Category Archives: Out and about

Joining the Facebook group, ‘Disused Stations,’ I wondered what it was that prompted a fascination with former railway stations, some of which closed sixty years ago. Among my railway books, there is one with a particular capacity to revive vivid … Continue reading →

Christmas is past and thoughts turn to summer. Sailing from Rosslare to Cherbourg on 3rd June, I am planning to pay my respects at Juno Beach in Normandy before going to the Western Front. More specifically, going to Flanders, to … Continue reading →

In childhood years, we thought the railway line that passed by my grandfather’s farm at Pibsbury was the most important line in the country. As a teenager,  I remember someone from elsewhere challenging my description of the railway as “the … Continue reading →

I must declare an interest. My mother’s family have been farmers for generations, raising stock, milking cows, growing crops, in a small area of Somerset, definitely since the Eighteenth Century, and probably for centuries prior to their recorded activities on … Continue reading →

‘Hell is other people’ wrote Jean Paul Sartre in his 1944 play No Exit. Watching a television production of the play in my teenage years, it would have been hard to disagree with such a description of the plight of the … Continue reading →