The Road from Santiago

  Today is my last day as a gainfully employed person. This is, of course, a lie, but it works if you assume that having a full time JOB as opposed to merely working is taken into account.  I am on holiday from that one so I am not expecting a phone call to demand I do a tight sixty minutes on the implications of the Liberal Health Reforms of the later Edwardian era but from now on, work may be regarded as not the only thing in my life.  What if  I get bored?  Maybe I need to get out of the house.  Are Streetview taking on?  Well I looked it up. According to Tech Careers I need: A clean driving record is a must. No company wants to hand over the keys to their high-tech vehicles to someone with a history of fender-benders or speeding tickets. Familiarity with technology is also key, considering you’ll be operating some specialized gear to capture those 360-degree street views. You don’t need to be Lewis Hamilton, but effective navigation skills are cruc...

  If you haven’t been interested in UFOs and the Supernatural when you are in your early teens what were you doing with your life?  Admittedly the 70s were a golden age for wondering if Aliens had really built the Chiswick by-pass and if you could sharpen the top of your pyramid if you put it near some razors.  Among these things which seemed to make the world a jolly bit more interesting than ‘Songs of Praise’ or Petrol Price rises, Ley lines stand out as among the more playfully interesting. Forward to 1984 and a friend is doing something on them for his Geography Degree.  He tracks down ancient sites in North Staffordshire which all seem to be linked.  He then got someone to create a computer programme to create random points [it was 1984, give us a break.]  The leyline was straighter than the random points!  Oooh eee oooh eee.  As he said, we need to do this a thousand times more to check.  Others have.  This in turn has created a lo...

  I’m not sure when I started ‘Walking’ - the purposeful act of going from A to Bish - compared to the mere act of not dragging my bum along on the ground.  Maybe it began when I went to secondary school and coming home for lunch was a thing - as we had over an hour, rather than the skimpy 40 minutes today.  College helped.  Catch a bus,  you had to leave home at 7.40.  Walk and it was 8.00.  Poly reinforced this. Of course I really am not good at doing nothing and at least if you are walking you are doing something. You also get to discover byways and small landmarks of minor interest. Thinking has also been a way of passing time and reordering problems.  Of course, it has to be the right sort of problem.  Anything involving pen and paper is right out.  Serious problems can lead to longer walks.  The trad walk for this page lasted about 40 minutes - or a podcast.  The new one is over an hour and, apart from the coffee break, m...

  We are heading back towards those sorts of roads which have been designed to hurry traffic along in an efficient way. This one comes with its own distraction in the shape of a cross with its own stone gazebo.  La Cruz Cubierta garners 4.1 stars from 14  reviews.  Coheta does us most favours by describing what it is: They say that King James I died in this place or stopped to rest on his way to Valencia when he was convalescent. In Valencia capital we can also find another covered cross of the same dimensions.  There is no access for pedestrians, the road runs in both directions and it is very dangerous to approach it without due precautions. Very pretty. David is very accurate It's not bad but it's not very good Boro seems lost on the Googlesphere I give 3 stars because I haven't tried the food, but the truth is, seeing part of the kitchen that can be seen from the bar, it wouldn't be a place where I would like to eat or even want a sandwich. Besides, coffee i...

When does summer end?  In many cases about the 5th June but this year I look at it with a new interest. A friend once commented that the summer ended after main event at Kentwell -in those days last two weeks in June and first in July.  This was her summer hols used up, the solstice had come and gone and that was it. September is a tricky blighter for anyone teaching.  The solstice has happened and students unlikely to make the grade are sacrificed on the wickerman in the hopes that exam markers will look kindly on the answers of others.  Nothing much has happened by late July, when you crawl over the finish line - wondering if anything you said in the last three weeks will have stuck.  By and large the nights are late and the mornings have lots of surplus daylight sloshing around, more than you would ever need. Then you have to wake up again as it is September.  At this point you notice the nights are muscling up a bit earlier and morning's lease is far to...