Mark and I are back on our travels, this time in Erfurt in Germany for the annual gathering of the Friends of Scouting in Europe. These visits have become a part of the year that I particularly enjoy: a chance to catch up with old friends, make new ones and, more importantly, see something of…
I was nine when my mum introduced me to a line that has stayed with me ever since: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” It comes, of course, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, although at nine I wasn’t terribly interested in who Polonius was, or whether he was necessarily the wisest source of advice….
There are some things which ought to sit above politics, and saving the life of another human being is surely one of them. That is why I have watched the growing abuse directed at the RNLI, its staff and, most disgracefully of all, its volunteer lifeboat crews with a mixture of anger and disbelief. Over…
I have a confession to make, although it is not a particularly well-kept secret. I am an Archers addict. I have been listening to the inhabitants of Ambridge for more than forty years, through births, deaths, marriages, affairs, farming crises, village fêtes, floods, fires and an impressive number of arguments about things which, to anyone…
This morning I found myself at Friends House in London at something rather grandly, and I suspect, deliberately, called Volunteering Davos. There were no mountains, no snow and rather fewer private jets, but there was a serious purpose behind the name. Convened by Shaping the Future with Volunteering, it brought together leaders from across civil…
There are some places where time behaves oddly. Gilwell Park is one of them. Today I went back for the 100th Gilwell Reunion — and realised, slightly alarmingly, that it is forty years since I attended my first one. I was 22 then. I should make clear that I haven’t been to every Reunion in…
. . The final morning of a holiday is mostly about luggage. We packed, repacked, checked the weight of the bags, moved things from one case to another and eventually established that we could get ourselves and everything we had accumulated over the past ten days back to Britain without having to wear six layers…
Copenhagen feels noticeably busier than Stockholm. The streets seem fuller, the pavements more crowded and the soundtrack considerably more international. We set off this morning to explore properly on foot. The city is compact enough that walking seems the best way to understand it, although by the end of the day our feet may have…
Our last morning in Sweden began with another excellent breakfast at Bomans in Trosa. Mark discovered pancakes with lingonberry jam, which seemed an appropriately Swedish way to start the day, before we packed the car for the final time and set off south. We had a fair distance to cover, but by now we have…
We have done quite a lot of walking on this holiday, but today managed to combine a gentle morning stroll to the End of the World with an afternoon involving a palace, fika, some impromptu foraging, rocky forest paths, an observation tower and several extremely wobbly suspension bridges. Sweden continues to deliver. We began in…
