Exploring Cirencester

We were looking forward to exploring Cirencester and as soon as I mentioned on Instagram we were heading there people gave me all sorts of tips on places to go, restaurants to eat in and what to do. Not too far from us I am surprised we hadn’t been there before to be honest, and I really hope we get the chance to go back. In fact I might have

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Coronavirus finally caught up with us

Not that I feel there is anything to say that hasn’t been said already but Coronavirus has finally caught up with us and I feel I need to acknowledge that here somehow. Having kept a bit of a diary during the early days so I could look back on it in years to come it only seemed right that two years after we first learned about Coronavirus, and now that

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The travel industry needs to change

I couldn’t really think of a title for this post that wasn’t 20 words long and I guess “the travel industry needs to change” just about sums it up for me. I have been ranting in my head about the travel industry for a while now and thought I should finally get them out of my head and down onto paper. In a post Covid, and Brexit, landscape it is

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Do you dine alone?

Do you dine alone? Would you? I am only asking because I have a confession to make. I don’t. Won’t almost. Along with never going to the cinema on my own (I wrote this back in 2019 about solo cinema trips), I don’t eat by myself either. I did try, once, at the Ivy on the Kings Road in London but it was a complete disaster. I was encouraged to

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Looking back on 2021 — Part two

For the first part of my looking back on 2021 click on this link: Part One This though is part two of my retrospective for 2021, a year I thought nothing had really happened but when going through my phone looking for those to include showed that on average I took 1100 photos a month last year so clearly some things were happening! And it has been good to look

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Looking back on 2021 — Part one

I always feel as though I need to round off a year with a blog post. I need that full stop somehow, and if ever a year needed a full stop it was 2021. So here is my post looking back on 2021. On a personal level I fell off the blog cliff. It was neglected and mostly ignored. In my head I was favouring instagram and trying to post

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Banoffee Trifle Recipe

“Banoffee Trifle” I hear you say. Yes that really is a thing. A magnificent thing. Basically this is a seven layer cheesecake but because it has custard, caramel and cream I think of it as a trifle. Mine uses biscuits because I didnt have cake in the house, but if you want to use banana bread / sponge cake then you can do that instead of the biscuits. PS if

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Cockerings by Stevyn Colgan — A review

Cockerings is pronounced Corrings by the way, as Bruce explained to me when he finished reading it recently and asked if he could do a review. Are you a ‘dash-into-the-bookshop-at-the-airport’ kind of person? Perhaps you’re more of a ‘loiter-in-the-bookshop-over-coffee’ type? Either way, I’d say Cockerings by Stevyn Colgan is a great addition to any book collection. Personally, I think it’s a great answer to the “What book shall I buy

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(AD) Have you heard about Wine List?

You would think that as my parents used to own a vineyard near Bordeaux I would know a thing or two about wine, right? Wrong. I know very little about wine other that what I like and that tends to be a very narrow Which is why I was thrilled when Wine List got in touch and asked if I wanted to see what it is they do Their idea

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2020 Olympics. I loved it.

To paraphrase 10CC, “I don’t like the 2020 Olympics. I love it” It was ten years ago that I wrote about getting all the Olympics tickets I wanted for the London Olympics, ie none. I couldn’t think of anything worse than queuing up with thousands of other people to watch a dot in the distance perform in a sport I knew nothing about, with no commentary to explain anything. Adding

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Hey Thortful, how about you stop body shaming men?

The above card appeared on my stories as a sponsored slide this morning and instantly made me rage as I screamed “Hey Thortful, how about you stop body shaming men”. It is body shaming in its crudest form. It isn’t funny, it isnt banter, it isnt humorous, it is wrong. That’s the tweet. We live in a time when many of us are doing all we can to promote body

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How lockdown changed the photos I shared

I hadn’t really thought about it in too much detail until this time last week when I was approached by Esther Addley, at The Guardian, and asked if I would like to take part in a piece she was writing about how we have taken fewer, and probably different, photos over the past year. Thinking about what I would say prior to us then chatting on the phone made me

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