The Rising Tide - Horses in the Thames

The Rising Tide by Jason DeCaires Taylor

London living... take three

I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me.

Charlotte Brontë, Villette

Your own exploration therefore has to be personalised; you're doing it for yourself, increasing your own store of particular knowledge, walking your own eccentric version of the city.

Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking

London - beautiful, immortal London - has never been a 'city' in the simplest sense of the word. It was, and is, a living, breathing thing, a stone leviathan that harbours secrets underneath its scales. It guards them covetously, hiding them deep within its body; only the mad or the worthy can find them.

Samantha Shannon

This is life, in all its gruesome, lovely, neon-lit glory.

Nuala Casey, Soho, 4am

This city had been a city for two thousand years, and I could feel that with every step I took. Bits of all that time were still here, alive, even if it was just in the form of collective memory.

Carrie Vaughn

It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.

Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

Brief journeys - Working and walking in Portland - Part Two

Brief journeys - Working and walking in Portland - Part One

Whenever I have a chance, I escape to a garden

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.

Michael Pollan

SanFran Sunshine

I heart it!

When in...

... San Francisco

Brief journeys - impressions of Toronto

“Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.”

Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

~ Peonies and rain showers.
~ Geese. Of the Canadian variety, of course. Bronze and feathered, both.
~ Rest and restoration. Good sleep, warm hospitality, leisurely pace.
~ Walks and chats. Lots of that...
~ Waterfalls and sunlight create magic in the sky.
~ Love, and a wander down memory lane.
~ Iconic skyline.
~ Did I mention the Peonies? Never, ever, seen so many.
~ A beach, a far horizon and a big sky. Some of my favourite things.

♥

Ville de Bruxelles - Part Two

Avenue of loveliness.

Old and new combine quite beautifully.

Parks that offer an oasis of cool and calm.

Magical glimpses...

Anywhere else it would be too much. In a palace... it seemed just right. 

Ceiling panels and chandeliers covered in wings of 1.6 million iridescent jewel beetles. Incredible.

Ville de Bruxelles - Part One

Yes, okay. I'll try.

Kings Cross St. Pancras to Gare de Bruxelles-Midi in 2 hours - Eurostar really is the way to go.

The Grand Place - very grand indeed.

Seventeen out of twenty. Plus a few that aren't listed.

Art deco loveliness. A museum of musical instruments.

And, of course... chocolate.

Chemically speaking, chocolate really is the world's perfect food.

Michael Levine

Well, I'm not sure about that but it does seem that the Belgians come as close to making it perfectly as I have ever tasted.