This weekend I’ve been on the Devon/Cornwall border. On Saturday afternoon I was lucky enough to be a camp follower of the Welsh invasion of Trebarwith Strand – a coastal area about two and a half miles south of Tintagel in North cornwall. It’s a magical place, with a stream running down to the beach [...]

I was very kindly invited to one of the Secretary of State for Wales’ get-togethers tonight at the Wales Office in Whitehall. I won’t list the raft of Welsh MPs, peers and assorted journalists that were there, but it was a very interesting evening – I got the opportunity to talk about my childhood memories [...]

I went to Southend on Sea earlier today, and it was closed. No seriously, I arrived in Southend at the main railway station, Southend Victoria, and then walked through the newly refurbished Victoria Shopping Centre, that leads from the station to the top of the main street down to the front. A lovely shopping centre [...]

Translation: ‘Welcome to Cardiff‘ So, I ended up in Cardiff (specifically in Cardiff Bay) yesterday for a meeting at the Wales Office and had some time afterwards to wander around. It’s amazing how the area has been transformed since I used to stay in a flat in Bute Town many years ago when were having [...]

We tried out another City of London walk today, “Finsbury Circus to Tower Hill”, which we found here. This one is a little shorter than the walk we took a while ago and takes in fewer gardens, but we started off somewhere that wouldn’t look out of place as an ‘on location’ spot for filming [...]

Excuse me for using a post title that only the most dedicated Star Trek fans will get, but I was in Nottingham yesterday and can’t help myself. The quote comes from one of the very few genuinely funny Next Generation episodes which involved the meddlesome ‘Q’ transporting the crew to the Middle Ages… I was [...]

The motto above is the one adopted by the City I visited today; Wolverhampton, in the West Midlands. The City (a town until the year 2000, when it became one of the millenium cities, along with Brighton and Inverness) was founded around 985AD by Lady Wulfruna, a powerful Saxon noblewoman of Mercia. A statue of [...]