A short drive south of Avignon is the village of Eyragues, where I spent a few days at a house belonging to a friend of a friend. A former farmhouse with attached barn it had been partly converted by a painter before the current owner took it on, opening up the garden, finishing the conversion …
Month: Sep 2019
They are like buses …
Foucalt's pendulums, that is. You wait for one for ages and then along come two at once! Having seen the one in the Musée des arts et métiers earlier I was visiting the Pantheon the next day and the copy that Napoleon III ordered be constructed is hanging from the dome there. Much bigger than …
Foucault’s pendulum …
I was taken to the Musée des Arts et Métiers when I was in Paris last year and I thought it a worthwhile place to revisit with my sisters. We went by Metro to the museum, and the metro station itself is well worth a visit, copper clad walls and with pieces of 'machinery' protruding …
We’ll always have Paris …
Places like Paris evoke thoughts, expectations, memories and more. There's a lot of history to absorb, some of which I have heard from the English point of view and thus not always exactly factual! And that phrase, "We'll always have Paris ..." Well, we nearly didn't, and it was the act of a selfless German …
On the rails again …
Today we are changing countries, and one of my sisters has never been in a country in which the populations speaks anything other than English so she will have some adjusting to do. The morning was a bit of a dawdle with a late start, a few conversations along the way, and then the Tube …
This service has been suspended ….
Fortunately I was on it at the time, and doubly fortunate that the suspension point was were I was intending to go to anyway. Train services are suspended for many reasons and the London Underground has an app that tells you what is wrong, the expected delays and lots of other info. Tonight the cause …
The people you meet …
There was a reason for going to Liverpool on my travels this year, my younger sister has another family, and she had not met them before. This trip was to get everyone together and talk about the past many years ... We left Liverpool in 1962, as part of an Australian government sponsored migration effort …
Reflections on … retailing
In which the reader will find disconnected jottings and musings that wouldn't make much of a post on their own … As you may know, I've worked in retailing for quite a part of my life, from small specialists shops to large department stores and timber and hardware companies. I accompanied my sisters in shopping …
We’ve got one to spare …
Peter McGovern's 'In my Liverpool Home' notes that if you want a cathedral "we've got one to spare ..." and there are indeed two cathedrals in Liverpool, at opposite ends of the same street, perhaps fittingly called Hope Street. The Anglican Cathedral Church of Christ was only finished in the late 70's and is a …
Ainsdale …
I took a train to Ainsdale, to the north of Liverpool, to see a chocolate maker who is a friend of one of my Melbourne friends. Ainsdale has a pleasant, village kind of atmosphere, with a neat main street, pretty houses and it's near the water. There is a good range of shops including a …
EUlogising Europe 2019 