I stood at the Menin Gate memorial in Ypres, Belgium and observed two minutes silence for the dead of the Great War on Remembrance Day. It was a beautiful, moving thing to do. I was there to honour the memory of my grandfather, George Monkhouse, who fought on the Western Front with the ANZACs (Australian […]
I’ve been reading about D-Day since I was a boy and films like Saving Private Ryan and the TV series Band of Brothers really fired my imagination as an adult. But it’s only when you actually stand there, on the beaches where the troops came ashore, that you can begin to appreciate what happened on […]
I love a good castle. As far as I’m concerned, going inside an ancient fortification beats the vaulted interior of any church. (I’m a sufferer of ABC syndrome; Another Bloody Cathedral.) So I was very excited about checking out the Convento de Cristo in Portugal, which was founded by the crusading Order of the Knights […]
The Portuguese are very stylish and intensely proud of their art, food, culture and history. The fiercest examples of this pride were on display in Porto, the great city sitting astride the Douro River and the Atlantic Ocean. Porto is world famous for its architecture, which is a heady mix of the ancient, the modern […]
There’s a craze sweeping across London called Secret Cinema. It’s a themed event where you go along and experience scenes from a movie almost as if you’ve stepped inside the screen, all the while try to guess what film it is before sitting down to watch said movie. Before attending the latest event, you had […]
