I blame Blue Peter myself. Somewhere back in the eons of time before the days of colour television and when John Noakes, Valerie Singleton and Peter Purves were still young, there was a dog called Petra. The year I was eight Blue Peter did one of their famous historical stories all about her namesake, the [...]
Hot, intense and bitter sweet, Seville is famous for passion, for spectacle and theatre, and for song. It’s the greatest city of the Spanish south, the home of such legendary characters as Carmen, Don Juan, Figaro and Columbus, and the city of the Andalucian gypsies and their flamenco culture. It’s an elegant and wealthy city, [...]
“The crags are capped in nests of domes, less hotly red than the body of the body of the hill. They gave the finishing semblance of Byzantine architecture to this irresistible place, this processional way greater than imagination…vast, echoing and godlike.” T E Lawrence The desert which the Queen of Sheba crossed on her way [...]
We saw Petra for the first time at night. Inky blueblack sky above, punctuated by a mesh of stars. Deep black in front, behind and around us, candles in paper bags lighting the path beside our feet but little else as we followed the Bedouin leader down the ceremonial Siq. As we entered the rock [...]
As technological advances push the boundaries of what is possible, our ability to enjoy the winter cold wherever we are increases apace. We now have the largest igloos ever known, carved from the ice and erected anew every year, machines that blast out snow where there isn’t any so we can ski whenever we want, [...]
Claire Burdett
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