St Albans clock tower

We recently had a lovely picnic in St Albans with a couple of our good friends who live there. I’ve always loved the town and it’s a great place to visit whether you’re a shopper or a tourist. The central part of the high street is pretty with a beautiful clock tower right in the centre, apparently the only medieval clock tower in the country.

One of our friends mentioned that you can climb the tower and I jumped at the chance. After giving the lovely old ladies 80p for a ticket at the entrance I heard the bell strike for three o’clock. They told me I was lucky I was on the ground floor and it was only after I got up to the belfry that I realised what they meant – the bell is BIG and you get to stand within an arm’s length of it. Being next to it and thinking that it could be struck at any time scared the wits out of me – I had visions of jumping at the sound and tumbling down the spiral staircase back to the entrance – so I legged it up to the rooftop.

The view from the top is fantastic – you get to see the cathedral as well as a lot of the town and surrounding countryside. On top of this, the masonry was covered with grafitti going back to the 1800s which completely fascinated me. I had the same spooky feeling I get when I see a photo of somewhere I know that was taken decades ago and can’t help thinking about the people that have stood in the same place years before. I took some pictures on my Blackberry but the camera is pretty crappy:

If you want to see more, take a look at the set I’ve uploaded to Flickr.

If you visit St Albans, have 30 minutes to spare, are happy to climb an extremely narrow spiral staircase and want to chance your luck with the giant bell, it’s worth a visit!

Visitors from NYC

We recently had the pleasure of Marc, Rachel and Jonah staying with us for a week on a trip over from NYC.  They’re even lovelier than we remembered, and it was great to meet Jonah.

Rachel has put up some photos from their trip.

The Rex…of Cyprus?

Saw this building while on holiday in September and it made me chuckle – thousands of miles apart from our Rex in Berko but I am sure many happy nights have been spent watching movies here too.

Turning 30 on New Year’s Eve

I just had to get this post in before January was over!

I turned 30 on New Year’s Eve and to mark the occasion we had hired The Old Neptune, a wonderful 15th century house in the centre of Ipswich. My wife had arranged everything (wonderful as she is); in order to secure the house over the New Year period we had to get a committed bunch of friends together and book it up in early 2005, which we managed to do. Although at first glance it seemed quite expensive, when divided up between 24 people and paid for in stages it didn’t seem that much.

The place looked amazing on the website and the rooms looked gorgeous. In order to make sure that everyone got a fair chance of bagging one of the bigger/ older rooms, a couple of weeks before we went we put everyone’s name into a bag and made a video of a ‘live’ draw which we then posted on YouTube for all to see.

In reality the place was even better than it had looked on the website. To be able to enjoy the gorgeous front room and fire, lovely big kitchen and the wonderful dining room with so many good friends was just great.

A few of us had organised a quiz for the first night and we had karaoke and dancing on the second (which degenerated into a bizarre hatfest) – it was only by the third evening that I went to bed even vaguely sober!

For my 30th my wife made me a wonderful book with photos from my very early years all the way up to present day – a really great gift.

In the daytime we headed off to some of the lovely surrounding villages for some winter walks and pub lunches – Felixstowe was lovely (cheese and pineapple toasties, anyone?), we had a bite to eat at the King’s Head in Woodbridge and an enjoyable wander around the pretty village of Aldeburgh.

Thanks to everyone for making my 30th such a fun and special one. More photos in the Flickr group.

Not flying short haul

As the months and years roll by I find myself questioning more and more things that I do. I’ve been asked to go to Zürich for some meetings in a couple of weeks; a little while ago I would have been looking forward to a business class flight and eating out on expenses for a few nights but now the first thing that pops into my head is how bad the trip will be for the environment. There are stories appearing every day about the Siberian permafrost melting and revealing loads of woolly mammoth tusks as it does so (if that doesn’t mean much then take a look at the definition of permafrost) and the polar ice dramatically disappearing. I don’t really want to contribute to that more than I do already.

Yes, I know that I can carbon offset my flights but what good does that really do? The Carbon Trust aren’t a charity and to quote Rob Newman I can’t see them funding a project to put Bangladesh on stilts any time soon. Who they are, where they come from, who regulates them and how they came up with their pricing scheme is a bit of a mystery.

So, I’ve taken the step of looking into how to get from London to Zürich by rail. As soon as I did so I came across a splendid website which not only explains exactly how to do it but much more besides. If you’re off to Europe and enjoy travelling or simply hate flying then I seriously suggest you check it out. There are suggested routes, tips on how to get the best fares and information and pictures on the different types of carriage you can expect to encounter. The site also makes the point that a tonne of carbon dioxide emitted from a plane does 2.7 times the damage of it being emitted at ground level.

Basically, a trip to Zürich via Paris will take the best part of a day. I figured I could probably travel on a Monday and then get a sleeper service back to Paris through Friday night/ Saturday morning. I raised the thought with a few people at work today and can report that 80% think I’m nuts to even consider it. For example, when I called the travel desk to enquire whether they handled train bookings and said that I wanted to go to Zürich I was asked “Why on earth would you want to do that?” I lamely responded “Green reasons…” and started to feel a little bit nuts myself – hopefully she didn’t think that I had an obsessive colour preference or some kind of nasal condition. My boss called me “Swampy.” More seriously, he made the point that the time wouldn’t be as productive as time spent in the office – this is true, but during the whole office/ airport/ queue for security/ departure lounge/ short haul flight with food/ passport control-taxi rigmarole there is no opportunity to get a lot done whereas on a train I could at least work offline for a few hours. I might even catch up with all the emails and documents I’ve been meaning to read and get one or two of my own written.

In terms of cost, there isn’t that much of a difference between a first-class train fare and return business class flights; the train fares just seem a bit more random depending on what website, currency and method you choose to buy them.

I must admit that I do have utopian dreams of setting an example that the whole company begins to follow but in reality I know that I’d just be doing it because I believe it’s right. Plus, it would be great to see a bit of where I’m travelling to on the way.

What do you think? Have I lost the plot or am I right to be pursuing this?

Hotel reviews

I had my first hotel review published on tripadvisor.com this week. If you haven’t been there, tripadvisor is a great website that hosts zillions of reviews of hotels all over the world. It’s great when you’re booking a last minute break and the travel agent website tells you what a fabulous hotel they have on offer – you can look it up on tripadvisor to see if it’s really a stinker.

The Raheem Residency didn’t have a single review and we had such a wonderful time there that I thought I’d give something back.

Once upon a time. not too long ago…

…took a day out in Manchester, as the song goes. Well, it was a weekend out actually – Katie and I recently went up to Manchester for a birthday party and decided to make a weekend of it. I’d only been to Manchester once before and that was for a whistlestop trip when my brother was ill in hospital quite a few years ago. I was really pleasantly surprised by the place. We stayed at a good hotel and did quite a bit of sightseeing and shopping and all the time it felt a bit like a smaller version of central London but without the crowds of people everywhere.

The architecture in central Manchester is gorgeous and they’ve done a great job of blending new things like the G-Mex centre and the area around The Lowry with the older features. If you’re a city lover like me it’s definitely worth a trip.

Photo set now on Flickr.

Train arrivals

Going to pick up someone from the station but not sure if their train is running late? You can now check using the live arrivals board on the National Rail Enquiries website. Or you can do it by text message. Great stuff.

The loudest tears on the way home

On my journey home on the train last night a young child in my carriage was having the loudest crying fit that I’ve heard for quite some time. You know something is loud and out-of-the-ordinary when people on the train actually start looking at each other – yes, acknowledging each other’s presence – and smiling in a “can you believe how loud that is?” sort of way. I can’t believe what a state children can get themselves worked up into! You just want to ask them what really could be so bad. Like these things do, it stopped almost as abruptly as it started and left an eerie silence on the carriage.

As I was busy sorting a few emails out on my PDA at the time and found that I couldn’t concentrate I quickly hit the record button with the intention of posting it here, but, listening to it now out of context, it just sounds harrowing and horrible. Consider yourself spared.

Sliding into a cold swimming pool

I’ve been going back through my collection of Flickr photos and renaming them so that they make a little more sense when stumbled across. Currently most of them are called something like ‘DSC000236′ which isn’t that descriptive. I came across one from our holiday in Turkey last year where I was trying to get into the pool without actually touching the water and it reminded me of a video we took; I’ve uploaded it here for your enjoyment. There’s more where that came from so watch this space! )