name like Team Capsize will rankle. We even had a team cheer – “We want…we want…capsize! capsize!”, to the cheer of Queen’s “We Will Rock You”. A haunting cheer, indeed; but one that never worked. I [...]

Yorkshire – Day 5 – Ripon and Lightwater Valley

Breakfast – Bangers, Beans, Peach Slices, Cornflakes Miracle of all miracles – the boys took it upon themselves to clean up their rooms, the entire campsite, AND hoover the entire building to boot by 9am. One suspects it has everything to do with the fact that the Lightwater Valley trip would end at 2pm no [...]

Yorkshire – Day 4 – To Knaresborough and Harrogate

After lunch – an utterly sumptuous baked potato and cheese melt experience, the fact that the boys were holed up with the Casino Royale DVD permanently in their sauna-like bedroom, which had had the heating on for 4 days now, as we belatedly realised, detracted from the pleasure somewhat. Still, with 2 consecutive meals, they [...]

Yorkshire – Day 4 – Rained Out!

If, the day before, we had been in self-imposed dormancy in the campsite on account of the weather, today, paradoxically we spent as much of it OUT as possible despite the worsening weather. Breakfast – Bangers, Beans and Cornflakes After that meal, we headed out to Pateley Bridge at 8am for the carboot sale; there [...]

Yorkshire – Day 3 – Rained In!

Breakfast – Bangers, Beans and Cornflakes Breakfast today – a far more subdued affair, given that it had been pouring maniacally the night before. The temperature had sunk into the mid-teens, and they say it’s summer. After grub, we shepherded the whole camp to Pateley Bridge, this time via the river route. On the way, [...]

Yorkshire – Day 2 – Becoming Brit

BREAKFAST – Bangers, Beans and Cornflakes My production – conceivably, as a vegetarian, I would avoid cooking meat like the plague, but I have absolutely no compunctions about feeding other people and accelerating their atherosclerosis via bangers that are dripping in cholestrol, fat and all that makes them ooze with a certain genteel charm. Over [...]

Yorkshire – Day 1 – Fly by Night

Nicholas nicholas86@gmail.com reports The moment the exams ended, you know you had a problem. With barely 3 hours’ shut-eye in between, punctuated by a good pizza buffet, we (me and Gan) showed up at Byker Community Centre, disheveled, to say the least. With 2 mini  backpacks between us, we were dwarfed by our boys, who [...]

Books of Birmingham

And the travelogue marches on, less sporadically than one originally intended, due to stroke of good fortune. Am right now in my mother’s sixth form classmate’s house (in Coventry), sans said classmate (working in London), after surprising his wife by showing up at the doorstep, bag, dirty laundry, and sundry all in hand. I was, [...]

Vienna – Day 1

welcome back, readers of my sporadic travelogue! After 2 weeks solid travelling, have ended up in Vienna, with a view of getting a good mugshot of famous composers today. All dead, mind you. Mozart, Strauss and Beethoven are all buried here, according to the friendly Vienna map I have been frantically attempting to read. If [...]

Day 2 – John O Groats to Glasgow

Today was the designated travelling day; and travel we certainly did. From JoG back to Glasgow, there was barely enough time for us to grab our grub, grub being a good trip to the breakfast table, loading up on 5 varieties of cornflake, enough rounds of cooked breakfast to give us a particularly nasty form [...]