• My Glass is Half Full

  • Tulips in Utrecht

  • Bussum

    So, we made it to the hotel in Bussum in the Netherlands, and this will be our home for the next four days.

  • Hard Rock on High Seas

    What’s your favorite candy?

    I’m writing from the ship King Seaways halfway across the North Sea. There was quite a swell when we set off, but now it’s settled down a bit. The duty free shop is full of chocolate, and I love chocolate, but I shall resist, with God’s help.

  • A Rose

  • The Magic Box

    Turkish wedding rehearsal

    The most important invention in your lifetime is…

    From a personal perspective, I would say digital photography. It has been a great source of joy for me, and I believe it has helped me with my mental health.

    I now have a collection of 123,000 photos, many are fairly ordinary, but some I’m really pleased with. I like photographing places, people and flowers in nearby gardens when we go for a walk.

    I’m too embarrassed to admit how many cameras I’ve owned and do own. Suffice to say, I now mostly use my iPhone which has a special grip on it that has a shutter button and a zoom lever. This combination I consider to be a little miracle of technology. I rarely go anywhere without it.

  • Travel

    Here’s a pair of inveterate travellers. In 2015, we went to Germany to see the musical, Starlight Express. On the way home, we spent a day in Utrecht in the Netherlands. It was meant to be just a break in the journey. But we fell in love with the place. There’s lots of historic interest, and beautiful countryside. Utrecht also has an Aboriginal art museum, which appealed to my Australian wife. The Dutch were in Australia before the British.

    So, anyway, we’re off back there this weekend. I’ll likely blog a few holiday snaps. Now we’re retired, we have to keep moving…

  • Perfect Day

    Years ago, when I motorcycled to the south of France or Spain, I would encounter a huge canyon en route. It was the Gorge du Tarn.
    In 2004, they opened a viaduct over the Tarn River, near the town of Millau. It is known as the Viaduc de Millau. The viaduct saves a lot of traffic from driving through the town centre, which is especially busy during summer.
    In 2018, I mentioned on Facebook how I had an ambition to see the viaduct, which is an engineering marvel. A friend challenged me and said if I really wanted to see it, I would have gone already. I rose to the challenge.
    We flew to Montpellier and spent a night there. Then we got a train to Beziers, where we’d booked in for a week. From Beziers we got a train north to Millau. The regional trains are marvellous, and you could go anywhere for just one Euro per person.
    We booked one night in a hotel in Millau, and studied the options for getting to see the viaduct, which is a few km to the west of the town.
    There’s a road train, but by far the better way to go is by boat, down the River Tarn. So that’s what we did. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the sky was bright blue. We had lunch outside a bar, before boarding the small flat-bottomed boat with four other people and a skipper.
    After seeing the viaduct from below, we were taken by minibus back to the departure point. Then we had a steady stroll back into town all the while listening to the cicadas.
    In relatively recent memory, this counts to me as the nearest we got to having a perfect day.

  • Badger

    Some street art spotted in a car park in Glasgow, Scotland. One from the archive.

  • Conditionings

    How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

    I believe very strongly that what we think, what we know (or think we know}, what we believe all conditions the way that we perceive the world and interact with it.

    So, if you have a sunny, optimistic and positive outlook, you will get similar feedback. There may be an element of confirmation bias here.

    If you have become very jaded and cynical, you will see lots of confirmation for that.

    The positive outlook has to be the better way to go. See this quote from Google…

    “All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye” is a famous proverb popularized by Alexander Pope in his 1711 poem, 

    An Essay on Criticism (“All seems infected that th’ infected spy, / As all looks yellow to the jaundic’d Eye”). It means that prejudiced, jealous, or cynical people perceive everything through the lens of their own bias, distorting reality to match their negative perspective.