Bonfire Night
The last Bonfire night I attended must now be what – 1991? Tonight, all across the UK, bonfires will be set, effigies burned and fireworks set off. People will have BBQ food perhaps or a special dinner. Families and friends will be together and hopefully, fun will be had by everyone. But not here. Not in Brno. Instead, I will be thinking back as I usually do to the bonfire nights of my past. The ones that I recall most vividly were those on the damp banks of the River Humber with the local camping club. It would be the last outing of the year and the caravan would be hitched and the tents packed for a short haul down the M62 towards Goole. There, somewhere in the countryside –
Read More »Fall – My Favorite Season
To me there is no more beautiful a season than Fall or Autumn. Even as a young boy, the beginnings of winter always appealed to me when we used to go to the banks of the River Humber to celebrate Guy Fawlkes night. There is something about it – the colors, the smell of dampness and the coming cold, the leaves heaped in piles and blowing in the wind, the fog that often occurs at this time of year….. With that in mind, we set out this weekend to tour a bit of south Bohemia here in the Czech Republic with stops in Jindrichuv Hradec and Ceske Kromlov being particularly spectacular. We were blessed with almost perfect weather – foggy mornings and sunny days – and sitting on a boat
Read More »Fog
This morning, for the first time in a very long time, it was really quite foggy here in Prague. We live at the top of a hill and it was quite bizarre driving up the hill into the fog. For a moment, my imagination was off and I half expected to emerge on the other side of the foggy wall in a parallel universe. Most disappointingly, I didn’t. When I was a boy, there seemed to be much more fog. Maybe there was as in industrial Britain of the 1960’s it was smog rather than fog that we were dealing with. Perhaps, it was just Hull situated between the coast and the River Humber on the flat plains of Holderness. Always damp and cold, fog just seemed a natural part
Read More »Fall Cometh
The temperatures dropped significantly on Sunday – from in the 20’s to 7C today. The leaves of the trees outside my window are beginning to discolor and even fall already along with the conkers that my daughter loves to collect. Fall cometh. Actually, I quite like Autumn. The colors and the earthy smells. The damp and even the cold. We used to go camping right up to November when I was a boy and the final camping weekend was always down near Goole by the River Humber. By the first weekend in November, many trees are already laid bare and leaves blew around in large numbers or lay in damp heaps sticky and wet. The air had a chill in it and by the relative warmth of a major estuary
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