• Europe,  Independent travel,  Photography,  Travel Blog

    Beautiful Places #4: St Petersburg

    The whole point of our visit to St Petersburg was to see a winter city in the depths of winter and therefore to see it as it is meant to be seen. We weren’t disappointed. During our visit temperatures dipped to minus 27, there was heaps of snow on the ground and the river was frozen, but each day was blue sky and wall to wall sunshine: it really couldn’t have been any better. St Petersburg is both beautiful and majestic, and enchanting. The imposing Hermitage with its unbelievably opulent interior; the majesty of the city’s architecture exemplified by the wonderfully named “Church Of Our Lady On Spilled Blood”, easy…

  • England,  Photography,  Walking

    Cold Snap

    Is it just me, or is anyone else irritated by the fact that, in the context of COVID, the world is referring freely to the “British variant” or even more geographically specific, the “Kent variant”, when ex President Trump was consistently vilified for referring to the pandemic as the “Chinese disease”? It’s called “COVID” because phrases like “Asian flu” and “Spanish flu” have been outlawed by the WHO as racially divisive, so how come the “British variant” is acceptable? Maybe it’s just me. Anyway, just as we sit here confined to quarters unable to travel, we get a little bit of the world – indeed a little bit of the…