We arrived in Edinburgh with a couple of hours to kill before we could check into our little Airbnb flat. Not to worry, we thought, we’ll drop off the car, walk over to the train station, stash the bags in… Continue Reading →

We’d learned a lot about Scotland from books and television. We’d watched Jamie and Claire survive the Jacobite Risings and the Battle of Culloden. We’d marvelled at the beauty of the Shetlands as Jimmy Perez solved yet another murder on… Continue Reading →

The country of Scotland includes more than 790 islands. We visited five. As well as the popular isles of Skye and Mull, we managed to get to a few of the smaller islands off Scotland’s west coast. Of course, each… Continue Reading →

England’s Lake District has long held a kind of romantic fascination for us. What a thing it would be, we’ve thought, to walk in a landscape that inspired Wordsworth, on paths trod by the legendary Alfred Wainwright himself. There was… Continue Reading →

The man in 12A nods briefly as I slide into the seat beside him. We’re pretty excited; on this no-frills flight we’ve somehow managed to score an exit row. Greg stashes the backpacks in the overhead locker and we settle… Continue Reading →

This year marks the 350th anniversary of the death of Rembrandt and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has mounted an extraordinary exhibition of the Dutch master’s work. ‘All the Rembrandts’ includes the museum’s entire collection of 22 paintings, 60 drawings and 300 of… Continue Reading →

There’s history in Belfast. In the city’s narrow alleyways that date back to the 1600s. In St George’s, the covered Victorian market built in the 1890s. And in the shipyards that launched the Titanic in 1911. Northern Ireland’s more recent… Continue Reading →

During our travels in western Slovenia we were often so close to the Italian border we could have waved to people living across the way. It was enough to make us realise we missed Italy, so we packed ourselves off… Continue Reading →

A few years ago we spent a couple of days in Slovenia and, though it poured rain the whole time, something about the place made us want to come back. So we did, and this time we took our time…. Continue Reading →

It was almost the last thing we expected. The first person we met in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, was an Italian taxi driver. We emerged from the airport terminal into a cold, wet night to be met with a familiar… Continue Reading →