units of mesaure

I was chatting to Mike @ realdadshangout earlier about stuff and the age-old subject of measurement came up, him being from the US of A and me being Brit. I grew up in the UK to feet, miles, inches, yards, pints, gallons, pounds and stones. This is despite being born the year the system was supposed to have changed to metric. In theory I…

Around the World

In response to Lauren@Salt Says and her post about favourite cities, I thought I’d do a little post-let. I did a bit of this before in this post https://charliebrown888.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/destinations/ but now I’m going to do a little one line review of each of these cities to help you all with your holiday plans 🙂 Glasgow:  interesting, Scottish, incomprehensible, wet, grand, historic Aberdeen: grey, cold,…

travel

I haven’t had to travel for my current job, which has been a bit of a blessing compared to the previous 12 years where I have travelled often and far and wide. Business travel is not as glam as it is cracked up to be and often involves just very long and unsociable hours, lost weekends and only seeing the inside of the airport,…

favourite place

Everyone has a favourite place in the whole world. It might be your garden, somewhere you went on holiday, your bed (as in the case of Jay, who loves her bed more than anywhere else) or somewhere you grew up. In my case, this place is Oldbury Woods, nr Ightham in Kent. I grew up a few hundred metres from this place and spent…

castles (part3)

So, the last castle we actually went to visit properly was Hever Castle, only 30 mins drive from my mum and dads house. Hever Castle is another fairytale castle, complete with moat, drawbridge and portcullis, surrounded by sculpted parklands with a maze and a Tudor village too. Its a fabulously beautiful place. Similar to the others, it has its foundations in 13th Century, with…

castles (part2)

Leeds Castle was cool, a bit too cool actually, we ended up tired and cold and missed the driving rain by seconds as we got back to the car. The next day was completely different – sunny and warm with a gentle breeze, so we went about a mile down the road to Ightham Mote, a wonderful moated medieval manor house, dating from 1320,…

castles castles and more castles (part 1)

The thing about England (and the rest of the UK come to that) is that almost everybody lives in a castle. There are simply millions of the things scattered about the country that if you don’t live in one, you live next door to one or a pile of stones that used to be one. I’m not even kidding – where I grew up…

more tall tales..

so, how far did I get? I’ve been so busy and also sick (with special thanks to my children for their so far unblemished record in handing over the lurgey baton when I see them) that blogging was placed on the back burner. So, Easter Sunday was spent at my sisters: Ava is my youngest sister’s smallest child – she’s ever so sweet, very…

tall tales from the motherland

So, as my one regular reader will know, I’m back in England for 10 days to see my beautiful children. I’ve had a great week so far, starting with breakfast at Pat and Nicky’s straight out of Heathrow. They weren’t up when I got there, but Nicky and Anna (their cute very nearly 4 year old) soon answered the door and made me coffee…

more Melbourne pics

Last photos from Melbourne I promise These are general shots of Melbourne people plus the cool street art of Fitzroy, just outside the CBD. Ideally, I’d like to go back there on a sunnier day with more time and just the Holga.