Travels with Arthur 1979-1986

Going to Israel in 1979, we had no idea what we were doing. The Iranian Revolution had just happened, the Six Day war 6 years earlier, Yom Kippur 1973. No idea what Yom Kippur was; that Jerusalem was a divided contested city. Page 17 of my 1968 Phillips Home Atlas. In 1979, long before the…

Down to the Waterline(1978) North East England, particularly Tynemouth in December can be spectacularly beautiful, its the one time of the year when you get to see these spectacularly beautiful red sunrises, all you have to do is be up before 8am. We were living with some of the best songs from Dire Straits and…

All that you leave behind Our goal this summer was to go south and see how far we could get.  If you live by the coast in North East England as we did, then ‘going south’ invariably means going somewhere warmer. Temperatures in Tynemouth rarely climb as high as 25°C. A good summers day still…

Take time to see the wonders of the world Human League – ‘The Things That Dreams Are Made Of’ Full Time Students In the UK in 1982 there was no such thing as a full time student, at least not at undergraduate level, full time wankers as far as most people were concerned. Students were…

London to Vienna on a Motorcycle Before mobile phones and easy communication home. No portable cameras, no photographic record of this trip, which took place in Autumn, before the bad weather. Things we learnt, doing large numbers of miles on a motorcycle is incredibly hard, especially when two up. German roads are unlike any other,…