It’s an honour to chop onions and garlic with Ted Simon, share a glass of wine, no, sorry, meant, have separate glasses of wine!…and chat about farms and France and certain viruses and other contagious stuff. He kindly offered his attic room, so I could ‘self-isolate’ and get on with re-writing what has already been […]
Writers, (among others) ‘do’ self-isolation, it’s par for the course – in attic rooms, garden sheds, quiet cafés – though the latter is off the list for awhile – but whether writer or not, if the sea is close and you can do so safely, don a wetsuit and let the might of waves batter […]
JOURNALING : good for mind and soul at ANY time but in unprecedented, disturbing times, even more so. As I ‘chisel-away’ on the sister book to Quondam: travels…, some words go down too, into a diary beside me. It’s a cheap copybook, ‘borrowed ‘ (!ha) from my school-going kids…they wont mind in the slightest! But […]
Before you read further, let me say, it’s an honour to write for OldVelos. What follows focuses mainly on one thing…a Mercian. Lovers of bikes and Mercian lovers in particular, will no doubt tell me how many times ‘Mercian’ was referenced, if at all, in Quondam: travels in a once World. Honestly, I wasn’t counting! […]
I’ve been asked (by a few in a Bicycle-travel-writing group!) to ‘say’ something about writing, travel writing that is. Gee? What can I ‘say’? What do I know? Not much but ok, here goes and off the top! – We face a tough task, perhaps an almost impossible one, in attempting to truthfully and whole-heartedly […]
In the spring of 2017, we went to Virunga, in the Eastern Congo. When I first told my wife where I wished us to go with our three teens, she threw the ‘proverbial canary’, but then, after she calmed down, she went straight to ‘Google’ !! As to our subsequent conversations…well, if you are up […]
Quondam means ‘a period of time that has passed’. Now that you have read it or perhaps listened to the story, I guess it is a ‘quondam’ one for you! Thank you indeed. I hope it engaged and was an uplifting experience! I shall endevour to take it onward from where it abruptly ended, but… […]
He was a bushy bearded urban countryman, a Walt Whitman lookalike. He told me once, how he would walk from his terraced suburbia to the city bus station, check what buses were going to where, and then, in a calculated or at times instinctive moment, hop on one, to begin his mini ‘adventure’. Most of […]
What a sweet feeling it was to be bluntly told “…ah sure, you’re only a young fellah!” As I look down the barrel of 61, that made me smile. You can only nod and smile when an octogenarian puts you in your humble age place. And I remembered, too, neighbour and dairy farmer Jim at […]
