Tactical Nuclear Penguin: Tasting Notes
Recently opened in Gijón is a new pub with a menu of at least 500 best beers of the world chalked on both sides of a cinemascope-size blackboard, of which this is a mere portion: The 3 prices being for take-away, drink at the bar, or drink at a table; the bottles
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Me & Sam Beckett, big profit, a fleabite
Back in 1964 when I was busy on my postgraduate thesis in Oxford, lapping up Flaubert and Baudelaire and Stendhal, Blackwell’s bookshop had a branch in narrow Turl Street which runs through the centre of the city (as in nos-tril dividing the nose), and they also had a rare books branch in nearby Ship Street
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Hallowe’en Special: Hurrah for the Pumpkins of Gijón!
Just a bit downhill from the largest single building in Spain, Gijón‘s University of Work, bigger than the Escorial Palace… …is a wondrous botanical garden, where boardwalks wind through enchanted woodlands (plus much more). I’m astonished how the Jardín Botánico Atlántico managed to grow so many pumpkins and gourds in the relatively small planting
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Make Me a Meme!
This is my shot at launching a feelgood meme upon an innocent world. Share on Facebook, and let’s watch this grow! Like a solar flare, like a nova… (Thanks to Rhys Hughes for placing these words of wisdom within a suitably illuminating setting.)
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The Mysteries of Paris
I’m stealing my title from the 1000+ page bestseller by Eugène Sue, Les Mystères de Paris, serialised during 1842 and 1843, which I constantly vow to read… some day sueoon. Our hôtel was the delightful Esmeralda diagonally across from Notre Dame—clong, clong—so endowed with antique character that it could never install such innovations as
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Portugal twice in 2012
During 2012 we first flew direct from Asturias to Lisbon and then, later in the year, Charo drove us and Alejo from Salamanca to Porto, latterly past big boulders balanced upon boulders, where glaciers must have butted up against the mountains between Spain and Portugal. The occasion for the second trip was Cristina as Spanish
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Return to Venice, earlier 2013
We visited a chilly Venice just before early Easter 2013 (whereafter, all prices would jump, along with the volume of visitors). I’d last seen the floating city almost 50 years earlier, so I feared in case megatourism might have sunk the place aesthetically as well as regards centimetres. Tourists were indeed passing over bridges
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Stendhal in Berlin
Cristina and I spent a week in remarkably friendly and laid-back Berlin this August of 2013. A woman with young kids even missed her subway train to help us with an uncooperative ticket machine on a platform. This was after we were marooned for 5 hours on the street with our luggage due to laughingly-titled
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Festival Fun in Spain
The second edition of the Celsius 232 (= Fahrenheit 451) SF & Fantasy Festival happened exuberantly between the 31st July and 3rd August 2013 in Avilés, Asturias province, in the north of Spain, assisted slightly by me as regards the foreign guests (and I also prevented rain, due to mage-powers of which I should
DetailsWhere would our Roman Empire be without COFFEE?
Where would our eternal Roman Empire be without coffee? What if the Aegyptians had never established trading contacts with the Horn of Africa? For the Aegyptians to venture so far southward in inferior ships, at risk of piracy! All the way down the Sinus Arabicus, a greater distance than from the port of Roma to
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