Happy to share this blog with anyone who finds it of interest. But it grew out of the notebooks I started keeping when our winter travels began after we retired in 2000. It was some time before I began putting them online and this is actually the second host site. At first they existed as both handwritten notebooks and blog posts and then a few years ago the handwritten versions ceased, in part because they didn’t include photos but largely because having them meant writing the initial entries and then transcribing them. That made sense when we had only intermittent access to computers and the internet but not once we travelled with tablets and wifi was everywhere.
Still, their chief value is for us as a reminder of the places we’ve been and the people we’ve shared our life with. The blog is searchable which is handy if we want to know what year we went to Romania or how much we paid for wine twenty years ago. And we trip over funny or quirky memories in the search. Like this fragment from Larnaca in 2013:
Walking down to meet J for coffee when a car pulls over to the curb. Do I speak English, asks the nondescript man inside. Yes, I say, assuming he is looking for directions. Slowly he introduces himself. I - hairdresser - cut - set. No thank you, I say, before the painful process can be drawn out longer. But no hairdresser looks for business by curb crawling. In fact, he reminds me of a man that I once saw exposing himself in the walkway under the road by Finchley Road tube station, so under-equipped for the display that it wasn't at first obvious what he was doing. I feel I should have given today's man pointers. Try it on with someone much younger - and maybe go with I photographer - studio - model.