Photography

A little trip to… York

2020 really is the year that just keeps on giving. In the summer, those wild and carefree days where we could go out and see people without the fear that they would kill us, I planned an Autumn trip to Yorkshire. It would have been my first proper trip to Yorkshire as in the past I have only been to Keighley and Leeds for short trips. The trip I was to take would start in York, moving to Harrogate and Knaresborough. Walks along the River Ouse and Nidd Gorge were planned. But the start of October saw coronavirus rates rise rapidly in York at the same time that tiers were being introduced and I just didn’t feel too thrilled about everything unravelling like a rusty old slinky. So the trip was ditched and, stuck with some expensive tickets, we chose in the end to spend just a day in York. A day in York is still a day well spent.

When we arrive in York, it is raining and the forecast is for rain all day. The wise words of a friend ring in my ears. York will be wonderful whatever the weather. He was right. York announces itself as a gorgeous place a few minutes outside of the train station as you cross the river and the city walls come into view. While there are some modern bits, they pale into significance and grandeur next to many of the surrounding buildings. Even in the soggy weather, York looks like a place you want to explore.

We wanted to go to Betty’s tea room for lunch but despite the pandemic, there was a queue outside and there wasn’t anything to shelter us from the rain so we found an alternative in Mannion and Co, just up the road. Having the benefit of an awning, we briefly waited before being shown inside to a world of cosiness and the most wonderful accents. Honestly, just a few words from people from Yorkshire is a real treat to the ears. With Bettie’s oversized presence (not saying she’s fat, just that she’s everywhere) there must be a need to be a really good café to compete and Mannion and Co bring their game in eyesight of Bettie’s hard stare. The sausage roll was excellent as was the coffee. The cinnamon bun was somewhat dry, but I have had worse. Next door is the Yorkshire Soap Co, which smells gorgeous inside. Being not as overwhelming as heading into a Lush and getting a migraine, I could distinguish smells here so bought some early Christmas gifts. For my mum, a mojito bath bomb. She doesn’t like mojitos and doesn’t use any smelly gifts I get here because “then I will have used them!” But still, it looked nice so she’s getting it.

I had heard much about York Minster, most recently in the aftermath of the awful fire at Notre Dame. The fire at York was compared to the one in Paris, and at the time I read about how they managed to repair the damage using traditional techniques, which people still seem to think no longer exist. The Rose window at York had 40,000 cracks in it and they repaired that and they fixed the rather pressing issue of the missing roof. The incredible thing is that there is no sign whatsoever that a fire ravaged York Minster. It’s a real testament to the talent of the people involved in the work.

In 2019, over 700,00 people visited the minster, and so it would usually be busy during half term but of course there was no queue to enter and the whole site was really quite empty. The benefit was that we could really explore to our heart’s content and get a sense of just how impressive the minster is. The central tower is as tall as a 21 story building, it’s wider than a football pitch, and there are 2 million pieces of glass in the hundreds of stained glass windows. There is nowhere in the UK with more stained glass and the earliest pieces are from the 12^th century. I have to be honest and say this melts my brain just a little bit.

The nave naturally gives some grand views, showing off the sheer enormity of the place but it’s when you look a bit closer that you see the glitz of the minster. Having the space to really explore the whole place was wonderful. There are little details everywhere. Signs abound banging on about the size of their organ, which seems appropriate for the church. This organ has 5,403 pieces and it has been taken to Durham for a once-in-a-century renovation. When we were there people were hoovering the outside of the organ with a sort of dust buster, which is not something I ever thought I’d witness.

Perhaps the most beautiful part of the minster is the Chapter House, which was finished in 1290 and so is just a mere 730 years old. It was in this year where some crazy things happened, and in a way, things back then felt just as messy as they are now. Only they had much brighter people than Dominic Raab appearing on the telly, or whatever they watched the Brexit negotiations on in those days. The Chapter house is a wonder, with some architectural details that are seriously impressive. The building’s ceiling doesn’t have a column to support the ceiling, which shows off the abilities of the builders. There are gargoyles aplenty throughout the room, which have some bizarre sights, including all sorts of animals doing ghastly things. If you want to see demonic pigs, men having their eyes plucked out or a head dug into with claws, this is your one-shop stop.

After we sampled the glories of the minster, we walked across town via Shambles to the art gallery. Shambles used to have a lot of butchers, as many as 25 in 1875 but have now all gone, replaced mostly with Harry Potter shops and tourist tat emporiums. Anywhere remotely old trades on some sort of Harry Potter connection, and York has done its work convincing people that Shambles is the real Diagon Alley. JK Rowling says she’s never been, which would surprise me as she seemed to write her books in every café in the UK. Perhaps I am being deceived. It is a wonderful street, but even when we visited, it was still fairly full of people taking photographs and gaping at the oldness of it all. I obviously took photographs of the people and the buildings. It is a shame that all too quickly, my Shambles experience was over so we headed to the art gallery which though small, has plenty of diverting pieces in the collection, including some L.S. Lowry and pop art. Most interesting was a video by Laura Besancon called Alone, Together which was a wonderfully simple but effective idea. A letter was sent to residents of a series of high rise towers in London, asking them to play a song at a specific time and turn their lights on and off to the beats of the music. None of the people doing this could see one another, but the video captured what it looked like from the outside. I found it quite moving in the context of 2020 and how alone we’ve all felt at times. The art gallery also hosts the Centre of Ceramic Arts, which is the world’s largest collection of 20^th century British pottery. Some of the work on display is incredible. I have no idea how they make some of the protrusions and knobbly bits, so it all looked quite magical. The Anthony Shaw Space is a highlight, with his extensive collection housed in what looks like a living room and there are also works by Picasso, who shows that he can put funny faces on canvas as well as vases.

At the rear of the gallery is a gorgeous garden full of plants and herbs from all around the world and then, quite unexpectedly the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey Church come into view. York museum gardens is a wonderful spot in the city and the ruins really add history to the area. I can’t help but find it fascinating that the Abbey has been left to become ruins since the dissolution in 1539, without bulldozing what was left and turning the site into a car park. At the end of the walk, we find a bar and restaurant that oozes coziness. The Starr Inn the City might have a clumsy name, but we were sat right by the wood burning stove, watching the rain through the windows. In that moment, York felt like home.

After reluctantly leaving the pub, we went to walk around the city walls in the last gasps of daylight, only to find that much is changed due to covid. One way systems and plenty of locked gates later, we managed to walk a few hundred metres of the wall in the wrong direction before getting tangled in two sets of people, walking in opposite directions. The stretch of wall we got to walk along was a delight, but obviously this lack of real walk means I will need to visit again, which is no hardship. A final walk around the city centre before the train home showed York at its best, the streets mostly empty and looking enticing with their Christmas decorations up. It’s a beautiful place and whenever I go somewhere this beautiful, I always kick myself at having never been before. Yorkshire, I am coming back.

Algeria: My favourite photos. Algiers and Timimoun.

Back in the heady days of 2016, a friend and I flew to Algeria because we could. Reading back on my travel diaries to understand why Algeria appealed, I wrote

Here’s the thing about Algeria: nobody really knows where it is. People are shocked to find it has a Mediterranean coast, that it’s less than three hours from London, that it exists at all. My mum thought I shouldn’t go, without quite knowing why. This is what led a friend and I to choose Algeria as our holiday destination of 2016 after we realised Iran is a dry country and, crucially, only lets Brits in if we go as part of a tour. Uzbekistan lost its charms when we couldn’t easily find more to do than whiz around the Tashkent metro eating plov, described in a guide book as “an oily dish”. Earning bonus points, too, was that Algeria has no current travel guide by anyone.

Algeria offered the novelty of boarding an aeroplane at Heathrow in the morning and having a late lunch in Africa in the afternoon. Looking back on those photos in 2021, the trip feels remarkably exotic and exciting so I wanted to pick out some of the favourite photos from the trip.

We spent the first day getting to know the city centre. There is a distinctly French colonial flavour to many of the buildings in the Bab el Oued district, and it is clear that a lot of care has gone into retaining the charm of the buildings. Alger la blanche is startlingly beautiful up close. Without guide books, our walk in the city centre took us wherever looked good and by chance we found the museum of modern art. It’s based in a stunning neo-moorish building, dating back to 1901, that photographs wonderfully.

The Casbah is part of the city that feels very different to the French part of the city and my friend and I went on a walking tour of the city which takes in some gorgeous buildings. There are attempts at bringing the Casbah back to life, but it’s a slow paced affair and many of the structures are in a parlous state, with bits of wooden scaffold propping up drooping walls. We walked from the middle of the Casbah down to the sea. On the way we were able to go up on a roof of building to see the city out beneath us. From the top it looked like a city of satellite dishes. Halfway through the tour we stopped by a cafe for a mint tea.

The bench situation has room for improvement.

At the bottom of the Casbah, there’s a busy market and every building has fabrics hanging off balconies and more satellite dishes. I remember that street being an assault on all the senses.

From Algiers, we took a teeny tiny plane out to Timimoun in the Saharan Desert. On board I could hear a bird squawking which didn’t help my ever-present worry that the plane will disassemble in the air. But the bird was in a cage, covered in a bin bag, and apparently this was totally normal. The bird experienced the novel concept of flying and I am sure it was most pleased. The flight from Algiers to Timimoun took us swiftly into the desert where I couldn’t stop looking at the never-ending emptiness and figuring out how I’d survive if we crashed into the sand. As time passed, I realised it would be impossible. But it looked incredible from the air.

On landing, our passports were whisked out of our hands at pace and then we sat about on different benches of the airport for a bit, looking outside at the Algerian flags fluttering in the wind and waiting for our passport to come back. Perhaps our UK passports merited close attention but it was at least 40 minutes before we had them back. The Police enquired as to how we’d get to our airport and spotting a taxi rank outside the airport, we said we’d call a cab. Ah, no. Due to fears of terrorism, the Algerian government had put in measures in place so that we’d need to be picked up at the airport by someone from our hotel and then accompanied there by a police vehicle. An escort, how exciting!!

Some time later, we arrived at the Gourara Hotel, where the strangeness of a Police escort was immediately replaced by a standard hotel check in and the view of the hotel pool, with families splashing about in it. The hotel faced a Palmeraie that stretched out until a sebkha (salt lake) and then dunes rising up miles away. I can’t recall being so shut off from the rest of the world, in the sense that though I had wifi, I was nearly 800 miles from Algiers and flights were irregular. It was quite an exciting feeling.

The next day we arranged for a guide to take us to the salt lake, and again, we needed an escort. We hung about outside a police station for a bit with our guide saying if they weren’t available, there would be no tour. However, soon we had some men with guns taking us out. The whole process was handled well. The police didn’t interfere with our tour and we saw some wonderful sights. We visited an abandoned village that is situated on top and under a hill. Under the ground, you could, even in April, notice the temperature change. I can only imagine how hellish it would be in the summer. The abandoned village was fascinating to walk through and it was a surprisingly complex set of structures that have survived.

Later on, we were driven around the dunes, which towered above us and looked magnificent. It was at this point that our police escort got stuck in the sand and our driver had to walk a fair distance to help them. We were surprisingly relaxed about this turn of events. But then, the two times I have been to a desert, I have found myself utterly content with the vast silence and emptiness of the landscape.

Our guide, going to rescue our police escort.

After our guide rescued out escort, we stopped by a tourist shop which had a reindeer for sale. I wonder if that was for tourists or something totally exotic for locals. Then we popped by a cave where I bought a scary looking fossil off some guys who were selling this stuff. I didn’t see any other visitors clamouring for them and wondered what they did all day.

I was delighted to see salad being grown in the desert, using little irrigation channels that our guide washed his face in. The sudden green of the delicate leaves against the orange of the sand transformed the landscape.

After the tour of the salt lake and the abandoned village, we decided to check out the town of Timimoun and get some money exchanged at a bank. It was a strange thing to need an escort for some things but not others. Nobody stopped us when we went into the town and at no point did we feel uncomfortable, though I certainly appreciated the effort the Algerian authorities went to in keeping us safe. The town itself is pretty small, with lots of interesting architecture and it looked even more mysterious and compelling with a glow in the sky from an oncoming dust storm.

Looking back at these photos reminds me why I love travelling so much. Getting to visit other countries and experience their sights and cultures is one of the most fulfilling things I can ever expect to do.

A little trip to…Ironbridge

The final destination of the West Midlands Odyssey was Ironbridge, a small town I have wanted to visit for a long time. Having been, I can say that this was a wise travel decision. Ironbridge is utterly bewitching. On my return to London, I started working out where I’d live in the town and if I could move somewhere that had a view of the gorge and ideally, the bridge. The journey from Ludlow to Ironbridge was in parts nice and a bit bleak. Arriving at Telford Central, we wait at the bus stop that will take us near to our hotel. Unfortunately, the first bus driver doesn’t know what Ironbridge is because he lives in Wolverhampton. I live in London but I know what Ironbridge is. The second bus driver seems equally confused and suggests a route that takes 50 minutes instead of 25. In the end I have to just take faith that Google knows the way better than the bus driver, so we settle in to a journey of a lifetime. We’re treated to the sounds of a thoroughly stressed out mum telling her kid to shut up the entire way before we get off at an unlovely stop that looks a million miles away from the pictures of Ironbridge I’d seen. We proceed to head down paths that get steeper and steeper until we’re not so much walking down a hill as sliding down. Thanks to the zig zag streets, we escape plummeting into a void by becoming human pinballs that stumble out into streets that look more appealing by the minute.

We stayed at The White Hart that is a delightful pub minutes away from the bridge that looks out onto the River Severn. The information pack to the hotel includes some outrageous sentences that belong in the 1970s, such as “Chinese restaurant, called something unpronounceable – pretty nice” which reminded me that Telford and the Wrekin voted for Brexit by a large margin. It all made sense. Casual xenophobia aside, The White Hart does great beers, even some foreign ones. It also has a covered terrace, ideal for the weather and the space it affords us from other people. I assume Ironbridge is overrun with tourists in a normal summer, but it was still busy with tourists queuing for ice creams and anything cold when we were there. We had lunch at the Malthouse pub which is about as hipster as Ironbridge gets, with bizarre toilets that look like they’re out of a western. Men don’t pee into urinals, but tin buckets. Inexplicable. Outside, music choices include The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand and Jamie T. When I say hipster, I am talking about 35 year olds and over who were cool once but now live in Ironbridge. But this was the music from my youth so I was more than happy.

After lunch, I entrusted my life and sanity with a walk from The Guardian, from 2009. Things have changed since this walk was written and it was a challenging, frustrating and at times, hateful walk. We start by walking along the river, but soon get stuck in brambles and spend time staring at partially capsized boats. We re-route and end up on a busy road, hoping that we won’t end up flung into a hedge by a truck. The landscape the walk suggests we walked through is a million miles away from the overgrown nightmare that takes up much of the route. Some parts have been vaguely maintained, which is the only thing that keeps us from not abandoning the whole thing. The walk through the meadows alongside the meandering Severn is very pleasant, with butterflies everywhere as well as dragonflies whizzing about. It is after the meadow that things become bleak. We cross the river by the bridge at Buildwas and walk down a path by a quarry, with dust swirling in the air. The guide says to walk down this grim road and head towards a caravan park. Eventually we find where we’re supposed to go and hack our way through fields that are chest high with brambles, nettles, weeds and probably snakes, too. The guide says to cut through a field. A tangle of barbed wire stops this. We alter our tracks again and somehow end up in the caravan park where, in a brief moment of joy, we see three deer eating grass. Then, we walk up a steep hill, following the soothing sounds of electricity pylons buzzing above us. By this point, I wanted to punch the entire walk, if only I could have found a way.

Once we get past the pylons and vertical climb, we broke free into some proper countryside, only an hour or so after we started the cursed walk. Soon, despair gives way to a sense of relief as we can relax into the views around us and we walked in the direction of Benthall Hall, which looks very nice indeed. Naturally, it’s closed. On Spout Lane we see people filling up large containers of spring water from the pipe on the side of the road. Not long after, Ironbridge comes back into view and the road leads us directly onto the iron bridge which looks gorgeous from every angle. It really is an incredible feat of engineering, the first bridge of its kind built in 1777 and opened three years later. The bridge recently went under a year of repair work where it was entirely covered up as they worked on it, turning the colour of the bridge from grey to a deep red, the colour of the bridge when it was first built. The red works so well that I can’t imagine it looking any better than it did when we visited.

In the evening we ate at The White Hart and it was excellent; the heritage tomato salad with dashi and red wine vinegar was outstanding as was my seafood main. We rounded the night off by walking back to the bridge to see it lit up beautifully, watching the insects have a party all around. Despite the partially hellish walk, Ironbridge was something of a revelation in its beauty.

The next morning was our last day and we wanted to make the most of it by going on a walk that didn’t involve a nervous breakdown so we walked from the hotel towards Bedlam Furnaces which to me sounded like an old asylum where the inmates smelted stuff, but I was wrong. It was just a large set of furnaces that is supposed to have cast much of the iron for the Ironbridge. When you look at the remains of the furnaces now, it is easy to lose track of history. Everything around you is beautiful and the gorge is luxurious with foliage. The reality would have been a vision of hell. The painting Coalbrookdale by Night by Philip James de Loutherbourg shows as much, with the skies filled with smoke and the furnaces glowing with flames. We have successfully romanticised heavy industry and I’m curious as to how the nearby Blists Hill Victorian village would have made the time feel. In my head, it’s full of chirpy kids in flat caps running amok but I bet they’d have been consumptive urchins with flat caps, robbing you. I think I just invented the plot of Oliver Twist.

After Bedlam Furnaces, we crossed the river and found more remains of a mining site on the side of the gorge and then we followed a path that took us to a viewing point up many steps. A family came down from the hill with one of the children counting how many steps they’d taken and they were up to nearly a thousand. Oh what larks! About a thousand steps later, we get to the top and are finally rewarded with a view that stretches out for what looks like miles of countryside, woods and village. The walk down is far less steep and arduous, but offers more sensational views of Ironbridge and beyond. It was truly wonderful.

I have always found the last day of a holiday to be my favourite. You get one last little trip and a chance to make the most of what time you have before you head home, in a high state of grief. The walk around Ironbridge and up in the hills is a great goodbye. And there we have it, the West Midlands Odyssey is over. The region is criminally underrated, the people have excellent accents and there is beauty in these towns that makes me want to go back for more.

A trip to…Ludlow. A West Midlands summer, part 2

Ludlow is the second location for our West Midlands holiday. It takes two trains to get from Ledbury to Ludlow, but it’s worth it as Ludlow is a wonderful town. We changed trains at Hereford which felt like an apocalyptic hellscape, with people patrolling the platforms for mask avoiders and a general feel of subdued terror. It felt very different to London. The Transport for Wales trains have big signs on almost every seat imploring you to not sit there and the announcements thanked all the key workers (my pleasure, guys) – it didn’t feel like August, but April. When we arrived in Ludlow, we head to The Feathers to check-in but are told to go far away until 2pm and that our bags cannot be handled because of covid. I get it, it’s fine. But the reception staff really seemed to take a little too much joy in flinging us out into the gutter.

Laden with bags, we trudge down the hill to Ludlow Brewery for a drink. The stuff they serve is excellent and all the staff are friendly, but the atmosphere is bleak. A baby is being fed milk in a windy, concrete garden. The old train shed that the brewery is in has no soundproofing so everything sounds eerie. Back at the hotel, the person behind reception manages to find us a room, but seems initially confused that we’re two men sharing a bed. She regains composure and asks if we want the standard queen room. Wink wink. I inform her we’ll take it, but we’re so much more than standard queens. The Feather is in a stunning building but beyond the façade of the building, most of the hotel is more recent and our room is nice, in a fairly generic way.

Beautiful streets full of charming buildings

Ludlow is a fine-looking town but suffers from what so many ancient towns do; by covering up the gorgeous medieval buildings with plate glass windows and plastic signs, the town loses some of its lustre. A giant Natwest sign definitely lacked the olde-worlde vibes I was after. When I become Prime Minister, this will be tackled in my manifesto, as will walking slowly and putting your feet up on train seats. I did wonder if towns like Ludlow take the gorgeous architecture they have for granted. Near the Buttermarket there is a row of what appear to be Tudor buildings, but the date 1871 carved into the wood suggests otherwise. One of the buildings has a charming overhanging first floor and it’s just a great view, but it could be so much more if it weren’t for the terrible embellishments of the now – massive posters for sales and such tawdry baubles.

After a stroll around Ludlow town centre, we go into Ludlow Castle for £8 and get to enjoy some expansive views over the town and beyond from one of the towers. Every tower has a queue snaking outside it, so only groups at the castle together can go up at any one time. The benefit of this is that you get to take in the view without a kid screaming at full tilt next to you, but you have to wait an age to get to the view, what with the kids screaming up in the tower. The parents exit the tower looking distraught.

The castle is, you know, a castle. I always leave a castle wondering why I entered in the first place. Usually, I am paying to see a few information boards that say “Lord Geoff lived here, and he loved curtains” as I look at a pile of old rocks in front of me. But it adds some heft to the town and the walk by the river is glorious. We follow a route called Whitcliffe and Breadwalk. It’s called the bread walk due to the builders being paid in bread so they didn’t just get drunk all the time. How very puritanical! As we approach Dinham bridge, the view becomes one that is a reminder of just how picturesque England can be. The bridge, dating from 1823, is a simple but elegant one that features stone arches. When you stand on the bridge, you can look right and admire the weir, the small islands in the river, the old buildings that line the riverfront and the castle high up above everything. The view is made all the better by the summertime explosion of nature. The opposite side of the river is composed of a wall of trees and wonderful paths to explore. If you follow the Breadwalk route from Dinham bridge to Ludford bridge, you will reach a point where you look across and see all of Ludlow from a vantage point that is picture perfect.

In the evening, we had a big meal planned for our anniversary. The biggest meal, in fact. We went to Mortimer’s for their tasting menu which is composed of about 610 courses of food. It’s a charming venue and when you’re inside you feel totally closed off from the world outside. The best restaurants feel to me like I imagine how a Casino is. You don’t know if it’s day or night and time disappears. Though, at a good restaurant, everyone is a winner.We eat in a room that appears to be built into rock, and it’s a small dining room so every utterance like “Oh my GODDDDD” is heard by all around. The staff are magnificent in their speed and efficiency. Proceedings kick off with olives and a cocktail before we’re bought some starters. Little bites of joy. The hand dived scallop is superb and is swiftly followed by duck in three ways. There’s pressed duck, pastrami and duck liver. I steer clear of the offal but the rest is a revelation of how different duck can taste. The part of the meal I had a bit of difficulty with was the sea trout which is served raw with crab and a smattering of fish eggs on top. The more I ate the more I enjoyed; and to put this in perspective, I can’t recall eating raw fish before. The trout was so delicate with a sharp citrus twist that I found myself enjoying it more with every bite. Following this was Hereford beef, baby leeks and roast shallot which had a delicious depth to it, showing that the chef can seemingly do anything in the kitchen. The variety of food was magnificent.

After all of this, two puddings came. The best pudding was this magnificent beast that featured a scoop of sorbet with a disc of meringue daintily balanced on top. We were entirely full and I considered if it would be necessary to call a cab to take us the 100 metres to the hotel when a small box of further treats was bought out of macarons, fudge and a chocolate. It felt a bit overwhelming and perhaps even masochistic of them to feed us more, but we ate them all. Everything was tip top and it easily slots into one of the most memorable meals I’ve experienced.

The next morning, still full of all the food from the night before, we met some friends from London who were also on a staycation. They drove us to Croft Castle and parkland, about half an hour from Ludlow. While the castle itself was closed for covid reasons, the 1500 acres of parkland more than made up for this. The walled gardens turned an overcast day into a kaleidoscope of colour and smells. Plants such as the spiky blue thing on a stick, the things you put under your chin to see if you like butter, daisies for making chains and the one that looks like a cool skyscraper (purple acanthus) are a delight to coo over. The gardens are expansive and really relaxing to stroll through.

We follow the purple route, the Highwood walk, and as soon as we walked past a recently deceased lamb, we enter a field full of ancient trees with great views over the countryside. I spot one particular tree, a Spanish Chestnut, that I want to photograph more closely and I notice a plaque at the base which says that the Queen herself thought this was an absolutely top tree and added it to the list of Great British Trees. This was all done for the Golden Jubilee in 2002 and it’s hard to imagine one of those Spanish trees, coming over here and stealing our soil, would be granted the same accolade today.

The scenery here is wonderful, and the National Trust have done some excellent work at opening up some views but also working towards planting more native trees to recreate a woodland that would have been recognisable to people with top hats and monocles. A great part of the walk is when you start to descend into a valley surrounded by conifers, cutting you off from the world before the fishpool comes into view. After some time walking by the side of the water, we see a grotto which is held together by forces of which I do not know and then the Gothic Pump House. The pump house is over 200 years old and from the outside, looks somewhat like a spooky church that once piped spring water up to the castle. The pump house no longer works and now if you want spring water, you’ll need to get yourselves to a shop.

After the castle, we have some time to kill so visit Leominster for a brief nose around. It’s a perfectly fine town with some delightful old buildings but the only life-changing thing I can recall was Roy’s Café which proudly advertised dairy burgers with an illustration of some burger version of Rainbow’s Zippy. Quite intriguing and terrifying. Needless to say, this being a small town outside London, there was bunting everywhere, which I always feel gives off a quasi-nationalist groove. I don’t know what it is, but bunting at a wedding is fine, yet when strung across a town it just feels a bit Farage for me. After the brief delights of Leominster, we drove for lunch at The Riverside at Aymestrey which was a beautiful pub in the middle of glorious countryside. It was the kind of pub that feels more like a special occasion venue than a local but the service, food and atmosphere were all great. There was a focus on local produce, with wild herbs from the Lugg valley, vegetables from local farms and lots of meat from the region. As an added bonus, there were plenty of good dogs, so it was essentially faultless.

Back in Ludlow, we took another stroll around the town. We had a look at the Broadgate which is the sole surviving medieval gate in the town, with the Wheatsheaf Inn growing out the side of the walls. The pub is cosy but they had some loopy covid restrictions. There was tape on the floor but no plastic screen around the bar so the lady behind the bar was relaxed until you stepped a millimetre over the red tape. People entered the pub one way and exited via the door at the far end of the bar. However, if there is an influx of customers, this system falls apart and causes a blockage of people trying to walk past all the people at the bar. Managing the situation looked like a bear trying to spin plates, which are on fire.

Ludlow is a gem of a town, even in covid-land. It has managed to maintain a lot of charm and character, thanks in part to the town being an economic backwater as the wool trade lost importance in the 19^th century. As a consequence, the town didn’t go through a period of demolition and reconstruction and today there are over 500 listed buildings in Ludlow. I would struggle to think of another English town that has quite such a density of historical buildings. I would also struggle to think of many other towns that left me feeling as content as Ludlow.

A trip to…Ledbury. A West Midlands summer, part 1.

Had 2020 been a normal year, I would have gone on a summer holiday to Germany for the third time. The trip would have been following the route of the Romantic Road, through places like Würzburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Dinkelsbühl, places which sound wholesome and cute. As we all know, 2020 has been a little bit tricky, so instead the decision was made at Holiday HQ to travel through the West Midlands. You read that right, the West Midlands. I am from that part of the world but have never thought to spend time there for leisure.

Lonely Planet describes the region as having “green valleys, chocolate-box villages of wonky black-and-white timbered houses” and the promise was delivered and then some. The countryside we saw was soothing, verdant, with hints of a wilder edge in the Malvern Hills. We visited Ledbury, Leominster, Ludlow and Ironbridge and every destination had timber-framed buildings a plenty, inviting pubs, a local approach to food and usually a castle within spitting distance. “Please stop spitting at the castles” is the region’s catchphrase.

It was quite novel having a holiday 90 minutes from where my family live, so I took the opportunity to invite Mum to spend the day in Ledbury with us. We hadn’t seen each other since the very day the lockdown was announced back in March. In Ledbury, we stay at The Feathers. The building dates back to 1565 and is a perfect example of the architecture of the time. It creaks and crackles with most stairs lurching pleasingly to a slope that makes you feel drunk while sober and sober when drunk. In our room, the floor went down into a corner and I sort of found myself falling towards it no matter what I did. The bathroom looks fresh out of the 1980s and the framed pictures in the bedroom have seen better decades but for £45 a night, the hotel is far nicer than the price would suggest. The restaurant and coffee house all retain a lot of the features that make the building memorable, but the coffee house’s blue light around the ceiling is less than fitting.

It’s a pity to report that the Sunday roast at The Feathers is average because to me, a roast is a high stakes meal and should leave you in no fit state to do anything but rub your belly and groan in a happy way. Instead, I was merely quite full and while nothing was wrong with the food, it lacked character. For £18.50, I would have expected more. My Mum did say her crumble was excellent, and the iced coffees are good, so it’s not a disaster. In a welcome twist, breakfast the next morning was genuinely good.

Ledbury is all centred around the market house and up the set-piece medieval Church Lane which is marvellously photogenic from any angle. On the street you have Butcher’s Row House museum and at the top of the lane stands St Michael and All Angels church, which has existed there in some form since the 11^th century. After our stroll around the town and it being August, a Sunday and in the covid-era, we wandered what we could do, so we went to the riverside park. After all the beautiful buildings of Ledbury, it was a pleasure to get to the park via an industrial estate which featured some stunning tin roofs. It’s quite the historical tour of industrial buildings of the last 50 years and is not to be missed, unless you’ve anything else at all to do. The park is a thin sliver of land between the river Leadon and a main road but there are some reasonably diverting sights such as a tree that clings onto the river bank, showing you the roots spreading out alarmingly. Beyond the riverside park you can head out into open country that looks gorgeous with cows roaming about. We spotted Sixteen Ridges vineyard in the distance, but it was closed.

In the evening, we went for a second walk and headed out to Ledbury Park, but it turned out that this was private so we kept finding gates telling us to go elsewhere. It’s bit of a downer because there’s so much nice land in Ledbury but finding a path you can walk on takes longer than it should. So we trudge back to town, find another private path and eventually find a space we can wander around, which is an almost vertical climb so we abandon that as well. Finally, past the Police station we find a path that takes us through some fields abuzz with bees and we end up in Dog Hill Wood where we spot someone looking out over the town all alone. It always seems to me that anyone sitting alone on a viewpoint must be a murderer, but we didn’t see any legs sticking out of the undergrowth.

After this somewhat distorted walk we go to the highly atmospheric Prince of Wales pub on Church Street. They’d gone covid-mad and every single table had plastic screens that separated people apart from each other but not separating us from strangers. I had seen these sort of screens splitting people up in Italy but Italians quickly figured out that this was ridiculous and scrapped it. We, like everyone else in the pub, discreetly slipped the screen out of the way as talking through a plastic screen is rubbish and we supped our very nice German beer in a semi-anxious state. They didn’t bother with track and trace and had a system where you ordered your drink and signed your signature with a pen other people had used. I guess we’d spritzed our hands with hand gel but still, great pub, shame about the inconsistencies. And if a breakout happens there, I’ll never know.

Day two in Ledbury marked day one of Eat out To Help Out so we went for a taxpayer-subsidised breakfast at Cameron and Swan, which sounds like the setup to a political joke, but in Cameron’s case it was a pig. And the first thing to note is that this is a place that does track and trace very well. Perspex separates different groups of customers, with hand sanitiser on entry and someone to take your details. If you wanted to go to the loo, you had to put your hand up so you’re not confronted with the horror of bumping into another human. I had the full English, which is most of anyone’s daily calorific needs, but it was kept very healthy by the half tomato and beans. Why do cafes feel the need to only put half a tomato on a place? Would an entire tomato ruin appetites? When I was in a hotel in Warsaw, I noticed that room service breakfast charged the equivalent of 50p for half a tomato. The mind boggles. My partner had some sort of salmon concoction and was very pleased. Gold star!

After the meal we had a stroll in the walled garden by Church Street and it was blissfully calm and quiet. I could have sat there for days. I was excited to visit Hus and Hem, a Scandinavian design shop which for reasons unknown thought that Ledbury was the place to sell their delightful goods. I bought a friend some chocolate covered liquorice (Salmiaki) before we headed to the only museum open in the town. The painted room is a small, er, painted room and when renovating the building in the 1990s, a decorator stripped away some wallpaper to find some unexpected marks on the walls. It turns out that they had come across a 500 year old painting that was hidden under hundreds of years of renovations. The design was that of a knot garden and it is simply remarkable that the painting is still so bright today, with easily readable extracts from the bible. The guide was super, miming along to a covid-friendly audio recording of her talk, and she was dressed in suitable attire, hiding her face mask under a lacy veil. There was something very 2020 about this visit; usually, I wouldn’t find much of a thrill in somewhere like the painted room but being able to go back into a museum was still something to be savoured. And really, it is remarkable that people in the Tudor times were painting on a wall I was standing in 500 years later, taking photos on my digital devices.

After a good lunch at the Seven Stars, we set off on a walk to Eastnor, despite Eastnor Castle being closed. We head to Coneygree wood, on the edge of Ledbury and we experience that great moment of the traffic sounds being entirely muffled by the trees. Soon all we hear is our feet crunching on the ground and the birds gossiping about us in the trees. The woods felt ancient, with vines creeping up everything they could and before long we were walking through open fields ringed by the enchanting trees and great views of the Malvern hills. After about 45 minutes, we come across a settlement of pheasants rummaging about, making alarmed noises and having fun with their friends. When we arrive in Eastnor, we see the Church covered in scaffold and not much else. A look for another route back via the fields was essential as the fine folk at Google only suggest routes that would have us as flat as roadkill if we misjudge the traffic on the roads. Luckily, there’s another route that takes us in a loop back to Ledbury, via fields of sleeping sheep that brings us out near Dog Hill wood.

In the evening we have dinner at the Olive Tree restaurant. Our original plan of eating at a Thai/Chinese restaurant is scuppered by them only doing takeaway. The only person inside was a very stressed out looking woman wondering where everyone was. Luckily, the Olive Tree had one table left inside, where people usually wait for takeaway. On this table we were able to hear the presumed owner bemoan his full restaurant, saying Eat out to Help out was a disaster. I couldn’t sympathise. He was making money and we got to eat two mains with drinks for £20. While I thought my hake risotto was great, the menu was so absurdly long, it made me wonder why restaurants don’t just do a simpler range of things excellently. But I don’t run a restaurant, so what do I know.

My adventures in Ledbury end here. It’s a fine town, with much to commend it. I had moments of real pleasure and relaxation but the closures from coronavirus definitely made this a less compelling visit than it could have been. Had we hired a car, the Malvern hills would have been ours for the taking. Next time maybe, but my trip continues to beautiful Ludlow.

Island hopping in Greece

After a few days in Athens, we drove to Naflipo, in the Peloponnese region of Greece. After driving through some reasonably nice landscapes, though ones devoid of ooh’s and ahhh’s, we start to see the Greece that travellers coo about. One minute it’s olive groves as far as the eye can see, then a hill starts to resemble a mountain and views become more like a greatest hits package. Everyone in the car starts staring out the windows left and right so as not to miss anything. Familiar names crop up like Corinth (ancient history town), Kineta (the first film by Yorgos Lanthimos), Olympia (all the sports) Argos (famed for its catalogues) and in heading to Nafplio I find out that it was the capital of the First Hellenic Republic and Kingdom of Greece until 1834. It has a population of just 34,000 today but still has an air of elegance and status about it.

We stayed at Pension Marianna, which is outstanding. As soon as we arrived, we felt welcome and were given some orange juice and are told our rooms were ready. A bugbear I have is arriving at hotels and finding that some unforeseen disaster has befallen my room such as moth attack, exploding lamp or an unforeseen and aggressive haunting, so it’s such a delight when all is smooth. The room was cosy and as we were perched at the top of the town, we had windows that opened out onto a magnificent view below, stretching out into the bay. The Marianna somehow under-promises and overdelivers from its excellent location to the quality of the breakfast.

Just above the hotel, you can walk to the Akronauplía castle ruins, where some parts of the wall date back 5000 years. History feels like a part of the fabric of Greece but until I found out that the walls were this old, I just looked at them and thought “these are nice walls” as I gazed out into the sea. From the viewpoint, I was able to see the curve of the bay and the Argolic Gulf, a view so peaceful I went there every morning to watch the few people in the sea as well as some fishermen and I urged myself to visit the sea more in England, something I have magnificently failed at doing.

When I first ventured into the town, it was a treat of marble pavements, wall-to-wall bougainvillea (the only plant I seem to be able to identify) and cats lounging stylishly. Entirely delightful streets full of things I didn’t need to buy stretched out everywhere but I spotted Mediterraneo wine and deli that had everything I wanted; a place to sit, read my book and have a glass of wine. A holiday read in a relaxing spot is the best kind of read, one where you don’t have to quickly feel you need to do anything but turn pages once in a while. Michel Faber’s Under the Skin might not appear to be a great holiday read but it’s worth a shot. It’s not too long, it’s deeply immersive and has a pace that makes you want to read more. Plus, the book features British weather and I had escaped all that.

Later, when my friends came down from the hotel, we took a long walk along the seafront, stopping every now to sniff the sewage and then to take photos and marvel at the quality of the light that may well have been organised by a cinematographer. It all felt a little unreal. Over the water, a castle perched on a rock and beyond that, hills caught the last gasp of the sun, with an army of wind turbines doing their thing. We headed back to Mediterraneo for a bottle of wine before dinner and after this, pleasantly fuzzy in the head, we walk to a couple of restaurants, who all politely laugh at our entreaties to be fed.

Hunger growing, we walk around the town some more and have a drink at the Aiolos Tavern’s Wine Bar before we are seated. What follows is an absolutely enormous meal of anything and everything at Aiolos Tavern. We were hungry, but the sheer quantity of food was ludicrous. That said, it was excellent and when you find a restaurant with a great atmosphere, it feels totally fine to just eat endlessly and laugh a bit too loudly. The orange cake was good enough that we visited the following day to get some more. Even typing orange cake gets me thinking about how much I want more of this. Somehow, after all the food expanded our stomachs and ripped our clothes like we’d become the Hulk, everyone wanted ice cream, so just like children, the ice cream part of the stomach was activated.

As we were in Greece, an island day was required so we drove from Nafplio to Ermioni, via a route that in some will produce terror and in others awe. A turning on a gentle corner quickly became a scene from a Bond film where he’s chasing someone and they end up in a ravine, on fire. Luckily, we arrive in Ermioni without anyone catching us. From there, we take a floating lawnmower disguised as a boat to Spetses, an island that can’t help but charm with its houses built very recently for Instagram. On some of the new estates, you could see influencers knocking chunks of the new homes with a sledgehammer, all for the vintage vibe. The vistas were engineered for hashtags. It is like arriving on an island designed for lifestyles lived online, with yet more glorious sunlight adding even more to the beauty.

As easy as it is to forget it’s a real place, people do live here and their bright white houses are perfectly set against the deep, luscious blue of the sea. We stop for an iced coffee at Balkoni, with views out to the water where I write a few smug “hahaha, you’re not here and I am” postcards to friends back home. Inevitably, I never found a stamp and these postcards ended up being sent when I was back in the UK. I may be one of the last people sending postcards, and even I’m doing it badly.

Caffeinated, we head from the centre towards a church on a peninsula and we walk past small beaches, clear water and fishing boats that lie dormant. On the island you can sense the season is drawing to a close; bars are closed or open for brief parts of the day. The warmth is very deceptive; it’s nearly 30c so you expect that sitting on a terrace for a beer will be a remarkably easy feat but it’s not. It’s nearly November and instead of enjoying the weather, we should be panicking a little. To put the weather into context, if this were the UK, shops would be filled with Christmas trinkets yet here I was applying sunscreen.

We only had three hours on Spetses so could just about scratch the surface of the island. There are woods that beckon in the hills, coves to explore but we simply don’t have time so we loop back towards the centre of town via a parliament of cats, getting down to the serious business of hanging around on benches. Just before we board the ferry for the next island, we pass a fairly grand old building in some state of disrepair with a notice board out front advertising their events. One was a 30^th anniversary workshop for Aston University. In three years of university, I never had a lecture or meeting off campus, let alone on a beautiful Greek island.

One thing I’ll always remember about Spetses that is both fascinating and terrifying is the endless streams of grannies whizzing by on scooters. They were always at a pace and nothing had a chance to get in their way. In the moment, I felt very much that I wanted to be a pensioner on a scooter later in life. They looked so mind-bendingly happy.

Hydra was our second island and it’s perhaps more beautiful than Spetses, but the differences are slight. For one, it’s less wooded but the upside of this is that there are more unobstructed views to be had. The island is entirely free of cars, which gives it a different pace and we didn’t have to duck and cover every few minutes. Donkeys, with BMW and Peugeot badges are the only form of transport on the island other than your own legs. We have five hours in Hydra but even so, we don’t get far from the main town but we do pass Leonard Cohen’s house which he bought when he was 26. Impressively, none of us realise at the time but Google timeline reliably informs me that I took a photo outside it. Naturally, I was taking photos of yet more cats.

According to Google, these cats are outside Leonard Cohen’s house. I think otherwise.

We need feeding, and it’s late afternoon on a Greek island in October. Google maps tells us that a few places are open, when they clearly are not. We go to a restaurant that has glowing reviews, knock on the door just in case and a startled topless man comes to tell us they’re definitely closed. After a while we do the activity that exists only when on holiday and lacking choices; we get picky. Anywhere will do, but not the place with the tables that look horrible, and certainly not the place with the ugly door. Eventually, miraculously, we find a place that only has one flaw. Flies. Herds of flies that are everywhere. We peer at the food, which looks delicious, and we try to look beyond the flies nesting on every piece of it. When lunch is bought over, new flies divebomb us and our arms flail enough to create a cooling draught for the customers next to us.

Post-lunch and fly larvae, we stroll along the cliffs and take in the views, accompanied by big contented sighs. Some of the trees on the path were bent at angles that suggest fierce storms and above us we spotted a few stone windmills. Some of these are barely recognisable as windmills while others are now used as accommodation and look gorgeous. As we amble towards a bar, we pass Leonard Cohen’s bench which this time is noticed by us. It’s not so much a bench as a three sided stone wall with a plaque, but with a view that would lighten the mood of any Cohen fan.

We spend the rest of our time in Hydra near the harbour, where I try and paddle in the water but find myself unable to trust the slippery look of the stones leading to the ladder. So instead I continue to look out on the water before we have a drink at Spilia café and bar and here, my mind wanders. Why is the sea so calm so often? How come water flows quite evenly and doesn’t jut out of the sea at random angles or arrange itself in a vertical tower of water? How come gravity doesn’t stop? Why didn’t I do well in my GCSE Science? This goes on for what seems an eternity and is a sign that I’m relaxed enough for my mind to start rearranging the world. We face the sea, looking at the sun slowly dipping down for another night and I’m glad water wasn’t doing anything untoward because, for one, it’d ruin the view.

A food tour…of Athens

If I had been counting calories in my time in Athens, I would have swiftly realised I was pregnant with triplets. The food was endless and almost all of it was gooey, yummy, delicious and with enough vegetables to trick the mind into thinking it was healthy. But healthy food has never tasted as good as the food in Athens. My friend, Rokos, had planned a day of doing little but eating and doing some walking between food stops to give us the illusion of exercise.

Part 1: We started at one of his favourite places, Stani. It’s one of a dying breed of dairy bars in the city and is in a neighbourhood that has seen better days. This isn’t an austerity comment, as most of Athens looks and feels like a normal functioning city but Omonia just looks tired. Watch your step as you could trip over some jagged pavement, avoid the overflowing bins and eventually you’ll arrive at Stani. It’s tiny and looks like it hasn’t changed in decades, which is exactly how it should be. The offering is simple and excellent; we had sheep yogurt with honey, a cake containing custard that oozes out when you break the pastry as well as coffee. The first mouthful was so good that suddenly the surroundings became palatial and glorious.

Part 2: Our second stop was Loukoumades Ktistakis, which sells very little but the eponymous fried honey balls. There are a few tables inside but this is the sort of place where you order, eat in one mouthful, make a face that is close to the face of someone that’s just seen God (and when he does return, he’ll go there and do the face of god when he tastes these). This is food that cracks open into a gooey mess, but it gets a thumbs up from everyone.

Part 3: The central food markets. This has the potential to go either way, once you enter the meat and fish section. As someone who has mostly given up meat, walking through a giant hall filled with flesh of every kind being cut up wasn’t very pleasant. Even the beaks and hooves on display didn’t fill me with joy. So I learned that I’m further along the vegetarian marker than I’d realised but not quite there. But the markets don’t just do meat, they do anything you could imagine and I always find a large array of brightly coloured vegetables really soothing. The real pleasure I get from them is seeing ingredients I don’t usually come across, which gets me thinking about what I’m going to cook next. It’s the same when you see spices piled high; reminding me of a middle eastern souk. The markets bring to mind a time before everything came pre-measured, in a glass jar or plastic pouch and I foresaw my past-self going round the stalls, haggling over prices before stopping off for a quick coffee. In this past life, I almost certainly had a wheely trolley full of the day’s shopping.

Part 4: The Mediterranean Grocery store is a superb deli that instantly made me want to live in Athens so I could pop by here all the time. Holiday mode does this to me; we have these sort of deli’s in London and even in Walthamstow, but still. I was in love. Aisles stacked high with every sort of olive oil imaginable, biscuits, different types of pasta, pickled things, wine. It all just looked so enticing and I cursed my lack of hold luggage on the flight back. Consequently, my phone is full of photos of Greek produce I’ll always be on the lookout for.

Part 5: Nikita’s. After various bites across the city, it was time for a big meal and Nikita’s has a great atmosphere of ‘home-cooked food by mum’ plus an outstanding cat having a snooze on one of the outdoor chairs. In my world, this is as good as getting a positive Jay Rayner review. At Nikita’s, we ate as much as the table would hold, from moussaka, to dolmades to vegetable stew and saganaki, all washed down with beer.

It got me thinking about the food of my childhood which was in no way as rich and varied as this. It was more of a traditional British meat-n-two-veg household, the kind of place where boiling a cauliflower until it’s a limp and soggy tragedy was deemed blanching. We didn’t eat cheese, ever, and adventures in seafood went as far as cod in a parsley sauce. It wasn’t battered! Watch out Heston. When I lived with my Nan, she somehow decided I was a maniac for lamb chops and chicken chasseur and even twenty years after her death, I still fondly think of her getting on the bus – the number 18 in Birmingham if you like buses – to go to the butcher’s so she could get the meat. But still, no cheese.

After all the food and reminiscing, we needed some perking up to stop us all falling into a food coma so when we found Dope Coffee we were all delighted. Not only do they serve great coffee in a very (I hate myself for saying it) Insta-friendly backdrop but more importantly, some superb cinnamon buns that were so good we found additional space in our already-distended stomachs for them. Hands down, one of the best cinnamon buns I’ve eaten in my life. It poses a threat to everything Scandinavia holds dear, it’s that good.

God seems to figure today with the holy dough balls and the holy bun, so it was obvious that we needed to follow this up by going to church. And so we walked to the Metropolitan Church of Athens which is pretty enough, but in its shadow is the very cute Church of Virgin Mary Gorgoepekoos and Saint Eleutherius, bringing some 12^th century swagger into the heart of modern day Athens. Inside, it is a showcase of what churches do so well; it feels intimate and calm while also as chintzy as you like. Cracks in the walls indicate the damage earthquakes can have on the city.

Next up was Syntagma Square, which I am familiar with from the austerity riots and also that time that Jason Bourne ran through the square mid mayhem to do something in a film. It is a becalmed place now, featuring the mighty Evzones guarding the President. Let’s take a moment to admire their uniform. A cap with a tassel, a shirt with flared sleeves for that Studio 54 look, stockings made of wool, clogs with a pom pom on and a gun. The clogs, presumably, are for kicking as they weigh 1.5kgs each and the pom pom is for fun. The gun is to shoot people dead. It is endearing for nations to keep these ridiculous traditions, and the world would look far less interesting without them. Take off the bearskin cap of the British Foot Guards and not only would they be able to see, but they’d just look boring. Anyway, my main point is that the military really embraces a camp aesthetic and should be applauded for how progressive that is.

On this whistle stop tour of the foods and sights of Athens, we still had more to see and so we walked through the national gardens which featured palm trees that rivalled those seen in LA, or perhaps it should be the other way round. The National Garden is a pleasant park though fairly tiny place at just 38 acres but it’s a green haven in the city with its own set of ancient ruins (to be honest, it’s hard not to find an ancient remain in Athens) and leads to many more sights such as Zappion Gardens and the Panathenaic Stadium which held the first modern Olympics. As stadiums go, it’s so simplistic in form and a beauty to look at. However, I can’t imagine it’d be too pleasant to sit there for many hours in the sun, roasting slowly.

As we headed closer to sunset, we took a cab to Mount Lycabettus, taking the cable car up 227 metres, meaning we were the highest people in the city. It got me thinking about exactly how high it was up there, and the Shard reaches 300m so there’s a little fun fact for you. When you reach the top, there’s little in the way of space as you’re on a small peak and there is a restaurant, bar, church with neon lights and a spectacular viewing point. Everyone is crowding for the best spots but with some patience, you’ll get the shot in the end. Most people tend to choose the cable car to go up and to walk down, savouring the sublime views of a deep red sky filtering over the top of the city and seeing all the lights spread out for miles. Having never been to LA, I reckon that LA looks like this from up the highest points in the city.

In theory, walking down the hill is an excellent idea but my friends and I took a wrong turn at some point and ended up walking down the hill with phone torches as our only light and coyotes hungry for our blood. Maybe it was a cat. It wouldn’t have been great fun to trip and break a leg here and dear reader, I didn’t. We eventually fell off the hill and into sight of this gorgeous modern building that was like a little slice of Zaha Hahid with its gorgeous curves and immaculate finishing. Back in civilisation, we found a bar, we found wine and we found more food to eat. It was glorious.

A trip to…Dresden

Such was my desire to visit Dresden that a seven-hour journey across Germany wasn’t enough to dissuade me. I can report that the journey is sorely lacking in grandeur and beauty without a mountain in sight. The journey on an InterCity train cost £20 each and we upgraded to first-class for under £10 each, which gets you a couple of free biscuits and table service where you have to pay for everything. That said, it’s a steal compared to the UK where first class comes with freebies galore at a price.

We were lucky to have a necrotic man sitting opposite us, who proceeded to eat breadsticks from a briefcase in a style I could only describe as “annoying” and when he wasn’t chewing on breadsticks he was hacking up some phlegm that had been brewing in his chest since the 1980s. He was such an awful person he even left the pinging sounds of emails on his laptop going. He thought he was so important, but he was the one covered in phlegmy breadcrumbs. We trundled and occasionally sprinted through Dortmund, Bielefeld and Hanover without incident or interest until Dessau, when I realised I was passing the home of Bauhaus and cursed myself for not stopping off here for a day or two. Thanks to my obsession with putting markers on Google maps, it’s stored for my next German adventure.

Eventually, after 15 mini naps, listening to almost all the recorded music ever made and numerous games of book versus phone, I caught my first sight of the many spires of Dresden and I knew I was going to like it. We checked into the very lovely Hotel Indigo where I congratulated myself on finding two excellent hotels in a row. The Indigo was not in a building as thrilling as the 25hours Hotel in Cologne, but it was stylish, comfortable and had a logo of a lion in a tuxedo playing a saxophone.

Hotel Indigo is located near the Zwinger Palace and the reconstructed centre so we headed out to the palace to explore the different levels where we were treated to the sun striking a demonic looking cherub or a dome in a gorgeous light. It is a photographer’s paradise, especially in the late afternoon. It was built in the 18^th century during the reign of Augustus the Strong and held a wedding that apparently went on for 40 days. I read further to find the theme of the wedding was Baroque and Roll. Actually, that’s a lie but it sounds cool. Clearly, anyone who would countenance a 40 day wedding would have been absolutely unbearable but the complex that stands today is a real treat to walk through and more so as it was free. We walk to The Crown Gate which looks much like the most overwrought crown upon an entrance, delightfully decadent with four Polish eagles stuck on the top for added chintz. Tucked away is The Nymphs’ Bath, an elaborate water feature that reeks of absurd wealth.

The old city is a marvel of reconstruction that rivals old Warsaw for the effort that went into bringing the city back to life. Dresden, like Warsaw, saw over 90% of the city centre reduced to rubble in the war. Today, you know what happened in the 1940s but can’t really feel it as buildings look designed so as to look ancient but are smart and neat with straight rooves, giving away their real age. There is a mixture of buildings that were recreated to reflect their baroque history and more generic designs, yet there is a sense of scale and harmony to the centre. We walked through the city on the way to Yenidze, an old cigarette factory that looks like a mosque to reflect the factories use of Turkish tobacco. A strangely inappropriate building but one that stands out from a mile away. Service there was, at best, frosty. Perhaps Yenidze is secretly an east German icon that refuses to accept things have changed. It took two emails to get a reservation (first one they told me the kitchen was closed and didn’t make any attempt to suggest I come at another time) and when we arrived the place was deathly quiet; even a group of friends sounded scared to talk in case the waiting staff were listening in. As soon as we sat down, a dramatic storm raged over the centre of Dresden which we had a fantastic view of. The rain lashed down and the wind whipped the sides of their version of a minaret. It was quite something to behold and was more memorable than the food. The slightly strange Yenidze experience is worth it, though. Perhaps better as a place for evening drinks on their rooftop bar than for dinner.

We went to go for a post-prandial cocktail in the Neustadt. Around Louisenstraße, people were spilling onto the street from bars, graffiti adorned the walls and stickers covered everything that isn’t moving. The trendy district of Dresden announces itself without any subtlety. We were going to head to Pinta Cocktail bar but it was roasting hot and filled with cigarette smoke so we abandoned it for a nearby beer garden where a pint was €3.60 which just makes London seem like it’s having a laugh.

Getting back to the hotel on the tram was far more confusing than it ought to have been, with the tram pivoting away from the centre towards some barely lit residential streets. We alighted to wait for another tram back, hoping for the best. The next tram takes us on an intensely circuitous route around Dresden, going north before suddenly realising it actually wanted to go back to the south. It was more of a drama than I required, but before collapsing into bed, I had to tune into the latest instalment of Germany’s anti-hero loaf of bread, Bernd das Brot on KI.KA. Bernd is a depressed loaf that gets into all sorts of scrapes. That night’s edition saw him hanging out with his band on a tour bus, before he fell over and broke a set of bagpipes. Luckily that night his gig was a huge success. It really is the most wonderfully crap show.

The next morning we visited the Albertinium by Bruhl’s terrace for cake and coffee. The Albertinium is the city’s modern art gallery and has an imposing main hall with an outstanding gift shop full of books about Dresden’s history but this is as far as we got as we had a busy day planned. Bruhl’s terrace is a wonderful section of the city, nicknamed “the balcony of Europe” when it was part of the ramparts of a palace. In 1814 a grand staircase connected Schlossplatz to the terrace, finally enabling the locals to enjoy the sweeping views of the Elbe that the elite had enjoyed for years.

The walk through the old town, snaking past the painstakingly reconstructed Frauenkirche through the terrace and to Brühlschen Garten put me in a state of deep relaxation. The city was quiet, the heat of the day hadn’t turned oppressive, the sky was a deep blue and I was on holiday. It was at this moment that I fell in love with Dresden. We read in the garden, occasionally sighing contentedly before a walk to the DDR museum, which is fittingly above a shopping centre. Even in death, East Germany is mocked. I am obsessed with the DDR, though I know I wouldn’t have thrived in the political hellscape as I don’t want to be restricted in every aspect of my life and couldn’t be on board with spying on everyone and being spied upon. I would be first against the wall. Or am I scared that I’d be a superb spy, destroying lives to save my own comfort? The design of the era is simply as good as it gets and manages the trick of having you think that a new society was being constructed from the ground up. People were at the front and centre – a less muscular version of the socialist worker, one who might have been able to extract some joy from life. The reality of course, sounded pretty damn bleak but I have always been hypnotised by the images. After looking at the drawings of happy kids at school, using beautifully-designed textbooks and drooling at reconstructed living rooms with dreamy furnishings, I went to buy some postcards at the shop. My Mastercard wouldn’t work and the man behind the till said that their machines didn’t like foreign cards. I joked that this was like being back in the DDR. He looked blankly at me. Ah, now, that was like being in the DDR.

Dresden has an outstanding DDR-era mural on the side of the Kulturpalast and what is so surprising is that in 2019, a full-throated piece of socialist realist art remains fully intact. There are communist symbols everywhere and the people look as strong and delighted, not to mention determined, as you’d expect. In Berlin, there’s a feeling of all the history being renovated out of the city but here is a distinct piece of soviet propaganda that puts you in a different world entirely. It’s gorgeous and I took every opportunity to photograph and admire it. The Kulturpalast as a building is a standard 1960s squat block that is perfectly nice, and manages to fit into the cityscape more successfully than you might expect it to.

For lunch, we walked up to Soul Food Sisters back on Louisenstraße. All the hipsters were probably tapping away on a laptop in a coffee shop somewhere and the area felt very different. But the food was brilliant; I had a Weiner schnitzel which was a really generous portion at a surprisingly reasonable price. The atmosphere was unexpectedly friendly, to the point that Ryan offered to put our plates in the kitchen at the back and the owner didn’t stop him wandering off.

Less friendly were the people of Molkerei Gebrüder Pfund, a famous milk bar that has a glorious interior of Villeroy & Boch tiles and remains true to its roots of serving fresh milk and dairy products to the people of Saxony. The only problem was that nobody was buying the milk and the staff operate on high alert for anyone daring to flash a camera near the tiles. At one point I was being trailed round the shop by two members of staff who seemed to take real joy in being utter jobsworths. I kept going for my camera, just to keep them on the edge of despair and ecstasy. While the shop is undeniably beautiful, this obsession about cameras is counter-productive and I’d have happily given them a few euros to have been able to snap away. Leaving the shop empty-handed – it was over 30c so the idea of fresh milk was frankly disgusting – we headed to Großer Garten on a tram which took us the right way to the city’s enormous park. Dresden is a very green city and despite spending some hours in the park, we saw but a sliver of it. For day trips, the area around Dresden is rich in places to explore. There’s nearby Leipzig for starters, with Saxon Switzerland, Prague and Berlin a bit further afield. All are ripe for exploration in this wonderful patch of Europe.

A trip to…Cologne

This summer, inspired by Greta Thunberg and the dread of a busy airport full of over-tired people, also known as torture, my beloved and I took a train from London through to Prague. We stopped off in Cologne, Dresden and Saxon Switzerland before ending in Czech Republic, Czechia or whatever they’re calling it today. With this holiday’s relaxed travel ethos and saving-the-world vibe, I feel like I’ve finally nailed how to do it right.

Eurostar is just a wonder, isn’t it? Despite their byzantine queueing system where a ticket purchased on Bahn.de requires you to the “just go there, just wait there” line for an eternity while everyone seeing said Bahn.de ticket looks scared, it’s still streets ahead of flying. That is, until we’re settled in, the train is pulling out of London and a tour guide starts talking to her group in a very piercing voice for what seems like forever. They are going to Antwerp I gather, and she is guiding them through escalators of Europe, and telling them about the chances of being robbed whilst in Brussels for twenty minutes. Once she’s word-bombed one lot of people, off she goes to another group. The peace and quiet of Eurostar is shattered so I put in my headphones and listen to Slipknot to calm me down. At Brussels, we are robbed twice and can’t work the escalators.

On the ICE train to Cologne, I realise with some horror that I’d not reserved tickets from Brussels and every compartment is rammed with people apart from first class which is, as ever, almost entirely empty. It’s quiet save for the sounds of champagne corks popping, aimed at the eyes of the poor. I cleverly use my un-corked eyes to spot one compartment fully booked, but from Cologne so we grab seats and realise everyone in there is British, American or Australian. We’re drawn to the compartment, I reckon, for the romance of it and the memory of when trains were like Harry Potter. The American impresses us all with his grasp of English when asked a question in German, he barks “English”.

I recall my first trip to Cologne, when I hated the city. I had been in Brussels with a friend, which we loved and Cologne seemed dreary in comparison. At the time that Germany were holding the World Cup, there was more energy in Belgium. Imagine! This time, Cologne presented itself as a thoroughly cool place, even if it isn’t much to look at. There are shops which resemble those in London, with the same succulents in tiny holders, postcards along the lines of Happy birthday, you old motherfucker and images of Cologne cathedral in neon pink. I also feel that Cologne was far better this time thanks to the brilliant 25hours hotel which I had been interested in staying in for a while. I already knew I loved the look of the building; it’s an old insurance company headquarters and 25hours have kept a number of the original features which gives it, in their own words, a retro-futuristic vibe. Attention to detail is everywhere, from the lobby which features a stunning ceiling, beneath which is the original reception desk where old typewriters are placed. The lobby is full of deep chairs, all within reach of a giant Taschen book on topics such as architecture, art, graphic design, the Bauhaus movement and cities. The lobby also has a store where you can buy Cologne gin, excellent garish socks with parrots on, books, notepads and so on. There’s a vinyl store with turntables for playing music and even a couple of Daleks hanging out.

Design doesn’t stop at the reception, the lifts are covered in mirrors, which is ideal for selfies and the ‘gram (ugh). The rooms have plenty of little touches that mark this out as a great hotel; every room has a UE Boom bluetooth speaker which is a simple idea that I haven’t seen replicated elsewhere and made me very pleased – clearly better than trying to belt out tunes on a mobile phone. There are books, comics and magazines on the bedside table for light reading and an old phone if you need to call anyone from the past. On the roof is a popular cocktail bar which does lots of fruity drinks at a reasonable price, offering far reaching views of Cologne. The downside is that I now only want to stay at their hotels.

We stroll out to Brusseller Platz where many ping pong tables are used by the youth to play badly. One man plays with a broken arm, and he’s one of the better ones. Mature trees offer some welcome relief from the blazing sun and the Belgian quarter has a series of genuinely old buildings to admire as it wasn’t badly damaged in the war. Later in the walk, it was chilling to note some information inlaid into the street of former inhabitants, saying where they were deported to in the war.

We ate lunch at Noa, and the salad I ordered came as a giant plate bursting with fresh leaves and herbs, quinoa, balsamic dressing and I added prawns in a chili sauce on the side. To say I was happy would be to downplay the concept of happiness. We head on to Aachener Weiher for a sit down overlooking a park and we sample one of the delights of the city, a Kolsch. It’s a 200ml beer that’s deeply refreshing and a reminder of how good the Germans are at this stuff. For dinner, we went to Café Feynsinn, which didn’t live up to Noa’s taste attack, but it’s a good restaurant playing many 80’s hits which is always a tick from me. My dinner was a pasta dish that was far nicer than Ryan’s veggie burger. As ever, our simple rule of no burgers or pizzas outside London was not applied and we paid the price. To round the evening off, we had cocktails at an outside bar, watching the world go by and being shocked at just how many songs Rihanna has done and how similar they are. Even the videos could be swapped over for one another.

Our second day was another beautiful one and we headed to Café Hommage for breakfast. It’s a typical hipster place, and instead of getting a number for your table, you choose a toy animal of your liking. We chose Bambi. While the breakfast was good, Nutella pancakes being an appropriate start to the day, the coffee was the real star of the show. Fortified with caffeine, we headed through the city and across the enormous bridge to Rheinpark to read and watch the world go by. There’s honestly little better than to sit in the shade reading a book. It’s relaxation of the purest kind.

Dragging ourselves off the grass, we got a train to Brühl, named after nobody’s favourite German actor, Daniel Brühl and to Augustsburg Castle which is a beautiful example of rococo architecture and is set within meticulously manicured grounds open to the public. Built in 1725, it has a staircase so grand that you’ll leave wondering if you can pull it off in your semi. Once a seat of power when Bonn was the capital of West Germany, dignitaries would gather on the staircase for a photo op. It has the ostentatious look that a certain president would admire greatly. Ready to take endless photos, we were told this was strictly forbidden and you could only go through the building in a guided tour, in German.

Headset on, and catching the odd bit of German, I learned some nuggets of information about the castle. In a state room is a beautiful stove in the corner of the room, which has no opening to feed it fuel. Behind the stove is a corridor where workers would shovel coal in lest the poshos have to witness how heat works. Other stories we were told marked the inhabitants to be real pieces of work. Sometimes the leader had a banquet all to himself, with the locals watching from a gallery upstairs, observing and smelling the feast below. He was on record as saying they loved this.

While we didn’t have the funds to antagonise people in the manner of the obnoxiously wealthy, we did manage to feast later in the evening at WALLCZKA, where we somehow bagged a table with a reserved sign on. I guess my German is that good. WALLCZKA is in the Neuehrenfeld district, a 15 minute journey from the centre of Cologne but it was worth it as the food was a total triumph. The burrata with chimichurri was bright and zesty, the duck salad was equally fresh but for me, the courgette kofta in a tomato and coconut sauce was a knock-out. To finish the night off, we head to Little Link cocktail bar and expect good things as the website proclaims “we are excellent” and I can’t disagree. The staff are friendly, they know their stuff and they understand their demographic when a cocktail with a film theme comes in a bag stuffed with popcorn.

After a great two days, it’s time to leave Cologne, but not before a quick reminder of what happened in WW2. The city was devastated with 37,000 tonnes of explosives dropped by the RAF, in 262 air raids. One particular raid struck me; over 1000 bombers attacked the city so that Bomber Command could get a propaganda win. They bombed the city for 90 minutes with the aim to cause so much damage that the fire brigade would be overwhelmed. Sometimes war just feels like statistics that are so overwhelming it’s pointless to really think about what these numbers mean. I thought it easier to think about this; in total the Luftwaffe dropped 40,000 tonnes of bombs on the UK in the war. Cologne was essentially dismantled from the air.

A holiday to Ukraine…the Chernobyl experience

It could have been apocalyptic, a bang to set off a chain reaction of bangs that would shroud the world in a pall of radiation, poison the waters of Europe before leeching into the seas and oceans of the world. And yet, 32 years later it’s a tourist spot. Chernobyl is burned into the minds of people as a byword for disaster and as a child I was fascinated by what happened there. Even today it’s seen as a deadly place of silence and mutated creatures roaming the landscape. Having read a chunky history of the Chernobyl catastrophe, by Serhii Plokhii, there were so many missteps and calamities that it’s a minor miracle I’m able to type this and perhaps a bigger miracle that I was able to have lunch in the power plant’s canteen, just a few hundred metres away from where the explosion happened. Recently, a gleaming containment unit was slid into place, soaring above the old reactor and hastily assembled concrete sarcophagus that stopped the radiation completely escaping.

People know about the event itself in the broadest of terms, but often it is the people that lived around the plant who are forgotten, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of liquidators who worked tirelessly to lessen the effects of the disaster, potentially saving the world but subjecting themselves to personal catastrophes such as a lifetime of ill-health, or a swift but brutal death.

Reading Plokhii’s book, I saw a horrific image of the aftermath of the explosion. Chaos everywhere, chunks of radioactive graphite burning all around and people rapidly becoming sick. In a chain reaction, as one person got sick from the radiation, they’d struggle to tell someone coming in what had happened – perhaps also too terrified to even admit what they knew if they did know anything – and that new person would quickly get to work before they fell ill. Imagine that; it’d be like trying to evacuate a sinking ship while suffering from overwhelming sea sickness.

Booking a tour to the exclusion zone is easy; but to maintain the idea of danger, the tour company Go2Chernobyl plaster their website with radiation symbols and a strange promise to take you somewhere extreme, that’s also safe and comfortable. Which is true, I suppose, otherwise nearly 50,000 people wouldn’t have visited Pripyat in 2018. Hints that this isn’t a usual excursion come when you are required to book your trip in advance to obtain permits and the many email reminders that without passport details you won’t be allowed to enter the 30km exclusion and 10km exclusion zones.

We meet other intrepid adventurers on a gloomy day by Kiev central train station. Nobody makes much of an effort to talk to one another, though that makes sense. We’re not exactly going bungee jumping. While we wait to go, we’re asked if we want to hire dosimeters but we choose not to. Some tours offer this and make the machines look rather scary, but I stick to the belief that this is just a money-making ploy; it’s safe enough to visit, so when the machine beeps a bit, it’s not going to reach a figure that’s meaningful. I absorbed more radiation in my flight to Kiev from London than spending a day near the power plant and you don’t find the air stewards shoving dosimeters in your face the whole time. An idea for Ryanair, there.

On the journey to the exclusion zone, a video is put on with terrible CGI of the explosion and lots of people sounding earnest or sad, which is reasonable enough. Eventually, when we arrive, I step out and go to the toilet, which is just past the barrier that separates the normal world and the world of the exclusion zone. I witness a strange frisson of excitement as I pass through a little divide between everything being OK and things being not OK for hundreds of years and everything still looks exactly the same. A road leads forever deeper into the forest and nothing seems to be moving, so it certainly scored highly on the eerie atmosphere I thought would exist. We wait for an age at the checkpoint, seeing gorgeous dogs that I wanted to pet but thought better of.

We visit Chernobyl town and it looks like you might expect a run-down ex-soviet town to look but with some subtle differences. Utility pipes run above ground because the soil is contaminated so nothing can be buried underground. People still work here, but can only work 15 days in the zone and 15 off due to the build-up of radiation. Inside the town is a museum, filled with dolls and baby gas masks as well as information about what happened. In a side room there’s a large painting depicting the scene where the firefighters were attempting to put out the blazes at the plant. It’s strangely poignant to see it stored away from other items and there was also something very tragic about the painting knowing what we know now, seeing the effort and exertion in their faces. Despite the museum’s artefacts and modern installation, this painting was by far the most immediately shocking and arresting thing in there. Outside in the rain, the Wormwood Star memorial is a long line of names of abandoned towns and a large statue of an angel. Nearby is a statue of Lenin; it’s one of two that remain standing in Ukraine. The other is also in the exclusion zone, making this place feel even more like a timewarp.

Our second stop is the Duga radar station, which is a fascinating place I hadn’t heard about until I booked the tour. Our guides explained that the radar was designed to know if the Americans had launched a missile, so the radar would bounce signals into the ionosphere, where it would have a look for anything to worry about, and messages would ping back. The scientists built the enormous station, over 100m high, 700m long, launched the system but never managed to get the signals to come back to Duga. It was doomed to fail, but was a colossal project that was so powerful, using up to 10 million watts, that it interfered with radio and TV signals around the world. So, it might not have stopped the Americans launching war, but it could made Coronation Street a bit fuzzy.

It’s a beautiful sight though and I would have happily spent an afternoon photographing it from every angle. It’s such a cold war remnant; a huge installation that the Russians thought could be hidden. Even as the reactor burned, officials didn’t want anyone to see Duga, fretting over whether to let Hans Blix from the Atomic Energy Agency drive to Chernobyl and be confronted by clouds of radioactive dust which would let him know that the explosion at the plant was worse than they said or fly there, but see the secret installation. In the end he flew there, and I doubt that Duga, as massive as it is, was ever really a secret. Naturally, being a tourist site, people have put up some radiation signs near Duga, which are fake but during the day we see plenty of real ones.

After Duga, we heard towards the power station itself and get an idea of just how enormous the site is with power lines and pylons stretching out across a great swathe of land. Impressively, a solar panel array has recently been installed and a plan for the future is for more solar farms to be put across the exclusion zone. We also stop by the red forest, so called because it soaked up huge levels of radiation after the explosion, altering the colours of the trees. Almost instantly, this became one of the most irradiated places on the planet and even today, the soil is so contaminated that radiation levels are thousands of times above the norm, so we didn’t stop there for lunch.

We stopped in the Chernobyl power plant canteen for a sloppy lunch of red and brown coloured food that is bought in from Kiev and on entering, we needed to go through a radiation scanner, which is nerve-shredding. It’s never revealed what would happen if you were the cause of a terrifying alarm, so I assumed you’d just have to live in the exclusion zone forever, serving up sloppy food to tourists that haven’t set the alarms off. I don’t know how the machines work but mine didn’t beep and for that, I am thankful.

Next up was Pripyat, the highlight of the trip, because for all the drama that happened at the nuclear plant, the town that has been left to nature is more interesting than the nuclear plant, where people still work. It was over 24 hours after the explosion at the plant that people started to be evacuated, some had spent the day after the explosion relaxing in the unusually pleasant weather. One man was sunbathing on the roof of his building and was delighted at how easy it was to tan that day, and not at all disturbed that his skin gave off the smell of burning. He wasn’t aware that his tan was the beginning of radiation burns, which would slowly cause intense blistering across his body. Many people suffered the same fate and for the squeamish, looking up radiation burns is not for you.

Pripyat is not quite what it seems and I don’t think the experience could ever be genuine after such a long time and as it’s so famous. But as the minivan meets the guard in his checkpoint shack and enters the town, we immediately see the blocks of flats almost hidden behind thick stands of trees. Everything feels different, that this is not a town that bears relation to any you’ve seen before; it’s like an English garden city if the developers decided to build inside a wood and leave all the trees standing. Every so often the trees give way and a block rises up, it’s both intriguing and eerie, but not scary. If you were there at night, it’d be a terrifying place. Our first stop is the old swimming pool and our guide tells us that we can’t or aren’t supposed to go in, so advises us not to post anything on social media for a few days and takes us inside. It was hard to say if this was a trick to make us think we’re seeing something we shouldn’t be or they’re being a bit cheeky. We were told that the pool was still operating up until 1996, used by the liquidators but now you would easily think it was abandoned along with everything else. All the windows are gone, the pool long emptied and the structure is slowly decaying. Some of the group clamber up the diving board but I find myself interested in the large swimming pool sign on the floor that reminds me of the atomic logo with people swimming around it. There’s a clock still hanging on the wall but like everything here, it doesn’t work.

Later we visit and cross another group of tourists, armed with their dosimeters which aren’t making any noise. The school feels like it has been dressed for us, almost like a film set. Rows of windows frames are left open at the same angle for that pleasingly consistent look. Maybe for Instagram, a classroom floor is littered with children’s gas masks for the emotional sequence and school books are left open on pages with the benevolent face of Lenin staring out and others show soviet kids in the woods. It’s incredibly photogenic and I can’t stop snapping away. Our guides show us before and after pictures, at one point showing us that this field we were in was once the town square. Nature has completely taken over much of the city with trees bursting through concrete, turning the old sports stadium into something more like a wood. We poke around the supermarket, which once was able to have signs for luxury foods and even have the food in stock, Pripyat being such an important town in the USSR. Near the supermarket the guides get their dosimeter out and poke it near a drain. There is distinct beeping, they explain that nobody knows what’s down the drain but nobody wants to find out.

Soon, our trip to Pripyat draws to a close and we pass the checkpoint back into the normal world. We wave goodbye to the atomic dogs and I wish I’d seen some atomic kittens for the comedy effect, but you can’t have everything. I think to the future, in my nuclear bunker/nursing home where I tell people that I visited Pripyat and think of what could have been.

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