Ches and I had never heard about Christian Marclay's acclaimed installation The Clock 2010. This blog is as much for us as anyone else, so that we will remember an amazing experience. It's on at the Tate Modern until mid January and Drew and Keith had been to see sections of it three times. Earlier in the week when we had been walking to catch the bus, Drew pointed out that just a couple of hundred meters from Clare's house opposite London, City Universit...

After an afternoon at the Borough Markets, we returned home on the top deck of a double decker London bus. We hopped off a stop past "The Eagle". In the interests of maintaining an antipodean knowledge of our English heritage, particularly of moralistic nursery rhymes and rhyming cockney slang as opposed to the monarchy, I offer the following: There was a nursery rhyme I remember singing as a child. 'Pop Goes the Weasel' was originally a dance tune that ge...

Borough markets, Pork Pies and Sausage Rolls - should be a song. After such a long day yesterday, we decided on a quieter Saturday. Ches had made the observation; no that's not quite right, she had made the statement …. quite firmly …. that with my focus on photographing everything, she often felt as though I wasn't there. What she meant was, I wasn't in her company and I wasn't even in the moment myself. She has said this on previous holidays as well...

If you are planning a trip to Germany and you're a coffee drinker, then wean yourself off it because you won't find a decent cup if your life depended on it. If you are happy with Starbucks, you don't really drink coffee, so you'll be OK. I only ever drank Starbucks once and that was in Frankfurt after three days when I was desperate. Here I began the day a little after 6.00 with a cup of instant coffee. By comparison with the brewed coffee, it's preferable...

I'm writing this almost a week after we arrived in Nuremberg. We did so on the Friday morning and Ches and I elected to repeat the city walking tour rather than the WW2 tour. This begins with the drive in from the river and then a circuit of around 2/3rds of the walls. I don't know how much of these walls survived WW2 bombing and how much are modern reconstructions. Either way, the walls are among the most impressive town walls anywhere. Towers linked by roo...