The archive

This year has been full of surprising twists and turns, not all of them for the better. But one perhaps unexpectedly good thing among an oddly bittersweet period is my cautious return to the railways after an economically enforced absence of almost four years.

It's a long time since I visited Cockfosters... My solitary previous excursion even predates the records I've kept on this venerable website. Back then I have a hazy memory of emerging from Charles Holden's low-slung, futurist station building to…

I first visited the Tropicana on a school trip – probably sometime in the late 1980s. I wasn’t a swimmer, so joining a small number of sick, limping or otherwise unpopular kids, I skulked around the margins of the site.

Crossing London can be a trial at the best of times, but today offered some special challenges. I knew in advance that various parts of the Underground network were out of action, but my early luck in tumbling onto a replacement bus service lured…

After the widely acclaimed and nominally successful staging of the Olympic Games, London has returned to a sort of strangely pensive calm. Everyone senses the Paralympics will bring a little of the magic back, but no-one really expects them to cause quite the upheaval in terms of the capital's life.

This is something I posted on Facebook, largely in response to some of the negative comments I received following expressing my views on the London Olympics. It's not the post I'd like to have written which details my personal connection with the…

I'm beginning to see how this strange hobby of mine goes in cycles. Last week saw me needing to turn lost days and cancelled trips into something of a coherent journey. It didn't work hugely well, and there were times when the need to be somewhere else without purpose made me pretty miserable.

Regular readers, should any remain now the music stuff has headed elsewhere, may recall the 'Lost Weekend' series. Occasions when planned trips didn't happen but advance fares and hotel bookings had to be used.

I'm no longer accustomed to baring my soul in these entries like I used to. Somehow the arrival of the blogging phenomenon made the idea of the original c.1999 'daylog' seem painfully self-conscious and eventually just obsolete.