How many different kinds of transportation can you think of? The obvious include bikes, cars, planes, trains, boats. Of course our own two feet are a means of transport. Then there are the animals pressed into service such as horses, camels and donkeys. All over the world people make different transport choices depending on local customs and resources.
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One thing I learned during the pandemic was that it is possible to have a good time holidaying in my own country. With travel abroad impossible we turned to UK options and managed to have several lovely short trips in the spaces between lockdowns. And of course like everyone, we explored our immediate area more thoroughly than in the past, seeking out places we’d never previously visited or finding new surprises in old haunts.
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Although August has been hot, mostly sunny and very dry, I can already sense that summer is closer to its end than its beginning. The lights are going on earlier each evening. The warmth of the sun is tempered by a cooling breeze. And a few showers, and one day of steady rain, have started to re-green the weary grass in our parks.
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A year ago we were in Paris, on our first trip abroad since the pandemic had started. It felt strange, but good, to be travelling again after almost two years.
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There is something about the idea of a corner. Who knows what might be around it? Whether on a city street or a quiet country lane, there is a sense of anticipation about what might be revealed.
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Thomas Jefferson said, 'The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.' This is a maxim I would do well to follow, but I too rarely succeed in doing so.
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In 1132 a small group of monks left their Benedictine Monastery in York, fed up with the extravagant and rowdy lifestyle of the monks there. Seeking a more devout and simple way of life, they were granted a parcel of land by the River Skell where they built a small wooden church and applied, successfully, to join the Cistercian order.
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Burning Man is a unique event that takes place every year in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, USA. But we are not in the deserts of Nevada; we are among the green hills of England’s Peak District.
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When Alexander Hadfield, a tailor, ordered a bale of cloth to be sent from London to his home in the small Derbyshire village of Eyam, he cannot have dreamed of the dreadful consequences. Nor could he have dreamed that this simple action would be remembered centuries later.
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Somehow, getting up early to watch a sunrise is so much easier when travelling. Of course it helps that the setting is usually both more beautiful and more interesting than the rooftops of our London suburbs above which we would normally see it rise.
