It is early September in 2023, I am sitting in a rocking chair in a cottage, a converted 19th century log house, in a little village called Virtaa, 7.7 kilometres from a small town called Sysmä. The cottage is in…
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…
On the 7th September 2022, during the second week of my trip to Finland, I got a ferry across the Gulf of Finland, in the Baltic Sea, from Helsinki to Tallinn, the capital of the Republic of Estonia. From one…
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…
I spent a week in Naples in January 2020, and on a sunny winter’s day, I took the train to Pompeii, the ancient Roman city that was destroyed by a cataclysmic eruption of the volcanic mountain of Vesuvius in AD…
On the 6th January 2020 I returned to Naples not realising it was going to be my last foreign journey anywhere for two years. On 31st January two Chinese tourists in Rome were tested positive for the Covid virus and…
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…