I’m not a reliable blogger, except while I am travelling, but sometimes I just need to record an observation or vent some spleen. This is the second edition of my Wordpress site but I have kept the archive from my original WordPress blog, which lasted for six years. It’s a personal and fairly public diary and one little contribution to shedding light on the past, or at least hurling creative abuse at it.
Most of our holidays over the last few years have involved long-distance walks. For most of them, I’ve journaled through one or other of the blogs. Here’s an index, although some links are only to slideshows:
Our September 2024 trip to Portugal, Spain and the USA included the Portuguese Camino.
May 2023: Ireland and south-west England, including the South West Coast Path from Torquay to Lyme Regis
October 2022: France and England (Bordeaux, Normandy, Somerset, Derbyshire)
• Bordeaux
• Normandy
• Somerset
• Derbyshire
April 2022: The Great Ocean Walk, Victoria
September/October 2019: Tuscany and Umbria — ‘La Tuscia’ walk, with trips to Siena, Florence, Lake Como and Milan
April 2019: The Queen Charlotte Track, New Zealand
October 2018: Scotland and London: the ‘Great Glen’ Walk
November/December 2018: the South West Coast Path from St Ives, Austria, California and home
July, 2017: Hadrian’s Wall and the Highlands
September 2016: Western Australia
December 2015-January 2016: Winter Holiday — London, Bath, York, Edinburgh
September 2015: Father and Son bonding in London
September 2014: Wainwright’s Coast to Coast
September 2013: Eastern Europe
October/November 2013: The Camino Frances
June 2013: Cor Novum pilgrimage to Issoudun
September 2012: Ko Samui
January 2012: Queenstown, New Zealand
June 2010: Canada and the USA
January 2010: New Zealand South Island
January 2009: Winter Holiday: France and the UK
May 2007: New Zealand North Island
November/December 2006: Pan-European Reconnaissance Mission (the ‘honeymoon’): Part 1, Part 2
Inheriting family papers provides a new impetus for an archive that may help the descendants gain an insight into who they are, as descendants of immigrants and heirs to a European culture living in this southern land. Most of the family history material is password protected: contact me if you are part of the Cormack/Donnellan or Bounds/Penberthy families. There is an Ancestry.com account to track the family trees as far as we can.
History is a personal passion, a field I studied at university and then continued as a recreational pursuit. I’m about to prepare my Masters thesis for publication and start a doctorate, so more to come. Here are some of the more successful academic essays I’ve written in the last couple of years — some may be developed and published over the next little while as I’ve always had to cut back to ensure they fit into a word limit.
Other projects, more or less finished, have been:
- Picnic Poetry (my attempt to find a poem for every day of the year, which is looking very dated)
- My public Flickr Gallery
- An older gallery of half-decent images (now undergoing an upgrade)
- Our first travel blog, from 2006!
- Links to photo galleries on Flickr and Piwigo.
This was all originally written in iWeb, which is now sadly defunct, so it’s time to move on.
Christopher’s quotes
