Photography

A holiday to…Ukraine. The food experience.

After the Georgian feast on day one, my friend and I went back to Communist HQ Hotel to watch some baffling TV before sleeping fitfully all night. Top tip, try to eat before 10pm. Day two began with a leisurely breakfast followed by a food tour with a local, organised via http://tasty-kyiv.com. Putting the food tour early in the holiday is a great idea, so you have a much better idea of the Kiev food scene.

Our guide Tania was a delight, and our tour began by walking through the city centre, talking about what it was like to grow up at the end of the Soviet Union, living in Kiev during the Maidan revolution and what it’s like to live in a country at war with Russia. From my British perspective, this is a war that has ended because it’s not on rolling news. Tania politely rebuffed this, and of course she was right. Since my visit, I have found myself reading stories of a war that is just simmering away, grinding the people down. Take this story of men who can’t collect their pensions because the office they need to visit is through the front-lines. I can’t but feel that the Ukraine authorities could help pensioners better if they had the will, but wars are funny things.

To get to our first stop, we have to pass a building right in the centre of the city that advertises a “Gentlemen’s Club” which is, I’m sure, full of fulfilled women dancing for pleasure and true gents there to support the arts. We arrive in the central food market where anything that can be pickled is there, in a jar. All this pickling makes for great photos and I sneak a few before a stall-holder tells me not to take photos in case the jars get upset, or some such reason. As we move through this labyrinth of pickles, Tania tells us about the traditional methods of storing food that still hold sway today. I can’t say I have a great love of pickled foods, and I have renewed respect for my fridge. Further on, we see a staple of Ukrainian cuisine, Salo. It’s cold, white pork fat, often served with something pickled and while it looked appealing, I couldn’t quite bring myself to eat it. Despite being an aspiring vegetarian, I tried a slice of deer and my friend had a slice of horse which was a no-no from me.

The second stop was a legendary site in Kiev, the first place in the city to serve up fast food before the likes of McDonalds arrived. Kiev perepіchka is a tiny booth on the street that serves up sausage in deep fried dough. You can immediately tell it’s trash food, but it’s so tasty that even when the strip of paper they give you to clean up with simply moves the grease around your face, you don’t care. Perhaps you could revive a flagging relationship by romantically licking the fat off each other’s faces? Or bring your own tissues.

We continue our walk and learn more about the city and revolution, before Tania takes us to a restaurant and bar called The Last Barricade. It’s hidden within the discretely ugly Globus shopping centre, right in the middle of where the 2014 protests were. Part of its appeal is that you’ll need some local knowledge and a password to get in. The password is something suitably impossible to say. Tania tried to teach me the words, which I dutifully mangled and we were permitted behind the iron curtain. Symbolism is heavy here, where you pass through a wall to enter the bar and bricks in the building are designed to look like paving slabs pulled up during the most intense stage of the revolution. There are even sculptures of hands by the entrance, suggestive of people working together. We’re told at the bar that all the produce is proudly Ukrainian. It could be easy to think that a restaurant that’s also partly a museum celebrating Ukraine’s trio of revolutions since 1991 is going to be a political meal (our specials, empty promises and lies on buses) but the food is brilliant and it manages to be both a place that succeeds on novelty and on its own terms as a restaurant. We had varenyky, which is a little like ravioli with fillings. The cherry varenyky was worth a return trip alone.

On foot once more, we headed to Kanapa for borscht and this walk showed off Kiev’s unexpected beauty. Architecturally, large parts of the city are an eclectic mix of art nouveau, baroque, soviet stylings and modern buildings often cheek to jowl so one photo can capture wildly different styles. Alongside this are the many beautiful churches that dot the northern end of the city, making a walk from the centre something worth doing that can easily eat up half a day. St Michael’s Golden-Domed monastery looked timeless in the sun, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it is ancient but the original monastery was demolished in the 1930s and is only twenty years old. Almost opposite is the equally stunning St Sophia’s Cathedral where you can climb the bell tower for far-reaching views. St Sophia managed to avoid destruction, becoming a museum rather than a place of worship. Both are topped by dramatic golden onion domes. Walk just another five minutes and you’ll spot St Andrew’s Church, which sits majestically atop a hill, but it is slowly falling apart so watch out for falling masonry or stressed out clergy.

The weather was the most perfect of Autumnal days, with the sun casting a glow on everything and the slight smells of wood-burning in the air making us all feel very enchanted with the city. Tipping us into cosy overload was Kanapa, set in a painstakingly restored 19^th century wooden building on the very pretty, and pretty touristy, Andriivskyi descent. Somehow we had the restaurant almost to ourselves. Outside was a terrace overlooking a heavily wooded park and I could have stayed there all afternoon. I was a bit worried about eating borscht, maintaining a lifelong distrust of beetroot, but it turns out that I was completely wrong. The borscht was served inside a hollowed out cabbage alongside some bread. The flavours were rich, with neither the sweetness nor the sour cream or dill taking over. I was so inspired by the food that I have since made it at home and it turns out in a past life I was a Ukrainian woman who made this stuff for her family every week. I mean, it tasted really good.

The food tour continued into its fifth hour, so it’s superb value for money. We end at Lviv Handmade Chocolate for a coffee and some of those handmade chocolates they keep banging on about. I bought chocs for my beloved, who is a bit like my mum in the “is it dangerous?” stakes, and one day I’ll let him know that the chocolate I bought, with its fancy Russian-language packaging, is a delicious local blend of Chernobyl milk and Fukushima cocoa with just a hint of cinnamon. The rest of the shop was filled with all manner of delicious chocolate, which is an ideal mum-present shop. When I saw my bank statement a while later, my supposed largesse was exposed when I was charged under a fiver for the lot. This gives you an indication of just how affordable Ukraine is. I read that it’s the cheapest destination you can visit in Europe and while there are plenty of hipster hangouts that charge more, it’s still a great bargain. Let’s just hope that Ukraine doesn’t go the way of so many affordable destinations, with endless stag and hen do’s. The horror! We say goodbye to Tania, giving her €35 each, great value to my mind when she was so engaging to speak to and made the whole day feel much more than what I had expected.

All of this food and talk of revolution got me thirsty for a beer and as luck had it, I had saved Craft vs Pub on Nyzhnii Val St into my Google maps and it was a stroll away. En route, we saw more grand buildings and a trolley bus terminus which I always love to see. I have never really understood these things; neither a bus nor a train or a tram. They were fit to bursting with people heading home from work and though tempted to get one somewhere, neither of us wanted to be getting out Google translate on our phones and showing the driver the Ukrainian translation of “how does this work, how do we pay, help us we’re English” so we didn’t bother. Using just our feet, we found Craft v Pub and had a pint of something lovely and cheap. It was another place that wouldn’t look out of place in London.

For our evening dinner, we had a long list of places to go to and were excited about the feast we would have. We hedged our bets on one restaurant, to find it closed so ended up at Kureni, which has many great reviews. Warning bells should have gone off when we saw that the restaurant is within a park, with nothing around it and darkness all around. When we saw the restaurant, we could see the lights were on, but nobody was eating there. It looked like a lair for a Bond villain who has no friends and we were hangry, so we tried to convince ourselves that an empty place was exactly where we wanted to eat. The confused-looking waiter quickly flicked more lights on, put on a tv and some music to try and create some atmosphere. In the end, the food was decent. My Chicken Kiev (at some point, it was inevitable I’d order this) was solid but not spectacular. The Georgian wine was good and the meal was well priced. The tragedy was that we’d eaten so well all day, and knew the city could do better, which meant that day three needed to include some of the best food Kiev could cook up. Back at the hotel/strip club I plotted for the morning; there would be more churches and a magical-looking soviet construct to visit.

A holiday to…Ukraine. The Kiev experience.

At times, I like to stress my mum out. It’s a sort of bloodsport. Not content with worrying her in Algeria, where she shrieked gems like “Won’t ISIS kill you? Is it safe? The Sahara desert?! I’ll stand in front of the aeroplane and stop you!!” I decided to delight with her my plans to visit the site of the Chernobyl disaster and the abandoned town of Pripyat. She was clearly less bothered with this, because she only said she’d block up the front door to stop me sending “radioactive postcards”. I’m grateful she didn’t know about the whole war with Russia thing. 32 years on from Chernobyl, there’s no consensus on Ukraine; you’re either crazy to go or you’d be crazy not to go. Honestly, I think there’s more chance of dying from boredom listening to people worry than there is in going to Pripyat for the day. And have you noticed that nobody calls it The Ukraine any more?

Needless to say, there’s much more than the world’s worst nuclear disaster and accompanying deformed animals (the ones I saw looked fine to me) to Ukraine. Kiev is a mixture of buzzing capital, memorial to commie concrete lust and entirely normal city. After landing at the airport, where any traveller’s heart will get a little thrill from the unfamiliar language, a taxi ride will swiftly take you through endless Soviet blocks, some of which are atrocities to architecture and others endearingly insane. There are three blocks, reminiscent of giant futuristic hairdryers, by Pozniaky metro station that equally delighted and disgusted me.

We were staying at a hotel that is simply one of the best slices of modernist architecture I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly the most stylish hotel I’ve stayed in, from the outside. Hotel Salute is a cylindrical beauty that reminds me of the Capitol Records building in LA, but with a slightly sinister edge, partly due to the circular windows at the top of the building that give a feeling of being spied upon. It should have been more akin to a skyscraper, but due to arguments during the design phase, it was cut in half. It remains a building that has a sirens call of “photograph me”, which I did at every opportunity.

The Salute’s lobby is a wonder of shiny metal panels that could be lifted from a sci-fi film, when we meet the inhabitants of an evil alien ship. It’s a lobby entirely at odds with the exterior. In the evening, a cardboard cut-out of Marilyn Monroe gets brought out to invite us to see the sexy ladies performing in the room where breakfast is served; as I didn’t take advantage of this I couldn’t tell you if the sexy ladies were writhing over the cold cuts or not.

Highly traditional Ukrainian beer hall, with neon lobster

Our first stop after marvelling and photographing the hotel for hours was Syndicate Beer and Grill. Once again, I make a first stop on an exciting foreign holiday somewhere totally familiar and unexotic. When in Jordan, I took my friend to a bar that served Cottage Pie and young Jordanians danced to Rhianna. At Syndicate, there is no cottage pie, but there is heavy use of neon, bare brick walls and filament lightbulbs that could have you thinking you’re in Shoreditch circa 2013. It feels in no way Ukrainian until we order an item on the menu called pickled fries, which sounded interesting. One slight mistranslation later and we received fried pickles which are much nicer than I’d have imagined. We also ordered a nano portion of parmesan fries – the staff should have served them with a magnifying glass, so measly was the offering. The beer was brewed on site and was fantastic. By the end of my second drink, it also struck me that this beer was strong. The steps leading up to the exit had “who’s going to be drunk” written on them. The answer was obvious.

After this, we went to Arsenla metro station, the world’s deepest underground station, which goes 105 metres beneath the surface. Heading down one very long escalator, my friend proclaimed the metro was deep but nothing special. Naturally, the second escalator was just around the corner and when we timed it, the journey from entrance to platform takes 4m 32s. I guess it had to stop at some point before we entered the bowels of hell. Deep as it is, the Kiev metro is a wonderful bargain at 22p a journey and it even takes contactless payments. It’s like some futuristic miracle. If you’re in any way interested in the architecture of travel, you’ll find yourself trapped in photograph loops in many of the stations, forgetting what you were supposed to be doing. The level of care and attention in these stations is gorgeous; true palaces of the people. While no Moscow metro, it’s still a superb system that puts many Western European metros to shame.

Eventually, our stomachs reminded us we were hungry so we head to a Georgian restaurant, home of my favourite cuisine. Having been to Tbilisi and Batumi, getting to eat this food first-hand, I had high expectations for Shoti, if only we could find it. My downloaded Google map of the neighbourhood directed me to a building site and then an alleyway. Lots of backtracking later we realise that Shoti is unhelpfully written to sort of look like WOTV with the Ukrainian for restaurant underneath. But once inside, the decor of the restaurant and the logo of the restaurant, in the shape of an Adjarian khachapuri, reassures you that all is well. Shoti feels swish and the staff are friendly and attentive. We ordered our favourite Georgian dishes of badrijani, khachapuri and khinkali, washed down with wine. The badrijani, aubergine with walnuts and coriander, was as good as I’ve ever tasted it. The khachapuri, a bread made with a sort of pickled cheese, dripped gooey mess all over my plate and was clearly very bad for me but tasted magnificent. The main part of the meal, khinkali, which is a meat dumpling, was outstanding. By this point, we were too full for pudding. A shame, as Georgian puddings can be very good, but they’ll never eclipse the starters and mains.

Former Soviet states seem to have Georgian restaurants all over the place and it’s easy to see why. The flavours couldn’t be any fresher, with heaps of coriander wrestling for your attention alongside cherries, garlic, pomegranate and walnut. The cuisine is far removed from the stodge people often think of when they think of eastern European food. Perhaps it’s simple geography that helps make Georgian food a blend of Mediterranean and Caucasian cooking. Either way, in Kiev make sure you visit at least one of the many Georgian restaurants. You might realise it’s the food you’ve been missing all along.

The joys of being an independent traveller

In a reflective mood, it occurred to me that some of my favourite travel moments are defined by having an open mind on where to go and then somehow getting there, even if turns out to be a right pain in the arse. I was first bitten by the travel bug in 2005 when I convinced a friend to visit Stockholm with me. In the winter. Ridiculous. But the flights were about £12, so, why the hell not?Evidently, this isn’t the definition of flinging myself off the beaten track, but being a third year uni student, it’s the polar opposite to a ladz holiday to some island full of babes and booze, and since then I’ve never looked back. And at the age of 36, I don’t see any lads holidays in the future.

Stockholm archipelago in 2005, taken on a charmingly crap camera

Despite my fear of crashing and burning into the ground because, in my mind, all aircraft are just flying tubes of petrol, I loved the moment the plane went above the clouds and I saw a beautiful sea of rippling sky-pillows beneath me. We explored Stockholm, visited the island full of art galleries and even took a boat out to Vaxholm island where it absolutely pelted it down with incessant rain. To be contrary, I acted like this was exactly what I wanted, but my friend remained glum and didn’t believe my tricks. Luckily, we found a cafe that sold cake with vanilla custard and hid from the deluge.

Other holidays followed, including an exciting trip where we went from Brussels (hugely underrated city!) to Cologne (bland) as a spontaneous day trip and then more standard trips to Madrid and Barcelona. A visit to Tallinn and Helsinki confirmed my adoration of all that northern Europe can offer and in 2009, a trip to Georgia, near Russia, really lit a fire about the sorts of holidays I wanted to have.

I fell for Georgia almost immediately, struck by wooden scaffolding, cleaners harassing rubbish on the streets with brushes that looked fairly similar to broomsticks and, not being unkind, genuine hags. Tbilisi was a magical eye-opener and part of the thrill and annoyance that comes with travelling off your own steam was experienced at the train station. We needed to get a train from Tbilisi, across the country to Batumi, now some sort of cut-price Vegas by the sea. We queued patiently to get train tickets, so locals would push in front to argue with the person giving out tickets and leave with tickets. I couldn’t argue in Georgian, and I’m not terribly keen on doing it in English, so when we got to the counter, we were denied tickets because of a power cut. I had wondered why things were gloomy. We did eventually get tickets when a tour guide we spent two days with, argued with the ticket seller on our behalf.

In Georgia, we arranged to go on a cycling tour, and the package was to part ride, part drive to a village called Tianeti. We spent a night with a host family who cooked us a feast of the most spectacular Georgian food, food I still cook to this day and rate as amongst the tastiest on the planet. I was in traveller heaven. I’ll always remember the woman picking out wild garlic and coriander from her garden. The flavours were spectacular. We all got drunk.

I have a book of soviet bus stops, so seeing one was well exciting

A year later, a friend and I went on an ambitious tour of Sweden, starting in Stockholm and taking in the archipelago, as well as Umeå, Luleå and Arjeplog all by planes, trains, boats and automobiles. The island of Finnhamn was intensely relaxing and in terms of amenities, it had a little store open ’til 5pm and then a fantastic restaurant, open late. Once again, we were caught out by taking matters in our own hands and not booking in advance, finding that the restaurant was fully booked until at least 10pm. With no other options for food open to us, we sat on the terrace, looking at the view in front of us and adding secret glugs of Finnish Koskenkorva vodka to glasses of coke.

Finnhamn

We visited Arjeplog for the midnight sun and when recently discussing that evening in Arjeplog, our memories were specific to the point of words we spoke. It is burned into my memories as something so mind-blowing it’ll be there in that photo montage bit you get before you die. As we took a night train over 1000km back to Stockholm, a woman in the train cafeteria asked us what we had been doing in Arjeplog and the answer that we’d done almost nothing but look at the scenery, walk and stare open-mouthed at the midnight sun. This didn’t seem to move her to tears as it had me. But that’s the Swedes for you, they are rather reserved.

In 2011, I went on a trip to Jordan and Syria, where I got to enjoy see Amman, Petra, Jerash and Wadi Rum in Jordan. Our hotel in Amman had been bombed by Al-Queda in 2005, so every time we entered our bags were X-Rayed and we were vaguely patted down, but I still felt very safe in the country and refused to let the actions of some pathetic terrorists stop me exploring the world.

In Wadi Rum we stayed in a tent made out of goat hair and spoke to people who were on an organised trip, which had cost one couple thousands of dollars and included things like hot air balloon rides – I will never entrust my life in wicker baskets powered by flames – and camel rides, where the camels growl, spit and walk at a slow pace. They believed that the Goat Hair Inn was some sort of exclusive place; I did a Google search after seeing how incredible Wadi Rum looked and $120 dollars later, my friend and I were staying in the exact same conditions as them. We all ate food that was cooked in a pit below the sand and afterwards, my friend and I stood in the desert, transfixed by the silence and stillness of the emptiness all around. Later that night, I got paranoid that we’d be stung by lobsters, until my friend told me I was actually afraid of scorpions. Great, that’s two animals that wanted me dead. I slept like a log in the end.

Wadi Rum

After this we headed to Syria, where things were slowly unravelling, the Friday we were in Aleppo was the deadliest in the unrest so far, with reports that up to 100 people were killed. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary for us, but it was clear that tourism was way below what would be expected. After a trip to some ruins outside Aleppo, we encountered a small protest where people waving olive branches were briefly around our car. Knowing that the government was shooting live ammunition and tear gas at people, my body froze with fear that something would go wrong, but we passed on. Later that evening, we found ourselves in a gay sauna, suggested to us by locals who clearly thought we’d appreciate the experience. It was bizarre when I had to ask the masseuse to give me a half-hearted rub; he seemed taken aback that someone wanted to do anything other than flirting. I’m fairly certain that hammam was partially destroyed by fighting. It always feels exciting to find a guide on the street and use their services to explore a place, and in Syria we found a driver who suggested we take a day to visit the Dead cities in-between Aleppo and Idlib and to the magnificent remains of Krak des Chevaliers, near Hama. Why trust a random bloke in the middle of the street, you say? He showed us lots of leaflets in the boot of his car and he had a lanyard, so we felt pretty sure he was the real deal. Luckily, we were right.

I couldn’t recreate this holiday now, but I am forever thankful that I got to do it at all. Had it been just a few weeks later and I am sure I’d have backed out, especially as the Foreign Office at this point had make Syria entirely red on their travel advice map, a colour if remains to this day.

Aleppo Souq

My 2012 jaunt to Cuba was thrilling for many reasons, but what stood out to me was the informality of the country. You really could hang out looking like a confused tourist wearing a straw hat and someone would come along to offer you accommodation or tell you your accommodation was on fire/full of rats and voila, you’d have a place to sleep. I recall how we dropped by a place we’d previously stayed at in Havana, needing to find somewhere to stay and the owner flipped through a rolodex and called some friends. Twenty minutes later we were in someone else’s home and they were frantically making swans out of towels for us. In my notebook, I had written that there was a woman in Viñales who made heart-breakingly good food and somehow, without GPS and wifi, we found her house, knocked on her door and asked if we could eat there. Sure, she said, in her pyjamas. There’s a certain sense of adventure in just turning up at a stranger’s home and hoping for the best, but generally, Cuba didn’t let us down. I recall being in the stunning city of Trinidad, heading to a beach near our fantastic accommodation, Casa Munoz and after our beach excursion, where real life Cubans were downing neat Havana Club in the sea, we had no transport back. A man with a truck sensed we were tourists – the straw hats, the pale skin and union jack tracksuits probably gave us away – so he let us jump into the back and took us to Trinidad. What a dude.

Friends that have been in the past few years have come back with mixed feelings; wifi seems to be everywhere, which for me takes away from the magic of escaping the news cycles and restaurants either need reservations or have queues going out the door. Places are fully booked, you need to reserve. Americans are everywhere. Where’s the magic in that?

Havana

Bosnia was the next up in 2014, and I feel a certain affinity with this place as my Dad was there during the Balkans war. Mostar was our first stop and my friends seemed somewhat uncomfortable with the sheer number of bullet holes in the walls, if a wall still stood. As the city grew closer, our taxi driver tried to sell us some “top quality sunglasses” which we reluctantly passed on, what with us all wearing our own sunglasses. While a bit shocked that some twenty years after the bloodshed, the town still looked broken, I also fell in love with the human spirit and the country. Seeing the Mostar bridge was both awe-inspiring and heart-breaking; watching videos of the bridge being shelled was a horrific reminder of how wars kill people, history and cultures and very often achieve nothing at all. Sitting at a table with a view of the river one evening, a lone firework explodes, telling Muslims observing ramadan that it’s time to eat. Soon around us are families chatting and eating and the city feels beautifully peaceful. The next morning, we stroll around the town looking for Muslibegovic House. Naturally, the only person around to help us spoke no English so we peek behind every door and fence to find the beautiful Ottoman-era house that my map tells me is definitely, probably, just there. Eventually, we find it and it is worth the wait. Unblemished by war, it’s a stunning building with a peaceful courtyard. I particularly liked the mannequins that are re-living the lives of the Ottoman-era. One looks just like David Bowie. You can stay in the house and it’s just €90 a night. Now to convince my boyfriend that he wants to visit Mostar…

Mostar

Sarajevo is an easy sell for a tourist; it’s a great city, full of energy, optimism as well as reminders of the war. I loved the Baščaršija, the old town where you get a sense of east meeting west. Many cities really do like to claim this but here you get to see Austro-Hungarian Europe one moment and a Turkish market the next. It’s a perfect warren of merchants to explore. At the time, I wrote that the city marketed itself as the place where we witnessed the “start of the 20th century” and where the “20th century ended”. At the beginning, Franz Ferdinand was shot and World War 1 began. At the end, words like ethnic cleansing become necessary and museums like the War Tunnels remind us of the three year blockade of Sarajevo. the History museum of Sarajevo showed fascinating images of the city during the war and now. The reconstructed Sarajevo City Hall, shelled in 1992, looks spectacular and the stained glass ceiling is a thing of wonder.

Sarajevo City Hall

So many of my travelling adventures have been helped no end by drunken conversations, searches on Google maps, happy coincidences and curiosity. So, my advice to everyone is pretty simple. The world is a great place and people are wonderful. Go and see it! Holiday resorts can wait.

A trip to… Liverpool

The first thing I saw after leaving the train at Liverpool Lime Street was a man, perhaps on his way to a wedding, or perhaps just dressed like an unexploded bomb. Any sudden move and that jacket was going to blow. The trousers were held in place only by a belt and, I presume, a judicious application of glue. It was a fascinating outfit that worked hard to re-introduce me to Liverpool, one of the finest cities in Britain. We were staying at Hatter’s hostel, and immediately my hopes of being able to freshen up after being trapped in a Virgin train, where a light whiff of sewage permeates everything, were dashed by the receptionists. Check in was 2pm, said the desk bureaucrats. With our luggage stowed, we left to explore the city, with that sweet smell of toilets clinging to us.

Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral

In my mind the first port of call for someone who’s never been to Liverpool before is the Metropolitan Cathedral; it’s the sort of place where I could be turned into someone vaguely religious, given enough time and if the services weren’t dreary, long or religious. As cathedrals go, it’s a modern masterpiece on top of a lost masterpiece. The original design was by Edwin Lutyens, with a dome rising to 90 metres. It was planned to be open 24 hours a day, with heated floors so that homeless people would have a place to sleep. Naturally, after World War 2, making enormous cathedrals didn’t fit in with the general vibe of having no money, so the building work ground to a halt. The only part of Lutyens building to be completed was the crypt, which you can visit today. It is a real surprise to go from the technicolour glory of the modern cathedral into the vast space of the crypt. Millions of bricks line the walls and the ceilings curve up into entrancing swirling shapes. Within the crypt was a history of the cathedral, including letters from church bosses to the architects about the need to stick to a miniscule budget of £1,000,000. They chose Frederick Gibberd’s bold design, and it’s a discount version of Oscar Niemeyer’s Metropolitan Cathedral of Brasilia. The result of the penny-pinching was that Gibberd’s building started falling apart almost immediately and fixing it took some ingenuity. The crypt gallery shows a bizarre image of an archer shooting down parts of the rotting ceiling with an arrow. Now it’s all repaired, it is a joy to look at from every angle. The interiors use the space and light to such good effect, I wish every city could have a building so perfect for its purpose. I love how the cathedral was designed to bring the altar into the round, making the congregation a central part of all that happens there. I couldn’t help thinking it’d make a brilliant venue for gigs.

Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral Interior

After the cathedral, we headed to the Philharmonic pub, which is only a short walk away. It’s a wonderful place to spend some time in a degree of elegance, with the men’s toilets being a revered stop on a bog-based tour. Thirty men shuffle into the opulent pee palace, without buying anything from the pub, looking confused and embarrassed by it all, while some chap exclaimed that the taps were from the 1920s. The Phil is so well-regarded that Paul McCartney himself said the thing he misses most about being not being famous is being able to pop in for a pint. But Macca, the toilets still smell bad. I had a coke in the pub, as I was doing Sober October. Everyone looked like a pint of cool, crisp lager. Being near Halloween, it could have been fancy dress.

The Philharmonic Pub

Next we found, alongside everyone else, the Cavern Club. There are entry fees at certain times of the week and we didn’t want to be charged, but when you’re inside, the magic of The Beatles hits hard. There’s no overstating the importance of the band, and seeing the tiny stage where they played 275 times feels quite special. The club is decked out with some incredible Beatles memorabilia including cabinets full of signed guitars, setlists, a flyer signed by iconic legend Jessie J about the Cavern’s printer being shit. Yes, you can tell the glory days are over when you read that China Crisis are performing there for a festive show, but it’s always going to be one of the most important places in music history.

The stage where The Beatles played

Dinner was served by the lovely folk at Oktopus, which is hidden away down an alleyway you’d not venture towards if you didn’t know delicious food was at the other end. The space is as cosy as can be, with standard regulation stripped-back walls and open-plan kitchen. The sourdough bread and beer butter was a major success, and sharing plates make tasty and inventive use of carrots. With firm bites and explosions of flavour, these were special. Topped with pesto, ricotta and walnuts, this was one of the best bits of the meal. The chickpea panisse came with a fabulously rich black olive caramel and the whole fish arrived in foil with fantastic roasted tomatoes and potatoes all cooked to perfection.

Our postprandial stroll took us down to Pier Head and to the three graces, which Liverpool is rightly famous for. The Royal Liver building is the most recognisable, soaring up to just shy of 100 metres, with clock towers at the peak. It is an example of concrete construction done with flair and it has a feeling of a New York skyscraper about it. The Cunard Building is a rectangular beauty, just six storeys high, and The Port of Liverpool Building is full of classical touches, such as the dome, and the building itself is said to be taken from an unused design of Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral. As a trio, they create an instantly recognisable waterfront skyline, making sure you realise that Liverpool, at one time at least, was very important. But god knows, the city doesn’t look after it as much as it ought to. There’s the Mann Island development, which hides the three Graces away with angular glass and metal shards poking about. It’s not pretty, and while no city should be preserved in aspic, it’s always worth caring for your heritage. There are further plans for trashing the area with outsized residential towers, letting affordable housing pledges die on the vine. Just beyond is the rubbish ocean-liner stylings of the Mercure Hotel and another couple of hideous monstrosities lurking behind it like unwelcome party guests. At certain angles, these carbuncles are thankfully out of sight and only then does the sheer glory of the three graces hits you like a gust of wind off the Mersey.

The next morning, sunlight streamed through the crack in the curtain and we were set for a perfect autumn day. I’d had a surprisingly excellent night’s sleep on the Hatter’s Hostel mattress, made of springs with some loo roll strung between them. Refreshed, we had a traditional hostel breakfast. This is usually non-brand name cereal and toast that goes through the bread conveyor belt in a very specific order. First time through = crunchy bread and second time through = ash. I spread some non-brand chocolate derivative onto crunchy bread and sighed. I shouldn’t have been such a cheapskate. After this depressing breakfast, we headed to Bold Street coffee to have breakfast again, but this time in style. After breakfast two, we boarded the train to Formby, just 30 minutes outside Liverpool. In Formby, you can venture into the woods to find red squirrels, making this just the second time I’d seen them, so it was very exciting to walk down the pathway and almost immediately see a family of the critters playing. In the UK, just 140,000 remain, mostly in Scotland. Red squirrels are pocket-sized bundles of cuteness, and their scampering about is very pleasing to watch, knowing that they are so rare in the UK.

The National Trust has red squirrel paths and many other routes around the woods, some signposts leading to a route called the Asparagus trail, which takes you through farmland used to grow delicious asparagus for a short season every year. The history of the area is also apparent in fields labelled Tobacco waste and Nicotine fields. Between the 1950s and 1970s, tobacco leaf waste was dumped by the beach. As you proceed to the sea, you come across sand dunes that seem so incongruous with the surrounding area, but this is what makes the landscape so surprising and wonderful to explore. The dunes are dramatic around Formby Point and this is part of the largest area of sand dunes in England, which is rapidly receding up to as much as four metres a year.

Formby Point

Back to Liverpool and dinner at Maray. I was wise and reserved ahead, but for some reason I did so for the night after. Maray was already busy and looked to be fully booked for the evening, but after some table magic was completed, we were seated for a wonderful meal inspired by the middle east. We had dishes including half a cauliflower slathered with tahini, harissa and yoghurt which was far better than my description would suggest. The scallops in a parsnip puree flew off my plate, as did the buttermilk fried chicken with a red cabbage ketchup. I had a mocktail and loved it, whereas my friend was knocking back a gin cocktail like a monster. Sober for October will turn you against friends and loved ones. The meal, which was too enormous for us to eat didn’t even hit £40 for the both of us. Wonderful service and excellent value for money, Maray is a gem.

Our final exploration of the city was the following day where we wisely ditched the crunchy bread and ersatz coffee, and had breakfast at a local café. We went to the Albert Docks to see what was on at Tate Liverpool. An exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein Pop Art was there and as much as I enjoy his work, I couldn’t help but feel the novelty wore thin after a while. And yet, there’s not much more iconic than this, and it was free. Their main collection holds some fantastic pieces, including photographs by Gillian Wearing and Cindy Sherman. Next door is a museum devoted to Liverpool’s maritime history and, attached to it, a slavery museum. It’s hard to come to terms with how the plight of slaves made Liverpool so important, not to mention so prosperous. One and a half million African slaves were transported from Liverpool to America so a visit to Liverpool, with its fine civic architecture, is loaded with a hideous past.

As our sewage-tainted train pulled out of Liverpool Lime Street back to London, I knew that I’d be coming back to Liverpool. It’s a fantastic city where Conservatives and The Sun newspaper aren’t welcome. These are my sort of people.

Open House London 2017

Open House is the best weekend in the year for the nosey among us and for the curious, it’s a great opportunity to see places you’d normally pay to get in or only get in by evading men with guns. As I didn’t to see Number 10 or the BT tower via the ballots, I plumped for Banqueting House on Whitehall. It is the last remnant of the Palace of Whitehall and has some interesting history behind it. The ceiling of Banqueting Hall was painted by Ruebens, dating back to 1636 and it’s a spectacular sight. Installing the canvasses wasn’t easy – though Belgium and England both used feet as a measurement, there was a difference in how long a foot was. If only there was an Olde EU, we’d have had equal measurements, and the canvass wouldn’t have needed some chopping up to make it fit.

The Great Hall was James I’s main venue for great parties, right in the middle of town. Ideal for showing off, it is said he was well into that and according to some information boards in the hall, he also loved the company of men. Suddenly, the Royal Family seems pretty cool.

Afterwards, sensing there would be queues for many things, if the queues for the Foreign Office were anything to go by, we went to Shakeshack where we got to experience modern architecture and a building too full of people eating quite average burgers. Then, onto Belgrave Square, where we visited the Romanian and Italian cultural institutes and the Argentinian ambassador’s house. The Romanian cultural institute had little in the way of diversions. The interior was grand enough, but when you’ve seen one grand old house, in a way, you’ve seen them all. There was an exhibition of blouses.

The Italian institute’s interior was more interesting, with classrooms full of old desks that reek of the repression of left-handers. There was a library stocked with books about Italy, which you can pop into any time! The library is in a lovely extension with a mezzanine floor.

The highlight was the ambassador’s house. In fact, in terms of what their offer was, they really made the others seem lazy. First of all, there was a doormat saying “beware of the pug”, with attendant pug looking gorgeous in a basket by a table groaning with beautiful flowers. Moving on, every room was full of art from Argentina, colours leaping out at you. It was as if all the excitement, noise and colour of the country was shipped over in diplomatic bags and installed in a London townhouse. Upstairs a band played Argentine jazz. Perhaps it was just jazz. A child danced to the beats, all beneath elaborate chandeliers. The last room was the office of the ambassador, which was a lovely treat; the room was filled with books on all the subjects you’d ever want to know about and a grand desk. As I left, I spotted a picture of the ambassador with the Queen. No Ferrero Rocher was visible.

A long weekend in… Warsaw

Here’s a fact that will make you a pub quiz hero. The population of Warsaw before the second world war was 1.3m people. At the start of the Warsaw uprising, in August 1944, 900,000 remained. In 1945, once the uprising had failed and the Germans had finished their systematic destruction of the city, 1000 people remained and Warsaw was dead.

Human spirit is an incredible thing, because the Warsaw of 2017 is a vibrant, modern city boasting the newest old town in the world and an atmosphere far removed from what you may read in the press about a far-right lunatic government. Oh, that Government, let me count the ways… The environment minister Jan Szyszko said that “human development is not detrimental to the environment” and thought it would be a good idea to allow logging in the primeval Białowieża forest. He somehow squares the destruction of Poland’s wildest spaces with something he completely misread in the bible. He’s an idiot.

Back to human spirit, which Warsaw has plenty of. It’s an underrated city absolutely worth a visit. In a region with the opulence of Vienna, the old town charm of Bratislava, the beauty and stag-dos of Prague and Budapest, Warsaw has had to go back to the drawing board on what it can offer as a city. It has a wealth of history, a history so violent and shocking that much of my long weekend there was taken up in museums, mouth agape at the sheer horrors that Warsaw and Poland has gone through. But, modern Warsaw also has some great attractions for hipster living, and just general fun times. I left Warsaw feeling it struck a note between Stockholm and Berlin, with a mixture of beauty, gritty realism, a lust for life and sitting on deckchairs. Deckchairs were everywhere; outside the front of the Palace of Culture and Industry, up on the viewing platform of the Palace of Culture and Industry, outside the Neon museum, along the river and many places in between.

Warsaw is a messy bedroom when it comes to architectural styles, there’s a bit of everything scattered around. From the Stalinist wonder of the Palace of Culture and Science, where a New York skyscraper may well have flown into the centre of the city, to the other major communist gem, Constitution Square, Warsaw announces itself as somewhere important. Constitution square is a slice of socialist realist architecture that really captures a moment in time, when the Soviet Union could do anything in its imagination, if not in reality. The square is surrounded by grand blocks that gracefully echo the strengths of the union, sculptures of heroic workers adorn the sides of buildings in a celebration of soviet myth. An updated version might show a bored woman giving you change at a supermarket, but it would somehow lack the power required to carry everyone forward into the light. On the square are three glorious oversized lamps that add a touch of brute elegance. This architecture of power is always fascinating to see, and there’s some irony in the enormous Samsung illuminated logo on the top of one of the buildings, bringing brazen capitalism into view. The square and immediate surrounding remind me of Karl-Marx Allee in Berlin, but more glitzy.

If I was to think of glitz and Warsaw, I would be drawn to the biggest building in the country, the eighth biggest building in the EU and a testament to the ways the USSR would wield their power. The Palace of Culture and Industry. Back in 1950’s Warsaw, Stalin was keen to offer Poland a gift. With Warsaw in ruins, you might think a hospital, a university or even somewhere for people to sleep might be a good gift, but as our tour guide said, when Stalin asks if you want something, there is only one answer. It was constructed in three years and in making it, 16 people died, which we were told was pretty good going for the 1950s. A sobering thought for the pointless 2022 Qatar world cup is that over 1,200 have died to make their vanity project. The rush to build the Palace was intense, and construction went on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A benefit of having no neighbours, I suppose. It is, I’m sure, a symbol of the evil of Stalin but the Palace is a marvel and we had a commanding view of it from our rooms in the Intercontinental hotel. Never having to live through communism, I can appreciate the structure, without having to worry about the morals of it.

The building today is a genuine people’s palace, unlike in the days of Stalin where only members of the communist party could attend events, by invitation. It is rumoured that new year’s parties here went on for four days. Keeping that spirit of booziness alive, in 2012, I heard that Roman Abramovich hired a hall in the Palace for Euro 2012 and turned it into a strip club. Today it holds a cinema, four theatres, two museums, a bookshop, a swimming pool and a viewing platform on the 30th floor. You can also go on fascinating guided tours of the building, some taking you down to the basement to see the antiquated machinery and up to the viewing platform.

The history of Warsaw’s near-total destruction is covered in forensic detailed in the Warsaw Rising museum. By January 1945, 85% of Warsaw’s buildings were destroyed, with an estimated 40% of the city levelled by the Germans once the uprising was over, with the population gone aside from a thousand people hiding in the rubble. Germans went around the city with flamethrowers and explosives to gut every building they could, focusing on anything of historical value or national pride, with the aim of reducing Warsaw to nothing more than a military transit point. The biggest building in the old town is the Royal Palace, which Hitler wanted destroyed as early as 1939. During the war, the Nazis conducted aerial bombardments of the palace, removed precious artefacts, tore off the roofing to quicken the building’s demise and in 1944 they spent six days blowing it up. All that remained was two small fragments of wall. Today it stands as the focal point of the reconstructed city and is an attraction worth visiting to understand the history of the building, a fascinating microcosm of Poland’s ups and downs over hundreds of years. One room, the Knight’s Hall, was removed and transported to Russia in 1832 and returned to Poland in 1922. It survived the onslaught of 1939, was removed again by the Germans and only returned to the castle in 1984. This is just one of many original fragments of the Royal Palace that through chance, brave Polish workers spiriting away contents in secrecy and the evil efficiency of the Nazis, managed to survive. The Knight’s Hall is a true gem, with a glorious wooden floor, busts, opulent chandeliers and more.

The Knight’s Hal

Similarly, the Conference Room survived by workers managing to remove many features of the room in 1939, including a chimney piece, wall murals, portraits and even a floor made from thirteen types of wood. In our minds, perhaps a war seems very immediate, but history shows it to be something very different, where people don’t flee their cities but do their best to stall the senseless damage.

The reconstruction of pre-war Warsaw was partly down to the work of Canaletto, who was commissioned to paint twenty-two street scenes of Warsaw. These paintings, like much in the city, was first nabbed by the Russians, then by the Germans, and they somehow all survived the turmoil, now sitting in one place in the Royal Castle. We visited the Castle on a Sunday, when it is free to visitors.

The old town is so remarkable, it’s hard to take it all in. You see what looks like a fairly standard eastern European old town; buildings painted many beautiful shades of green, peach, yellow, crooked rooflines, enchanting views from all angles. But it’s all of 60 years old, if that. The reconstruction of the city is a glorious act of defiance that stands at odds with how Britain rebuilt after the war, in a festival of concrete and ring roads.

All of this…about 60 years old!

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is a spectacular building, designed by Finnish architects and every bit as adventurous as that would suggest; the exterior is relatively square in shape making the interior’s grand curved entrance even more startling. The building opens up to represent a parting of the seas and is lit from above allowing shadows and shapes to dance over the sprayed-concrete interior. Shapes are everywhere, from the spiral staircases to the slanted doorways. The main exhibition space is below ground and traces the history of the Jews in Poland since the middle ages and it would be fair to say that squabbles and power play have been a constant between the Jews and the Polish, with both sides enacting petty rules against the other whenever it suits. As we travel through history and edge towards the Holocaust, the space feels more oppressive as you get closer to the second world war and the tone is more frantic as history takes one of its bleakest turns. It is important to note that the Holocaust is just one aspect of the museum and the story ends in the modern world, reminding us that Jewish history did not end in the 1940s.

Museum of the Polish Jews

A much smaller museum is the Museum of Life under Communism, which squeezes hundreds of artefacts, photos and tat into a few rooms that imitate a home in communist times. A cheesy record plays on an old record player, with the staff coming along to start it up again. Every room has information in English to tell you about the great time-saving abilities of the commie kitchen – stuff that Westerners will probably look at half in interest and half in amusement, but across the homes of many millions of people would be the same sort of products and the museum is a great time capsule. The house was stacked with Zenit cameras with old film stock, cleaning equipment called Prozek and Wedel Chocolate. Wedel is an interesting company; in the war, the company refused to collaborate with the Nazis and so they were persecuted, with their factory being destroyed in the uprising. Afterwards, the company made attempts to get back on its feet when the communists nationalised it. Since then, it’s been owned by a bunch of global names and now one of Poland’s best- known brands is owned by a Japanese-Korean conglomerate. A history lesson in a bite of chocolate.

A few minutes’ walk more and you’ll find the Neon museum, a celebration of liquefied air that when illuminated, makes everything look immediately cooler. Discovered by Brits, but finessed by the Polish, the neon museum has a heap of Warsaw’s old neon signs that adorned the buildings of the city during the Cold War. Some of the pieces include depictions of bikes zooming off, milkshakes, flowers bursting with colour and the symbol of Warsaw, a Mermaid. The museum also restores iconic neon in their original locations, and it looks like the museum’s work has made Warsaw reminisce for the illumination of old because the city crackles with the sound of neon on many shopfronts.

If the weather’s good, head to the University of Warsaw garden, a huge green space around the university and on top of it. The gardens are separated into two sections; the lower gardens with a pond, many spaces to sit and sculptures by Ryszard Stryjecki. The upper garden is even more impressive as it covers the roof of the university building, with four areas full of paths and differing plants and trees. The views of the riverside and the city centre are remarkable, with clusters of skyscrapers here and there and the familiar outline of the Palace of Culture and Industry dominating.

In the breaks between history and culture, a drink is always welcome and you can’t go wrong if you head to the bars of Pawilony, the cluster of little bars tucked away behind a gate at 22 Nowy Świat. Despite it not being announced by any signs, beyond the gate is pivo enough for everyone. The atmosphere is relaxed yet busy, the clientele a mix of young and older and choosing somewhere to go is really just a lucky dip. As we left the bars, a stag-do came along, singing their songs of fighting and so on. Actually, we had no idea what they were singing but the guttural chanting didn’t sound sweet in nature.

Hala Koszyki

For food, Warsaw packs so much on your plate that you’re going to need elasticated trousers for a few weeks afterwards but it’ll be worth it. A new food outlet is Hala Koszyki, a gorgeously renovated market hall transformed into a grand food hall with tiny bistros nuzzling up to food stands and restaurants. Finding a table was hard to do, so you might find that you eat wherever you can, rather than where you want. Spend some time here checking out the lighting which is an artwork in itself. Just looking around the market is entertainment enough. We had a great brunch at Sam, which sprung up in 2012 and has a deli, bakery, bar, and food through the day. They bring you many, many menus that offer you all sorts of food options, so you can even bring along your fussiest. I’ve noticed this in Poland; some menus will have little arrows telling you that chia seeds are “blah blah good for you” and the omega 3 is “blah blah whatever it does” and that the meat is from some special Polish place with the eggs being from blessed chickens. Menus are turning into little booklets on nutrition and I swear it worked its magic on me when I ordered Shakshuka, which is full of “blah blah all good eggy things”.

We had dinner at Stary Dom, inside an unprepossessing façade a tram ride outside town. The interior is high on rustic charms, with a wooden vaulted ceiling, lots of pictures of old people and generous sized tables with room for all the food and drink you’ll order. It’s genuinely nice to go to a restaurant and have space. It’s not all that fun doing Tetris with your pierogi. Our waiter had a good sense of humour and coerced us into downing shots of the strongest vodka known to man. Clever man. To balance out new Warsaw and old Warsaw, we visited a milk bar. For the uninitiated, a milk bar is a communist-era cheap cafeteria serving up dairy-based food, so expect mashed potato with everything. We visited Bar Sady, where the interior seems little changed from communist times and it’s all the better for it. The extensive menu offers Polish staples like soup, meat and veg with sides of cabbage. I had a mushroom soup with pasta in it, breaded chicken cutlet with potato and red cabbage. The entire meal with a soft drink cost under £5.

Warsaw has many great bakeries, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll stumble over one but here are my highlights. For pastry needs, there’s Vincent where I had an orange croissant. For beautifully structured cakes you can head to Lukullus or Odette but be warned that you’ll not want to eat it because it’s like a work of art. Then you’ll eat it and just buy more.

I went to Warsaw expecting something altogether more grim; after all, I was told it was an “interesting” city with rough edges. Seeing Warsaw in excellent spring weather was a genuine delight. The city might not appeal to those looking for something like Prague, but it has a real depth of character that gives the city a sparky personality. Resilience turned Warsaw from a charred wreck into what it is today, and that’s a thoroughly enjoyable destination I’ll want to visit again.

Many of the photos courtesy of my friend Rokos who has an eye for detail and a head full of 80s pop tunes.

My 2016 in photos

Two thousand and sixteen promised us lots of futuristic things, but when they arrived, I got fed up of them pretty quickly. It seemed to be a year of hoverboards that didn’t hover, people doing selfies and strange orange-skinned men banging on incessantly. Photography is something good to hold onto. Photography can’t tweet at 3am.

Invisible Dot, King’s Cross

The invisible Dot, now sadly closed, was a fantastic venue for comics to warm up for new shows or for new acts to get a food on the ladder. I saw Sheeps, Liam Williams, Kieran Hodgson, Joseph Murpurgo and many more there. No round up of my year would be complete without it.

Algiers

Algiers is a wonderful assault on the senses. Jasmine, herbs, spices, barbecued meat, diesel and industry all fight to capture your attention against the sounds of cars beeping and police blowing their whistles for a purpose barely fathomable. At once, you are in the Maghreb, the middle east in outlook if not geographically and with French signs everywhere, you feel like you’re in Europe. The other places we visited in Algeria were very different altogether.

Timimoun

The Sebkha Circuit outside Timimoun was one of the most exciting things I have done in my travels. Getting to Timimoun itself was an adventure – after flying on a Turboprop for four hours into the Algerian Sahara, you land in a tiny airport and wait while the police do various things with your passport. Then you need to have a police escort to take you the ten minute drive to your hotel. Going on the Sebhka Circuit requires a police escort as well, but soon you forget them and their guns and focus entirely on the stunning beauty of the ksar (old castle) and the underground dwellings where people would store dates and seek sanctuary from the blazing sun. Even in April, the difference in temperature underground was significant. We were able to walk around the abandoned caves, drive across dunes, see our driver rescue the police escort when their 4×4 was stuck in the sand and have sand blown in our faces for an hour thanks to a mini-sandstorm.

Ghardaïa

The magical town of Ghardaïa exists thanks to an oasis. In fact, it is one of fiive hilltop settlements that have their own oasis to draw from. Ghardaïa has a relatively new town but the real draw is the ancient town, which you can only access with the help of a professional guide. Photography is permitted, but you are not allowed to photograph the women, dressed in a white veil with only one eye peeping out. They swap the eye in use around so they don’t end up ruining their vision. We stayed at what we assume was our guide’s summer house, which looks like something fresh out of Tatooine. On our second day there we were invited to a wedding, where men danced around, occasionally stuffing antique guns with gunpowder and firing them at the floor. We drank mint tea and shuddered at every gunshot.

Røros

In May I visited my friend Dave in Norway, and we went to the delightful small town of Røros. It was founded in 1644 and for 333 years was a hotbed of mining shenanigans when it wasn’t burning down. The town and mine seemed to be on fire a lot. Working in the mines would have been exhausting work, and the sub-arctic temperatures could hardly improve the moods of the workers, so the brightly coloured buildings of the town make perfect sense. There is a wonderful cluster of the oldest wooden buildings near the old copper mine. The copper works museum is full of artefacts and a model reconstruction of the works, showing men and horses deep underground. As ever, Norway stole my heart with its good looks and charm.

Tate Modern

In the summer, just after Brexit, the will of the people opened up the Tate Modern extension. The building looks like a fortress and it suited the climate of the country. Luckily, inside it is a wonderland of modern art, with a new 360 degree view over London and those horrid flats on Bankside. A nation fed up of millionaires was able to glare directly into their sterile living rooms and gasp “it looks like a show home”. Tate Modern put up a tiny sign asking for resident’s privacy to be respected. It was in every respect, the art event of the year. Here, my friend Leanne is risking it all with an umbrella opened up inside!

Man. Mourning a bucket.

Here is a man looking sad by a bucket in the horrid flats on Bankside. The Switch House viewing platform is another highlight of the Tate Modern extension.

Berlin

One of the first photos I took when I landed in Berlin was this sneaky one of a man, wearing bleachers, drinking beer from a roadside kiosk, holding flowers. The relaxed atmosphere of Berlin is just one reason why I love it.

Ferry to Skye

In October, we took the ferry to Skye from Mallaig. After a stunning train journey it made sense to take a beautiful ferry ride. This girl proclaimed that her pose was “a Titanic reference!”. Meanwhile, Skye rose majestically in the distance.

The Old Man of Storr – Skye

Words, photos and memories do not do the Old Man of Storr justice. A steep walk up slippy paths in ever-apocalyptic weather got me thinking I should look more at my footing, but every second spent staring at the rock formations was a second well spent. An ancient landslide caused the startling rock formations, visible for miles around and the height of 11 double decker buses. Breathtaking.

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