I woke up the other morning – and saw a few leaves falling from the tree in my back garden. It was also a tad chilly. Not cold – just chilly. A harbinger of things to come. As George R R Martin wrote : Winter is Coming. I was born and raised in a hot…
Rat (Ratty to his friends) was so right … There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats … I read the Wind In The Willows as a child – living in Queensland. The nearest significant water was the Myall Creek – some 17 miles…
I love museums – they’re fascinating places full of really really old and interesting things. They house ancient statues and primitive tools – the riches of long dead Kings – that sort of stuff. Imagine then, the double take I did when I saw something all too familiar in a museum… something I had…
It’s really strange to suddenly find yourself in the midst of one of your old school text books. Even in Australia we were taught about Sutton Hoo – the burial mounds in Suffolk that contained an Anglo-Saxon ship and a vast treasure. I now know we were taught just a tiny part of a…
I love a ghost story. And a legend. And music. So it was inevitable that while in the American south on holidays, I should go in search of the ghost of Robert Johnson. We found his grave – all three of them .. and the crossroads where he sold his soul to the devil.…
I can remember the day Elvis died. I was a teenager, the most junior reporter at a TV news station in Australia. When the news broke, my boss immediate scheduled the Elvis story as the lead item for that night’s news. I was confused – the idealistic, university-student me thought news was about politics…
Like so many people, I’ve seen Gone With the Wind. My vision of the American deep south was very much formed by Clark Gable’s charm and Vivien Leigh’s accent. I didn’t really believe either were strictly accurate, so on our Mississippi River road trip, I was very keen to visit some of the plantations…
Continuing my blogs about my US road trip – I thought I should talk about the cause of the whole venture – the Mississippi River. At school we were taught that the Mississippi is one of the largest rivers in the world (4th longest I believe). We learned about its role in opening America…