Tag Archives: life

Blog, Travel

Wanderlust

I’ve been reading the magazine Wanderlust for a few years now. It’s a great magazine with interesting stories about places that are often well off the beaten path — my kind of travelling! A couple of months ago I took the unusual step of writing a letter. It came in two parts, a comment about my time in Cuba (in response to someone who said he couldn’t find any night-life) and a second, longer piece about my time in Gdansk, Poland (as a counter-point to their piece on long-weekends for less than ?100).

Of course they published the Cuba story but edited out the rest. I thought the Polish story was the best part so I reprint it here:

The second is a short story from a couple of years ago when I went to Gdansk. Kind of. The friend I was visiting was working in Warsaw and one of her colleagues told her that if we were visiting Gdansk we had to see Sopot which was just a little bit further up the coast. Sopot was their home town and, reportedly, well worth a visit.

Gdansk was lovely, we wandered around, my friend dragging me to many amber jewellery stores and, long story short, we were quite late leaving and heading up the coast. We were expecting a lot and were disappointed. I didn’t miss a word out there. It was the Polish version of Ayia Napa with late-teens running around in an advanced state of inebriation. We weren’t impressed and time was getting on so we didn’t have very much choice other than to stay the night. Unfortunately pretty much everywhere was fully booked.

In the end we got the last room in the worst hotel I’ve stay in for quite some time. It was some distance from town (we were also hungry by this time) and there was a big party going on in a field next door. An all nighter it turned out. Come 6am, tired and miserable, we decide to leave. If breakfast was anything like the shower, we wouldn’t have eaten anything anyway!

Still, it would take more than that to stop me travelling to new places…

Blog

September Wedding

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[photopress:CRW_2614.jpg,thumb,alignleft]It seems like only last week that I was at a friends wedding (in fact it was just over two weeks), but on Tuesday two more friends tied the knot.

I’ve known R since my time in Norway. We met up a few times in Oslo and continued when we both returned to London. She had dreams of travelling, going back to Norway or Paris, or, generally, elsewhere. But she drifted back to her home-town, Bristol. Later, T, a Polish tree surgeon, moved into the flat-share she was living in. She jokes that while I tried internet- and speed-dating, she just stayed at home but had greater success.

They exchanged vows in Camden Town Hall, confusingly located opposite St Pancras station rather than in Camden as one would naively expect. It was a good service, and it was good that so many people made it, including both mothers. T’s didn’t speak much English but seemed to enjoy herself.

Afterwards we retired to a local pub for the reception.

A good day was had by all. R and T are currently in Morocco on their Honeymoon and we all wish them all the best. Congratulations!

Blog, Links

An Inconvenient Truth

I went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” last night, a film about Al Gore’s global warming lecture tour.

It’s very well done. Gore delivers the talks with humour — he introduces himself link this, “I’m Al Gore, I used to be the next president of the United States” — confidence and passion. (If he’d had this passion in the presidential campaign things could have been very different!) Even for someone that agrees with the message there are some scary statistics. Perhaps even more scary is the lengths that some politicians go to to avoid acknowledging the problem, much less doing something about it.

Quite possibly a case of preaching to the choir, but I still think it’s well worth seeing.

As a counterpoint, you might want to look at these videos from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Talking about CO2, “they call is pollution, we call it life.” Based on the fact that we breath out carbon dioxide they conclude that the volumes found in the air currently are perfectly natural.

These people should be forced to watch “An Inconvenient Truth.”

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You Wouldn’t Buy a Toaster Drunk

[photopress:Picture_18_.jpg,thumb,alignleft]Last night we went to see Dylan Moran do stand-up comedy at the Hammersmith Apollo here in London.

Here in the UK he is probably most famous for his role in the sit-com Black Books where he plays, well, pretty much himself it turns out. It’s a version of Moran who works in a book store with Manny (Bill Bailey).

It’s difficult to say much about his show as he doesn’t really tell jokes as such, more a stream of observations. A couple of years ago when I first saw him live his most memorable line was “Children are just small drunks.” This time it was about relationships: “The first time you meet your partner you are generally drunk. Why would you do that? You wouldn’t buy a toaster drunk. It’s too important a decision.”

We were impressed. If you get the chance, he’s well worth seeing.

Blog

A Very Civil Partnership

[photopress:CRW_2501.jpg,thumb,alignleft]It turns out that 2006 is a big year for weddings. I got married in April, a friend of my wife got married in May and my friends P and I had a Civil Partnership Ceremony yesterday.

Despite the poor weather, it was a great day for everyone. They tied the knot in Wandsworth Registry Office with nearly twenty people present. It was a short but touching ceremony. They said their vows and exchanged rings.

As I’s Best Man said, in general they’ve had a fairly private relationship which made such a public occasion all the more special. It was great to see so many people there in the evening helping to celebrate their commitment to one another.

Congratulations to both of them!

Oh, we were slightly amused (or is that bemused?) to see a sign behind the registrar defining that a wedding is between a man and a woman. We weren’t sure whether some people in the council objected to same-sex marriages or that they’ve just not moved it since it became legal last year.