I’m a Berliner now
I was in Germany in April 2023, I’d been to Leipzig for the Bach 300 festival before catching a train for ten great days in Berlin. A city I last visited in the late 1990s, just a few years after…
I was in Germany in April 2023, I’d been to Leipzig for the Bach 300 festival before catching a train for ten great days in Berlin. A city I last visited in the late 1990s, just a few years after…
Even people who don’t think they like classical music know and even like at least some of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750). Those who love classical music are mostly in consensus that he was probably the…
I was checked in at the Old Metekhi Hotel over-looking the Mtkvari River in Tbilisi, Georgia , on 13th September 2022, after a booking that had been made in 2019, long before Covid changed everyone’s plans. I was here to…
I was in Finland in August and September 2022 and, when I was staying in Helsinki, it was relatively easy to get a train for the 24 mile journey to a place I had read about often and wondered what…
In September 2022, after a wonderful time at the Sibelius Festival in Lahti, I stayed on in Finland for another week and moved to Helsinki, a place that everyone I know who has been there to told me that I…
My first sighting of Finland, land of lakes, forests, saunas and music, seen from the air on a scheduled flight to Helsinki. It all started six months earlier, in the Runaway Cafe on platform two at Lewes Station, UK, my…
This was in June 2022, my first foreign trip after Covid decided to keep us all home for a couple of years. I had been going on holiday to Italy annually for ten years. I love the place, the culture…
In December 2019, I spent a week in Milan. It was raining, no surprise there for this part of Italy during December. It was wet but achingly beautiful. As a fashion-shopping mecca internationally, not even the rain could dampen its…
In September 2017, when I was looking at Mount Vesuvius from Sorrento, across the Bay of Naples, I thought of Pliny the Younger (born 61 AD), as you do, who wrote a detailed description of the catastrophic eruption of the…
Troy myth and reality. At the beginning of 2020, I spent a week in Naples and visited the fateful ruins at Pompeii where you have to think about the disaster that befell the folks there in in the year 79…