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Last Days in Turkiye — A Long Journey and a Mystical Surprise.

November 29, 2025

It was the last 2 days of our Turkish tour, travelling with a bunch of interesting people led by our indomitable guide, Abdullah. Our tour group was not only interesting and sociable — 3 of them had become overnight heroes. An Indonesian tourist had suddenly arrested in the hotel restaurant the evening before, and the heroic trio, 2 men and a woman, had worked as a team to perform CPR on the poor guy. They did this for a full 20 minutes until the ambulance finally arrived. We heard later that the gentleman had pulled through and had had stents put in. Chris and I missed the drama as we had decided to have an early night to prepare for our long coach journey the next day but we learnt all about it at breakfast.

So it was goodbye to Cappadocia, the land of surreal landscapes, troglodyte villages and medieval, frescoed rock churches. It was goodbye to the colourful armada of hot-air balloons that were rising into the pink, dawn sky as we drove off. Our group of 40 ( plus guide and driver) settled down for the lengthy 330+ journey back to the Mediterranean coast at Antalya. We had seen some incredible sights but I guessed that the highlights of the trip were now all behind us. No journey in a foreign land is a waste of time however. This one was to throw up a couple of fascinating surprises.

The first surprise came only about 40 minutes in. We pulled into a roadside services that had been created out of an old, medieval caravanserai or desert inn. We were back on the route of the Silk Road from China, through central Asia to the eastern Mediterranean. Curiously, Abdullah said we must stand still and stop talking in 20 minutes time at 9.05 am precisely. We would then depart at 9.06. We were bemused and wondered what was happening. It turned out that it was the anniversary of Kemel Ataturk’s death in November, 1938 at the age of 57. His last breath was taken at 9.05am on the 10th. Ataturk was the much revered founder of modern Turkey in the early 1920s. So November 10th is a Turkish version of Remembrance Day. Coincidentally, the British Remembrance Day is just 24 hours later on the 11th. It was only now that I noticed that all the buildings were festooned with the red and white Turkish flag — a crescent moon cradling a single star. Many buildings also had large scale photos of the great man himself. So we stood to attention and bowed our heads at the appointed time and then were off again, driving across a featureless, flat plateau towards the city of Konya.

I had imagined Konya as an historical place full of ancient Ottoman buildings, evocative bazaars and colourful markets. However, as we approached, all we could see was a vast industrial estate, ranks of apartment and office blocks, busy roads and a modern tramway. It was a bit of a shock — the gap between expectation and reality. However, we were not to be disappointed, as soon we were gazing at one of Turkiye’s most celebrated religious sanctuaries — the original home of the Whirling Dervishes. It was worth the journey. Before I describe our memorable visit, some explanation is required.

Konya is a major place of pilgrimage in the Muslim world and special for all pious Turks because it was the adopted home of Jalal al Din Rumi. In Turkiye he is better known as the Mevlana or Our Master. Rumi or the Mevlana lived in the 13th century and was a poet, philosopher and mystic. His ideas led to a new and important strand of Islam, called Sufism, being formed. It’s a religion based on mysticism and centred on a ritual performed by the “Whirling Dervishes.” We had seen a performance by a group of Dervishes back in Cappadocia. It had been stressed to us that this was not a tourist entertainment but a genuine spiritual ceremony with the aim of uniting with God ( Allah.) There was to be no applause and no photos, except at the end when they came back for a brief curtain call. There were 5 men doing the spinning or whirling, another older guy who was a sort of master of ceremonies and 4 musicians who also sang . The whole ceremony lasted for 45 minutes.

The idea is that just about everything in the natural world is cyclical. For example, the rotation of the earth, the seasons, the water-cycle or the circulation of blood round the body. The aim of the Dervish ceremony is for the people involved to escape their earth- bound status, and become part of nature by spinning around in a circle. This would open them up to go on a spiritual journey towards God. At first they wore dark, closed cloaks and tall, dark, plant-pot like hats. These represent the earthly tomb that man’s ego is trapped in. Once the hats and cloaks are removed and they start to spin around, their white skirts fan out and allows them to escape their ego and be spiritually born again. At first the Dervishes have their arms closed tightly across their chests, but as they whirl, their arms open up. The right hand points up to God, while the left points down to the earthly shackles that have been left behind. That’s the theory anyway. It was very interesting and quite moving. The effect was lessened somewhat however when we saw one of them in the car park afterwards, now wearing his jeans and football shirt, checking his mobile and getting into a big, flashy car.

Anyway, here we were in Konya, where it had all started 1200 years ago. We were about to visit the museum and mosque that has been created around the Mevlana’s tomb. It was his mausoleum. Soon the focus of both pilgrims and tourists came into spectacular view. In front of us was a huge mosque- like building with 2 large domes, a tall minaret, a dozen smaller domes that sprouted along the roof-top like mushrooms and, most unusual of all a tall, turquoise, fluted tower. Upon closer inspection the tower was decorated with a band of blue and gold Arabic calligraphy. The Mevlana’s ornate tomb sits directly below this tower. The building was originally the first HQ or Lodge of the Dervish sect. It was started a year after the Mevlana’s death in 1273. More grand buildings were added by Sultans in the 15th and 16th centuries. The whole complex is surrounded by rose gardens. It stopped being a religious centre in the 1920s when Ataturk was establishing modern Turkey as a secular state.

We walked round the side the museum and into a large courtyard. Crowds of visitors were swirling around. In the middle was a place where worshippers were doing their ablutions. (cleansing themselves with water.) Round the side were the cells where the dervishes had prayed — now turned into an exhibition explaining sufism. To enter the building we had to put plastic covers over our shoes. The place was heaving. Above us were the domes, highly decorated with geometric patterns and fancy calligraphy. To our right were the elaborate tombs of Rumi, his father and his closest disciples. Each tomb was topped by a small wooden pole round which rich material was wrapped to create a kind of turban. The one on Rumi’s tomb was a deep turquoise green. This turban symbolises Rumi’s spiritual authority. The star tomb was naturally the Mevlana’s or Rumi as we know him in the west. It had scores of pilgrims, men, women and children, praying in front of it. Some even had tears in their eyes. Nobody worried about us tourists wandering around in the midst of all this religious fervour with our jaws dropping, as Sufism preaches that non-believers should be treated with respect.

Rumi’s tomb and its surroundings are exquisitely beautiful. The tomb area is supported by 3 ornate columns with archways in between. The walls have elaborate embellishments representing paradise. Broad pink, blue and green bands are adorned with golden Arabic script. The raised tomb itself has beaten gold ornaments inside and is covered with vitrified tiles on the outside. The sarcophagus is draped with a beautiful gold-embellished veil. It is topped with the already mentioned green turban. In front of it is a silver cage on which verses from the Koran are carved. The whole scene, with the worshippers and the richly decorated tomb was quite overwhelming. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling and above us were the beautifully decorated domes. It’s difficult to describe how wonderful it all was. It felt as if I was experiencing a part of the real Turkish life and that I wasn’t just in a tourist trap. A number of grand halls contained historical and religious artifacts and at the end we briefly peeped into women’s and men’s prayer rooms, showing that it is still an active place of worship.

The Rumi Museum and mausoleum in Konya was definitely one of the highlights of the whole trip for me. We eventually walked back to the coach and continued on our journey. We travelled on, eventually reaching the impressive Taurus Mountains. As soon as we reached the other side and descended on to the coast, we ended up in Antalya’s teatime rush hour. Our compensation was to witness a magnificent blood red sunset over the dark, distant mountain peaks. Then it was a late meal at the hotel, when we could swap notes with others in the group, before we finally hit the sack.

Our last day was spent in Antalya first of all visiting a jewellery workshop and then a leather outfit. The talks and demonstrations were interesting but the hard sell at the end wasn’t welcome for most of the group. We worked out that we were being dragged along to these places because they paid the tour company to deliver us there and thus subsidised the holiday that we had all been attracted to by the bargain price. Finally we were set free in the old town and harbour for 3 hours but as we were tired and were nervous of getting lost Chris and I just had a little potter around a small, defined area and shared a nice meal with another couple whom we had teamed up with. The bit we saw of Antalya was pretty tacky and commercialised but I’m sure there would be some interesting parts to discover if we had had more time and energy. For instance, the Rough Guide says the Archaeological Museum there is outstanding. Maybe next time , if we go there on an independent trip.

We left early next morning for our flight back to rainy Manchester. We were hoping for a quiet, smooth departure but our luggage got lost and we spent a tense, uncomfortable half hour in the departures lounge waiting to be reunited with it, as we eventually were. It had been a great trip overall, albeit tiring and hectic because of the sights and experiences that had been packed in to just 6 whirlwind days. We learnt a lot, saw a lot, met lots of interesting people, had a few disappointments but enjoyed many, memorable highlights. One last thrill was seeing the Swiss Alps as we flew over the entire length of Europe back to the UK. Now it was time to get back to reality and catch up on sleep. The Premier Inn’s bed in Manchester was extremely comfortable!
CAPPADOCIA — Experience of a Lifetime?

November 26, 2025

After a long coach journey from Antalya ( Turkiye), we had finally made it to Cappadocia, the land of a thousand tourist dreams. According to AI its the Turkish land of unique “fairy chimney” rock formations, cave dwellings and underground cities. It sounds like a veritable heaven for today’s armies of camera clicking Instagrammers. I had been thinking of going there for many years but had never got round to committing. But now, at last, thanks to a bargain priced tour , my wife, Chris and I had finally made it.

We had travelled into the area through mountains and then across a flat, featureless plateau. We had arrived after dark ( it was November), so we would have to wait until morning to see the famous landscape. Some have described it as like being on the surface of the moon or visiting an alien planet. We all got ready to channel our inner Captain Kirks.

However in the morning, before we even got to see the weird and wonderful rocks, we were treated to another spectacle. As the sun slowly rose, hundreds of multi-coloured hot air balloons gently took to the air. It was an incredible sight and we even delayed breakfast in order to stand and gawp at it.

Hot air ballooning over the lunar landscape of Cappadocia is a top tourist draw. Our guide Abdullah was very keen for us to give it a go. He said not to go ballooning would be like visiting Paris and not going up the Eiffel Tower or going to Egypt and not seeing the Pyramids. He warned us that if we didn’t go on a sunrise balloon ride we would regret it for the rest of our lives. I think he was on commission! (He’d obviously not been there when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band had played for over over 4 hours at St James’s Park, Newcastle in 1985 as part of their “Born in the USA” tour.) I don’t like being told what I should do but the real reason that Chris and I didn’t go for it was because we are very nervous of heights. Going up Blackpool Tower as a teenager is still one of the scariest things I’ve done in my life. That’s why we decided to forego the trip of a lifetime and stay earth bound. Lesser reasons were the £150 per person fee and having to get up in the middle of our sleep to catch the glorious glows of the sunrise. We opted for a much needed lie in and a healthier bank balance. We were in a small minority though. About 33 of our group of 40 signed up. One lady even told us that the hot air balloon ride was the only reason she had come on the trip.

The experience of a lifetime for the 33 had to wait however, until the second morning of our stay in Cappadocia. Earlier strong winds had caused a backlog of people wanting to fly. In the meantime, we had the relatively mundane task of touring the area by coach and on foot. Even without the adrenaline rush of taking to the air, I still found it a fascinating and thrilling day.

Cappadocia is an area in the south- central part of Anatolia, in the Asian part of Turkiye. It used to be so remote that persecuted Christians travelled there to hide out during the Arab and Turkish invasions of the 7th to the 11th centuries AD. Now it has become a hugely popular magnet for tourists who flock there from all over the world. It is one of the jewels in Turkiye’s tourist crown.

The strange, highly photogenic landscape was created by the eruptions of 3 volcanoes, now extinct. The lava set into very hard Basalt but at the same time, their ash was compressed and solidified into a softer rock known as “tuff.” Water and wind action has weathered these tuff formations into fantastical shapes. Thus now there are : table mountains, canyon like valleys, whole hillsides of cone-shaped rocks ( My Whippy would have been proud of them), and weird pillars of sculpted soft rock topped with mushroom-like slabs of darker basalt. These eye-catching forests of pillars have been dubbed “fairy chimneys” by the tourist trade, although to many, their phallic shape is what first comes to mind. One area is called “Love Valley” and I don’t think the namers were thinking of fairies or mushrooms.

The refugee Christian communities found the tuff rock very malleable. In other words it was tuff but not tough. They carved out houses and churches, not to mention whole sub-terranean cities. It was a full scale, troglodyte community.

We set off for “Love Valley” after breakfast. It’s a deep canyon and is full of fairy chimneys, the phallic-shaped rocks that some have thought of as fertility symbols. Hence it has been given its “Love” title. The sight of all the fairy chimneys is indeed startling. They seem so unreal They appear in eye-catching clusters and every one is unique and constantly changing because of the way it is being weathered by the elements. As soon as the coach parked, I scampered off, trying to get my own photos of the spectacle. Unfortunately the position of the rising sun hampered my attempts to get a clear cut picture, and pesky hot-air balloons kept descending and blocking the view of some of the most picturesque clusters. I had to duck and dive to get a few half-decent shots. Despite everything though, it was a wondrous sight to take in.

The tourist trade knows this once remote rock-scape is now a massive draw , and it has exploited it to the full. On the edge of the canyon are car parks, refreshment stalls and souvenir hawkers. One can sit on a pony, a horse or a dromedary camel to have a selfie taken. The presence of the horse is very appropriate as Cappadocia is Hittite or ancient Persian for “the land of the beautiful horses.” Of course you can pop in and out of Love Valley in a hot air balloon. The most tacky sight in my opinion was of large love hearts, festooned with plastic flowers and ribbons, where one can sit for that “romantic” souvenir photo. Obviously , the latter gimmick is playing on the modern name for this unique valley. Mass tourism and commercialisation is doing its best to spoil a natural phenomenon .

After our alloted time we all piled on the coach, gulped down some water as it was getting hot, and drove on to the next place on our Cappadocian tourist trail. It was called Goreme and is one of the few remaining settlements where rock cut churches and fairy chimneys are still inhabited. It has an atmospheric honeycomb of cave dwellings etched into a steep hillside. We went into one multi-storied rock house which was open to tourists. It was (is) very tall and divided into several floors connected by steep, narrow ladders. Each floor got progressively smaller as we got closer to the top of the cone shaped rock. It was quite precarious as we clambered gingerly up and down the metal ladders. ( a modern addition.) The floors are carpeted and have low-slung sofas covered with richly coloured textile throws. Windows had been cut out of the rock but had no glass. It was like visiting Fred and Wilma Flintstone or their neighbours, the Rubbles. The Turkish attendant had obviously cottoned on to this, as he greeted visitors with an enthusiastic ” Yabadabadoo!” Once out of the quaint rock house we climbed the hill in increasingly hot and bright sunshine. As we ascended, the views of the surrounding volcanic landscape were impressive. Goreme is amazing even though now heavily commercialised. Rock cones have been turned into houses, hotels, restaurants, bars, shops and almost anything else you can think of. All types of tourists are catered for from back-backers to luxury seekers. All sorts of activities are on offer. One agency we passed was advertising : hot air balloon flights, horse riding tours, camel safaris, Quad Bike tours, jeep safaris, a vintage car tour, a Turkish night party or a “performance” of the Whirling Dervishes. The choice is mind boggling. One wonders how much longer the delicate natural environment can withstand such relentless pressure.

On we drove to Monks Valley, another wonderland of weird, phallic rock pillors. The difference this time was that we could walk amongst them instead of just viewing from above. Each pillar of tuff is topped by a black, basalt cap. Interspersed with the rock forest were bushes and trees sporting bright yellow, autumn leaves, gleaming in the sun. The valley is extraordinary but by the time we got there in the late morning, lots of people were pouring in. It was the weekend and also the start of a school holiday, so there were large numbers of Turkish families. We had to queue to get in and even queue to get out! The entrance and exit are controlled by turn-styles. At the head of the valley are fast food, ice-cream and souvenir stalls, plus restaurants, toilets and a large coach park, which had at least 20 coaches in it when we left. A quiet valley of fantastic rocks has been changed into a busy tourist mecca.

After a set-menu lunch in an underground rock restaurant we visited part of an underground city created by the refugee Christian and monastic communities in medieval times. It sounds exciting but was actually a bit of an anti-climax as we only saw a few rooms used for strange or to house animals. We were warned not to go in if we suffered from claustrophobia as there were some very narrow passages with low roofs. However it was fine. Obviously the guide has never been in the caves and caverns of the Peak District of Derbyshire near where I grew up. The Peak Cavern in Castleton actually has a long, low entrance nicknamed “lumbago walk.” We weren’t issued with helmets or anything. Health and safety seemed to be very casual in Turkiye compared to what we were used to.

Finally , on that hectic but memorable day, we went to witness a spiritual ceremony by a company of Whirling Dervishes. It wasn’t a tourist performance but a genuine religious ritual. It lasted for 45 minutes and we were warned not to take photos or applaud. The Dervish ceremony is an important part of the Sufi Muslim religion. I’ll write more about the Dervishes in my next Turkiye blog which describes a visit to Konya where the mystical Sufi sect was born.

On our second full day in Cappadocia, we had a small lie- in as most of the rest were doing their balloon rides at sunrise. They came back full of smiles and enthusiasm although wrapped up very well as it had been very cold up in the sky. I was pleased that they had enjoyed it. Once we set off at 9.30 we drove to a traditional carpet making cooperative. One of the reasons the tour was so cheap was that places like this paid the tour company to bring its groups there. Some people were resentful and didn’t want to go in but, we had no choice but to go with the flow. There was nothing else of interest around the workshop. We were given complimentary drinks ( we had pomegranite tea) and were treated to an interesting talk and demonstration by a Belgian guy who used to be priest and a Turkish lady in traditional dress. Some of the hand -knotted carpets were absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately, at the end, salesmen attached themselves to us and tried to persuade us to buy. The attitude seems to be that all foreign tourists are rich and have money to burn. Our salesman even followed us to the toilet but had the decency to wait outside. After a while he gave up and we just had a pleasant chat with others in the group while we waited for a couple of people to make purchases. I lashed out and bought a box of Turkish Delights for our neighbours who were kindly putting our bins out and back in.

Next came a visit to an interesting ceramics museum and gallery followed by a self service lunch in a restaurant packed with tourist groups, like us. It felt a bit like we were being processed on a conveyer belt. We stopped off for a panoramic view of an abandoned Greek village spread up a picturesque hillside. In the early 1920s, when the modern state of Turkey was rising, phoenix- like out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, Greece and Turkey agreed to conduct a massive exchange of populations. Some people would call it “ethnic cleansing. People whose families had lived in a place for generations, suddenly had to abandon their homes for ever and go to live in another country. In some ways it was a tragedy, as in the old Ottoman days, both nationalities had lived happily together. Now Turkey is littered with haunting, abandoned villages. Presumably it’s the same in Greece. It would have been nice to explore the old streets but we only had time to clock the view and take our photos. I believe many of the old Greek dwellings are now being turned into hotels or shops.

Abdullah, our guide, left one of the best experiences to last. We went back to the village of Goreme and visited it’s outstanding open- air museum. It’s one of the largest monastic settlements in Cappadocia and contains more than than 30 Byzantine- era churches hewn out of the rock. We visited six of them including three 11th century columned churches set into a steep hillside. We saw long rock tables where the Christians ate, alters and crosses, domes and columns, and, best of all some fascinating old frescoes, painted on to the rock. We saw angels and seraphim, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion and other religious scenes all done in the flat Byzantine style of the Eastern Roman Empire. It was a bit strenuous clambering up and down steep staircases to see them but it was worth the effort, at least in my opinion. You cannot beat an ancient fresco painted over a thousand years ago. It’s not exactly the Tardis, but such paintings allow one to travel back in time.

The Open Air Museum was the grand finale of our whistle stop tour of Cappadocia. It had been a memorable if somewhat hectic visit. All the boxes on our tourist list had been ticked. I would like to go back there someday and have a more leisurely exploration of this unique region’s sights. For the time being though, it had been great. I had managed to do 3 satisfying things in 2 full-on days — 1 See some of the geological, historical and artistic highlights of one of Turkiye’s most stimulating areas. 2. Continue my on-going, long term study of mass tourism in action. It is still enthusiastically trying to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. 3. Have interesting conversations and get to know a whole bunch of fascinating people. As someone said to me on another escorted holiday – “”I’m always up for a conversation.”

The next morning it was an early start. We had the long road journey back to Antalya ahead of us. Who knows what surprises lay in store for us? As we drove off after our last Cappadocian breakfast, the sun was rising again along with a hundred or more hot air balloons. Another excited group of tourists were having their experience of a lifetime. It was a spectacular sight to drink in before we turned south and headed away from the land of fairy chimneys, troglodyte villages and frescoed rock churches. Even though Chris and I didn’t take to the air it had still been a memorable adventure. One outstanding sight still waited for us down the road, but that will have to wait for the next blog…..
More Snapshots of Turkiye — Taurus Mountains to the Anatolian Plateau.

November 20, 2025

My wife Chris and I were recently lured to Turkiye on a bargain price escorted tour. We had no intention of going away in November. However, the exotic sounding places and the almost unbelievable price persuaded us to go for it. Everyone assumed we were aiming for a dose of winter sun, but we actually packed our woollies and rainproofs as we were heading for mountains and a potentially cold, high plateau. The first day was spent on an over commercialised coastal strip near Antalya, and I was pretty disappointed. However I hoped that things would look up once we left the coast behind and travelled through the scenic Taurus Mountains and on to the geological and historical wonders of Cappadocia on the Anatolian plateau beyond. Unfortunately, during the night before we were due to set off, there was a tremendous thunder storm with torrential rain. I feared that our trip would be called off because of floods, landslides or worse. My sleep was fitful as I witnessed the eerie Muslim call to prayer at 6am and then the dawn.

Yet, when we went to breakfast, everything and everybody seemed normal. There was no gloom and doom talk of cancellation. The trip to the interior was still on. Obviously the Turkish road network and infrastructure was more robust than I had feared. We packed our cases and set off at the ungodly hour of 7.30am. You don’t get much rest on an escorted tour! As soon as the coach slid into the traffic quite a few of our 40 strong group fell asleep. Abdullah, the guide, decided to save his talk on the Turkish education and health systems until later.

Those of us still awake endured another tedious dose of Antalya’s traffic congestion. Finally, the traffic thinned and we started to climb into the foothills of the mountains. The Taurus Mountains form the impressive backdrop to many a holiday shot of the Antalya coast. Now we were actually going to travel through them! We started to see some spectacular, jagged rock formations and then distant peaks, as we slowly climbed. The weather at first was fine and calm but then the rain returned. Before we knew it, we were in the middle of another thunder storm!

Then, about an hour out of the city, we pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. After an urgent conflab with the driver ( Ahmed), Abdullah solemnly announced that we had broken down. There was a crack in a radiator pipe, the water was draining away, and we were overheating. They phoned the office and organised a replacement coach to come and rescue us but it would take at least an hour. We were stuck near the start of a very long journey of 330 miles. It was our lowest point.

Luckily the storm soon passed and the rain stopped. Most people got out for a leg stretch and breath of air. Being mostly British, the Dunkirk spirit quickly set in. As Turkiye had been neutral in the Second World War, I had to explain to Abdullah what the Dunkirk spirit was. Everyone started to talk, laugh and joke. We were determined to make the best of the situation. One lady trecked a 100 metres down the mountain road and had a wee on a bank behind a tree, guarded by her husband. Needless to say the coach for our “bargain” holiday didn’t have a toilet. She came back with her shoes caked in mud.

A police car arrived and put on its flashing lights to warn traffic of our predicament. Everyone helped to unload the broken down coach. The barriers between us had melted away and we now all worked together as a team. At last the replacement coach arrived. We loaded up, boarded and were off. For 2 seconds we lurched forward and then we stalled! It wasn’t Ahmed’s normal coach! But we soon got cracking, driving through a fairly narrow pass between the peaks. At the summit we entered a very long tunnel through the mountain in front of us. It had only been open a few months. Apparently, the tunnel miraculously shrunk a meandering journey of 1 hour to a mere 5 minutes. Before we knew it we were on the other side and descending. After a quick comfort stop at a services that looked like a large yurt, we drove through more fantastic mountain scenery complimented by colourful autumn trees. We went past a huge lake that looked like the sea. Abdullah told us it was the 3rd biggest in the whole of Turkiye. We then had a lunch stop on the outskirts of Konya, a large city. It wasn’t exactly idyllic. We had a view of a busy ring road and an industrial estate. Our trip into the old centre of Konya was postponed until the return journey in order to make up for lost time. We drove on across a flat featureless plateau, north-east towards Cappadocia.

The highlights were a huge sugar beet factory and a prison! I also spotted a small herd of cows looked after by a bored looking cowherd and a flock of sheep, tended by a big dog and a teenage boy. The sheep had a donkey quietly grazing in the middle of them. That’s something you would never see in the English Lakes or Dales. It was a long day and a long drive. I was beginning to think it was another mostly wasted 24 hours.

Then, completely unexpectedly, one of my personal highlights of the whole trip suddenly appeared in front of us. I thought it was just another toilet stop, but then I found we were walking round the walls of a large, fortress-like, 13th century Caravanserai or desert inn. Without warning, we had been plunged into the medieval world of the legendary Silk Road when constant lines ( or caravans) of camels plodded patiently from China to eastern Europe, their precious cargoes balanced on their humps. Loaded camels could only comfortably travel about 20 miles a day, so every 20 miles, the Seljuk Turks built a rest station or caravanserai. This was much more exotic and fascinating than the caravan parks I had experienced in Britain. We were visiting Sultan Han, the largest surviving caravanserai in Turkiye. It is in the town of Sultanhani. Opposite, across a square, was a large silver coloured mosque with a dome and 2 minarets. Surveying the scene around me, I realised I was now a very long way from home. I felt the hairs coming up on the back of my neck. At one point Sultan Han had been dropping to bits and in danger of being demolished. However, then, thank goodness, the Turks realised its historical value and had it fully restored and opened up as a museum. I’m not sure whether this was because Turkiye suddenly came to appreciate its rich heritage or whether it spotted the opportunity to earn lots of money from tourists. Maybe it was a bit of both reasons. Anyway, from my point of view, as a history buff, Sultan Han was (is) absolutely wonderful!

It was built in 1229 AD because it was bang on the trade route from/to Persia. We entered through a 13 metre high marble gate, with a pointed arch. It is decorated with corbels and geometric patterns in the stone. Very fancy it is. All cameras were out at this point. We walked into a large courtyard, lined with arcades on both sides. These contained the stables and accommodation for the merchants and their animals. In summer, the camels usually slept outside. All food, fodder and lodgings was free, paid for by religious endowments. The Seljuk Turks prided themselves on their hospitality, a tradition that still continues in much of Turkiye today. The lodging rooms are now being restored. As well as sleeping quarters upstairs we saw: kitchens, lounges, a library, quarters for a harem ( for wives, concubines and female servants), a posh room for the Sultan just in case he dropped in and even a perfume room — to “soothe the soul.” In the middle of the courtyard is a small mosque or prayer room which has 2 floors. It’s called a Mescit or kiosk, and is the oldest in Turkiye. The caravanserai also had a refectory and a hamam ( steam bath.) ( By the way, “kiosk” is one of only 2 Turkish words to be adopted into English. The other is “yoghurt.”)

After the guide’s introductory talk we were let loose to explore. It was fascinating. We ducked into the various restored rooms, some of which still had craftsmen working on them. Then we walked through a second ornate, stone gateway into the winter quarters, another courtyard but this time covered with a roof. It has a vaulted ceiling, and lines of stone pillars separated by pointed arches. In the centre is a dome-capped tower. It was like walking into a medieval cathedral. To cap it all, the pillars supported a fantastic display of colourful 18th and 19th century Turkish rugs and carpets. And there was hardly anyone there! What an experience it was.

All too soon we had to move on. Chris and I had been so consumed by it all that we didn’t even have time to grab a cup of coffee. We re-boarded the coach and carried on our seemingly endless journey into Cappadocia. Darkness fell but we ploughed on regardless until finally we turned off the main road and there was our hotel, a grand, palace- like structure with floodlit statues of an angel and a unicorn standing in front of it. You couldn’t make it up.

That night we had a splendid mezze style dinner at the hotel and settled into our rooms which had rounded ceilings and fancy stone niches. It was like sleeping in a compact, ornate cave. Perhaps that was appropriate in this famous land of rock houses and churches and fantastical geological formations. All that was before us, but for now it was time to reflect on an epic day of emotional ups and downs and some indelible memories. At last we drifted off into sleep, dreaming of the wonders of Cappadocia still to come.( we hoped.)
SNAPSHOTS OF TURKIYE — the ups and downs of an Escorted Tour.

November 18, 2025

I’ve been to Turkey 3 times before but this was my first trip to Turkiye. ( Ha Ha!) The Turks have recently changed the name of their country, maybe because they were fed up with being associated in the West with the festive season’s sacrificial bird. My first visit was to Istanbul, on my own, way back in 1974. I stayed in the same hotel as Agatha Christie and James Bond,( the Belle Epoque: Pera Palas, up the hill from the Bosphorus). I visited the monumental church of Hagia Sophia, saw a dancing bear outside the beautiful Blue Mosque ( very cruel), tried to walk to Asia but didn’t make it, found out I didn’t like Turkish coffee ( a bit of brown sludge in the bottom of an egg cup), and visited the fabulous Sultan’s palace with its glittering crown jewels. ( the Topkapi Sereglio).

Two decades later, in the early 90s, a girlfriend and I found ourselves in Kalkan in Lycia on the Turquoise Coast of South West Turkey. It was a wonderful holiday, alternating sunbathing and swimming with visits to ancient sites. About 10 years ago I was in Lycia again, this time with my wife Chris. We were on an escorted tour west from Antalya which eventually took in the fantastic Roman cities of Ephesus and Aspendos. Finally just recently, we got lured by a bargain price, on to another escorted tour in the holiday low season, this time linking Antalya, on the south coast with the weird but wonderful landscapes of Cappadocia on the central Anatolian plateau. It was to prove a hectic, eventful but memorable trip with a few lows but many amazing highs.

A friend of mine who had been on a Mediterranean cruise described it as a series of fascinating snapshots, whetting the appetite for a longer visit at some future date. I think an escorted tour follows much the same format. You see a collection of interesting places for just a short amount of time each, before quickly moving on. There is little time to linger. The downside is that someone else is deciding what you see and how long you will see it for. Someone else even decides when you get up and have your breakfast. Relaxation is not a word one would associate with an escorted tour. Sometimes it can be frustrating as outstanding places are experienced in a rush. But the alternative would be to travel round an unfamiliar country, which speaks a strange, incomprehensible language, on one’s own. At our age, the thought of doing that is pretty scary. Our carefree, backpacking days are now well and truly over. So Chris and I sacrificed some of our freedom to play it safe and have a lot of the worry taken out of our heads. We travelled on a package tour with 32 British people, 2 British based Turks, a German lady from Blackburn, a Canadian lady now living in Derby and 2 Taiwanese Chinese ladies currently residing in London. It was an excellent bunch of people — interesting and varied. Everyone was friendly, open and supportive. Our Turkish guide and driver were Abdullah and Ahmed. They looked after us very well although inevitably there were a few little niggles on the way. However as the Muslims say, nothing and nobody is perfect except Allah.

The adventure started in Manchester where we caught a budget airline flight to Antalya on the Turkish south coast. It was a near 4.5 hour flight reminding us that we were not only travelling to another country but also to another continent. Turkiye straddles both Europe and Asia. One early highlight of the trip was seeing the dark mountain peaks of the Balkans rising up above a blanket of white cloud which had settled in the valleys below like snow. Once we landed at Antalya we could stop thinking for ourselves as the guide and driver then took charge. Like schoolchildren with our teachers, we were now being chaperoned. We drove through dark and busy streets lit up in lurid neon, to our hotel complex. After a late buffet dinner, we settled down in our room to catch up on sleep. We had pushed our clocks 3 hours forward, and our bodies needed time to adjust.

It would have been good to rest up the next day. The hotel complex was very nice, with a pool, tropical trees and plants, a bar and lots of slim, graceful cats slinking around. We saw cats all over Turkiye. Presumably they are there to keep the mice and rats down. Yes, it would have been nice to relax but we had paid to visit a mosque and go on a river trip, so off we went.

The coast west of Antalya is ugly and heavily developed. It is a popular tourist area, a narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the dramatic Taurus Mountains, just inland. A four lane highway runs right behind the beaches. This now hosts almost permanent traffic congestion and the situation has been made worse by the addition of a tramline, built for an Expo in 2016 which few people use. Alongside the beach is a continuous line of huge luxury hotels and holiday villages. Some of these are really showy and over the top — something we saw a lot of in the tourist areas of Turkiye. Some people would call it “kitsch.” Tourism has brought a lot of revenue to the area but has also made property incredibly expensive, driving the local people out. The largest group of tourists are the Germans, followed by rich Russians and then us Brits. Many people are attracted to the idea of relaxing, sunbathing, swimming, sipping cocktails and living in luxury for a week or two. Some don’t even leave their tourist complexes for the whole of their stay. They are sometimes cynically referred to as “fly and floppers.” In the past this was a peaceful area of Greek villages known as Pamphylia but now it is a crowded concrete jungle. It seems that in chasing the tourist dollar, Turkiye has failed to learn from the “mistakes” of the Spanish in the 1960s and 70s who covered their attractive coastlines in a sea of concrete and tower blocks and more or less invented mass tourism. Apparently, about two thirds of Turkiye’s holidaymakers are “sun tourists”, while the remaining third are attracted by the rich array of sights and culture. We fitted into the latter category.

Amidst the ugly, urban sprawl that spread like an ink stain along the coast, Abdullah pointed out an ancient Roman bridge across a river and the remains of a Roman aqueduct which had once brought water to the city from the mountains. The ruined aqueduct was a sad sight. Most of its stones had been pilfered for other building works over the centuries. The idea that the past should be preserved to be part of a country’s heritage is a relatively recent one. Hadrian’s Wall in England for instance is now a World Heritage Site but in the past, local farmers stole its stones to build their houses, barns and sheep pens.

At last we turned off the busy coast road into the town of Manavgat, about 50 to 60 kms east of Antalya. I was hoping to be able to have a wander round the town centre and perhaps witness a slice of everyday Turkish life. But no— we were on a tight schedule and were there to visit a mosque. Even though it was the low season, tour buses were constantly coming and going and groups of tourists were being shepherded in and out.

To be fair, it is a beautiful modern mosque, based on the famous Blue Mosque of Istanbul but smaller. It had been built in 2004 and paid for entirely by the Government. It seems that the current Turkish government led by Recep Erdogan is trying to turn Turkiye into a more religious Islamic nation, moving away from the ideas of Ataturk, who created modern Turkey in the 1920s out of the ruins of the collapsed Ottoman Empire. Ataturk wanted to establish a secular nation to avoid the religious strife that had plagued so many countries over the centuries. Like Modi in India and Netanyahu in Israel, Mr Erdogan seems to be reversing this policy and is using religion to shore up his support. He seems to have largely succeeded, as around 90% of the Turkish population are now muslims, although most don’t speak or read Arabic, the language of the Koran.

As I said, the mosque at Manavgat is ravishingly beautiful. It was worth getting out of bed early for. We had already been half woken by the early morning call to prayer from the local minaret which reminded us that we were no longer in the UK. Now, after removing our shoes and the ladies covering their heads, we were standing in a Muslim place of worship and it felt a real privilege to be there. We got an interesting talk about the main features from our guide, then a demonstration of the call to prayer from the Iman or priest. We then had time to explore the building, admiring its ravishing turquoise tilework, beautiful calligraphy, stained glass windows, patterned carpet, niches and graceful arches. It was all laid out beneath a spectacular, decorated dome. As in a church the rule is that there should be no visual representation of God or Allah. This explains the emphasis on complex geometric patterns and lovely stylised calligraphy. All too soon we had to leave. I suspect the next tour group was waiting to come in.

The itinerary now dictated that we leave the town and drive to a nearby river where we were scheduled to go on a boat trip. I imagined picturesque scenery, and a relaxing cruise to an interesting destination. Little did I know that we were being led blind into a tourist trap. Our meal on board the tourist boat was paid for but straight away, the crew were circulating trying to sell us drinks. For some reason, drinks always cost extra. They then took our pictures and of course framed versions of them were waiting to tempt us at the end of the trip. Mine was framed inside a plate! The scenery was scruffy with quite a bit of litter on the river banks. Just inland were the impressive mountains but we were sailing away from them. All along the riverbanks were mock galleons decorated with pirates, dinosaurs or dragons. It was a fake world created for gullible tourists. I shuddered to imagine what the river would have been like at the height of the tourist season. The river flowed gently to the Mediterranean Sea. Our boat then moored up and we were given 1.5 hours of free time to “enjoy” a short stretch of sandy beach that lay between the river and the sea.

I had hoped we might stop at a quiet, pretty spot where we could relax and contemplate the sea in one direction and the mountains in the other. But that was just wishful thinking. The reality was a tacky tourist trap, with cafes, bars, ice cream stalls, jet ski sessions and camel rides. Yes, some tourists were grinning nervously as they perched precariously on top of a camel plodding across the sand. My pedantic teacher side kicked in when I noticed that the camels were dromedaries which belong to Africa not Asia. Asian camels are 2 humped bactrians and apparently they are an endangered species. Chris and I made the best of it by taking our shoes off and enjoying the warm sand trickle between our toes as we took a slow walk up the beach.

Eventually we were back on the tourist boat which then sailed slowly back to the start. There we met Abdullah who had enjoyed 3 hours rest, having got rid of us on the boat trip. Finally we drove back through congested traffic to our hotel for dinner and then a much needed sleep. I felt frustrated because I thought much of this first full day had been wasted. The mosque had been very good but the boat trip was tacky, touristy fayre. I thought we’d signed up for a cultural, sightseeing excursion. As I retired for the night, I felt a bit low. Had we wasted our time and money coming all this way to do gimmicky tourist stuff? I consoled myself by thinking I had witnessed mass tourism in action. Following a pre-arranged itinerary, the tourists were collected into groups and then placed on a conveyor belt of packaged experiences. It was very disappointing . I cheered myself up though by thinking that the journey through the Taurus Mountains would be spectacular and once we had left the over-commercialised coastal strip, we might actually witness some genuine Turkish life and culture.

Even before the early morning call to prayer, we were rudely awakened from our slumbers by a tremendous thunder storm. It began around 3am and lasted for over an hour. Constant flashes of lightning lit up our room and then our ears were assaulted by deafening claps of thunder. The rain was torrential. As I waiting for the storm to die down, a new worry entered my mind. What if our route through the mountains was being flooded? Would the road be passable? Might there even be landslides up in the highlands? I had seen a landslide on a previous trip to Turkiye when the bus I was on between Kas and Demre had to slow right down to allow diggers to clear the way ahead. I gradually drifted off into a restless sleep. Might the trip be called off before it even began? Despite the fixed itinerary, thanks to the extreme weather, this tour could end up becoming a journey into the disappointing unknown.

To be continued… Watch this space…
Growing Up In The 1950s.

October 12, 2025

I’m approaching my 76th birthday so most people would classify me as an old man. I’ve recently been accused of talking more in the past tense than in the present or future, but I think that’s fair enough as I’ve been around for over three quarters of a century. I have a lot to look back on. I have recently been reading a couple of memoirs set in the 1960s and 70s and they have brought back lots of memories. What was it like then, in those distant, pre-internet days? While I am still compos mentis, I’ll try to explain a little.

BATHTIME.

I grew up in a fairly simple, working class home in the east Midlands of England. It was a rented Railway house as my dad was a fireman and later a driver for British Rail. We had no bathroom and the toilet was outside. We only had a cold tap. Water had to be heated up for washing and cooking. We had a kettle of course, and a bigger water heater called a “copper”. It had a large copper element inside which heated up once it was plugged in. Because of all the faff, we only had one bath and hair wash per week. Bath-time for my sister and I was on Sundays evenings. A tin bath was half filled with hot water from the copper. During the week the tin bath hung from a nail on the toilet door. My dad washed me in his rough and ready fashion and my lucky sister got a more gentle experience with our mum. The days of walk- in showers and instant hot water were still a long time off for us ordinary folk.

WINTER.

I remember it being very cold in winter in the 50s and early 60s. Back then, it seems to me that we had proper winters with lots of snow, ice, rain, fog and wind. We didn’t have dramatically named storms like the recent Storm Amy — we just lumped it all together and called it “winter.” We didn’t have any of this global warming stuff either. It was proper cold. To combat this, knitted mittens, scarves or beanies were often Christmas presents from mum or grandma. Having snowball fights, going sledging or building snowmen was a regular and real thing in the winter months. Snow played a much more prominent part in our lives than just making a pretty picture on a Christmas card.

HEATING.

Our house only had one heated room. All the other rooms were freezing cold. No-one I knew had central heating in the 50s or 60s. The one room was heated by a coal fire and every hearth was furnished with a scuttle, a pair of tongs and a poker. One of my earliest household duties was to go outside to the coal house and use a shovel to fill up the scuttle, which was actually a big bucket with a lip on its rim. Every family knew how to light a fire using : screwed up newspaper, a criss- cross of sticks and small quantities of shovelled coal. If the fire was slow in getting going we held up a big sheet of newspaper to “draw” the fire. The paper made the chimney pull the draught up it from the enclosed space, hopefully feeding in more oxygen and creating a stronger flame. We were always nervous that the newspaper might actually catch fire while we were still holding it. Once the fire had got going , more coal could be gradually introduced. Underneath the fire was an ash can which had to be emptied regularly lest it overflow. I don’t suppose anybody thinks about any of this these days as all one has to do is press the heating switch on or wait for it to come on automatically. I wander if Alexa would have any idea about “drawing a fire” or getting rid of the clinker. For the uninitiated, clinker is the hard residue left behind after the coal has had all its gases burnt away.

Carrying on with the cold theme, we learnt to get dressed and undressed very quickly. Often the inside of the windows would be frozen over when we woke up in the morning. They would have pretty patterns on them which we called “Jack Frost.” Jack has mostly been banished to the past now in this age of double glazing and central heating. At night we would warm up our beds with hot water bottles as the sheets would be so cold. I can still remember the warm, rubbery smell. Some people like my grandma would wear specially knitted bed socks. Of course, none of us had duvets or “continental quilts” in that far off decade. They might have been all the rage in France but we had never heard of them. We just had loads of blankets to keep us warm. Some people had electric blankets which they switched on a couple of hours before bedtime. We didn’t get them though, presumably because of the expense and maybe because my parents didn’t fancy getting electrocuted in the middle of the night.

PLAY.

An important aspect of life for me as a young child was play. Baby boomers like to reminisce about how they used to go out and play all day, without a care in the world, until it was getting dark and their mums called them in for tea. Parents and children were less worried about “stranger-danger” then. I suppose it was just left to our common sense. Like just about everybody else, I was out with my mates playing in the streets all hours of the day, when not at school. We played chase games such as “Kingy” ( running after people and trying to hit them with a ball), hide and seek ( always a favourite) and hopscotch, after chalking the pavement with squares and numbers. I never understood the rules of the latter but still joined in enthusiastically. There was also a street game called “Queeny” but I’ve forgotten what it entailed. Boys and girls of all ages happily played together without any bother.

Near our house were 3 grassed- over coal tips — waste from the mines. We used to climb them and play cowboys and indians or Japs and Commandoes up there. One day I was hiding in the long grass pretending to be a cowboy when something dark and shiny came slithering towards me. I immediately forgot about the game, and assuming it was a dangerous snake, I ran all the way home to my mum. In my panic I dropped my toy six shooter and it was never seen again. I got sent to bed early for carelessly losing my gun. This was about the 3rd one I had lost! My excuse is that my toy holster was too loose. I bet Billy the Kid or Wyatt Earp never had that problem! Ironically I later found out that my slithering nemesis was not a deadly snake but a harmless slow worm. Such is life! The tallest coal tip was nicknamed Mount Pud. To us it was like climbing Everest, or at least Ben Nevis. It was so high that as we neared the top, the grass ran out and we were just scrambling through cinders and ash. Naturally we got filthy and we got told off again when we got home. More washing for mum!

WASHING.

My mum had a primitive washing machine which heated the water up and churned the clothes around after the detergent had been introduced. Before that my grandmothers had to bash the clothes around with a special stick in something called a “poss tub” and a bar of soap had to be turned into flakes using a knife. Going back to mum’s washing machine — once it was finished, the clothes had to be fished out with wooden tongs and then put through the electric mangle, which was a set of rollers that squeezed the excess water out . My grandmas had hand-operated mangles where you turned a big handle at the side. I used to help by standing to receive the flattened clothes as they came out of the rollers. I was always a bit frightened that I might trap my fingers. The designated washing day was always a Monday. On that day we only got a fry- up for our meal as our mums had been busy all day with the washing, mangling, drying and ironing. The fry- up consisted of stuff left over from the big Sunday dinner. That’s where I got my taste for fried potatoes, smeared with spicy, brown HP sauce. There was always a bottle of HP or red tomato ketchup on the table. I now realize it was the added sugar that we were really after.

STREET SALESMEN.

Talking about sugar, one treat was when the ice cream van came round. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed. We used to have two Italian ice cream companies in Chesterfield where I lived — Cuneos and Fredericks. We used to favour the former as it was creamier although they were both delicious. At some point we progressed on to ice lollies and then “Jubblies” — lumps of orange- flavoured ice in a carton. We cut off a corner and sucked away to our hearts content. A lot of tradespeople came to sell their wares in the street. We had a travelling grocery shop, which was very useful as most people didn’t have cars and had to walk or catch a bus to the local corner shop. ( we didn’t have self service supermarkets in the 50s). We also had travelling green-grocers, butchers and fishmongers. I’ll always remember the rabbits and chickens hanging from hooks when the butcher opened his van doors. I was more than a bit horrified. The highlight of the week though was when the pop lorry came round. We had 2 — the Coop and Corona. Being loyal Cooperative Society members we only ever went to the Coop lorry. Our favourite flavours were Dandelion and Burdoch and Lemonade. We then got a bottle of grapefruit pop to go with Sunday dinner as that was regarded as extra special. It was all sugar and additives of course but we didn’t worry so much about that in those days. My grandma used to keep the pop bottles in the cellar near the coal, as that was the coolest, darkest place in the house. It was very spooky, full of coal dust and spiders’ webs, when she sent me down the stone stairs to get one. We didn’t have fridges or freezers in the 50s or for much of the 60s. We bought fresh rather than frozen food and shopped more often. In our house we had a walk- in larder which had big, cool, stone shelves. Milk was delivered daily to the doorstep, another British tradition that has largely ( though not entirely) disappeared. Most people also had newspapers delivered to their letter box. Later on, as a young teen, I earnt extra pocket money as a paper-boy. I did my delivery round before school.

My very first “job” however, involved travelling round the streets selling bunches of firewood with my paternal grandad. He was a retired miner and had a pony and cart. My dad had made me a little hand cart and my job was to shovel up the pony’s droppings when it did its business in the street. My dad then used this as fertiliser for his garden. He gave me a silver sixpence for every cartful. That’s about 2.5 pence in today’s money but it was a useful amount of money for a young boy in those days. I used it for sweets and bubble gum from the local shop. The bubble gum came wrapped up in flags of the world. I used to collect them and stick them in an album. I valued that time as it was the only occasion when I spent any quality time with that particular grandad.

SUNDAYS.

Sunday was a special day for my parents, but a bit of a misery for my sister and me. I grew up in a strict Methodist family and so Sunday was all about church and worship. We had to attend both morning and afternoon Sunday School where we sang simple hymns, learnt Bible stories and coloured in pictures. One week it might be the Good Samariton while the next week it might be about Jesus feeding the multitudes with just 5 loaves and 2 small fishes. One of the most popular songs we learnt by rote was “I am happy, loved and saved.” In each verse we spelt out the key word, for example: H.A.P.P.Y. Another one was “Now Zacchius was a very little man, a very little man indeed indeed, he climbed up in a sycamore tree, for the Saviour he wanted to see.” I think you get the idea. After tea my sister and I had the ordeal of the evening service — 4 hymns, a prayer, a long, boring sermon and the benediction. It lasted for about 75 minutes, the longest hour and a quarter of the week.

We weren’t allowed to play out on Sundays, have ice creams or watch sport. This became a big frustration for me when ITV’s “Big Match” ( its answer to Match of the Day) was broadcast on Sunday afternoons. Sunday was also Brylcream day. My dad would summon me to the kitchen once I’d got dressed up in my “Sunday best” and smothered my hair in thick, white grease from a jar. He would then comb it and slick it back in a big quiff so I ended up looking like Elvis Presley. Ever since I have always said “no” when the barber asked if I wanted gel on my hair. Sunday, of course, was also the day of the big dinner. This is when we got to eat the Sunday roast and all the trimmings. My dad would stand at the head of the table, make a big ritual about sharpening the carving knife, then would cut a slice of beef or pork for each of us to go with our vegetables, mashed potato and gravy. He was very proud when he did this because he had been out to work and earned the money to put meat on the family table. It’s not surprising that he became very confused, angry and upset when I later became a vegetarian.

SCHOOL.

I began school when I was nearly 5. I mostly enjoyed it even though it was quite strict. We had to learn our times tables by rote, chanting them all together in the class. If the headteacher came in we all had to stand up and he would test us on our tables. For instance — what’s 6 times 5 or 4 times 8? If we got one wrong we risked getting whacked by a ruler across the back of the hand. I got the ruler for cheating in a test, naughty me, and I also got slippered for fighting. The other lad and me were having a playfight in the classroom but accidently knocked over a book stand. There were good things though. It was at school where I developed my love of literature, history and geography. I also made friends there. Each classroom had 4 rows of desks — A,B,C and D. We were given regular intelligence tests and were made to sit at the desk which reflected our position in the class. So if you were at the front of row A you were top of the class, but if you were at the back of row D you were at the bottom. It was all quite blatant and crude. It’s just very unfortunate that D is the first letter of DUNCE. One good thing about schools in the 1950s in my opinion was that primary school pupils didn’t have to wear a uniform, as they have to now. We just wore our normal togs. Boys up to 10 had to wear short trousers however and it became very embarrassing for me as I was very tall for my age. In the end, me and a couple of other lanky lads got special permission to wear long trousers.

HOLIDAYS.

The undoubted highlight of the year for the family was our annual week’s holiday by the sea. Paid holidays had only just been brought in after the war and I could tell my dad was particularly proud that he could afford to take his family away. We were doubly lucky as my dad’s job on the railways meant we all got 5 free tickets every year. So we were able to catch trains to traditional seaside places such as Blackpool, Scarborough, Gt Yarmouth or Margate and enjoy a week sitting in deckchairs on a beach and making sand castles. My sister and I also enjoyed having a ride on the donkeys, going to a show at the end of the pier, eating fish and chips with mushy peas and licking extra big ice creams. We never got into Punch and Judy though. We stayed in Guest Houses as we couldn’t afford hotels which were regarded as “posh.” Most of the landladies of the B and Bs were nice enough but we still got chucked out of our rooms between breakfast and teatime, rain or shine. I suppose it saved them a lot on their heating bills.

ENTERTAINMENT.

As we didn’t have magical electronic screens to keep us amused in the 50s, everyone was good at keeping themselves entertained. In the early 50s we didn’t even have a television. It was the golden age of hobbies. My dad encouraged us to start stamp collecting, which we really enjoyed. It taught me a lot about the world and probably led to my lifelong love of travel. Being the son of a railwayman meant that it was inevitable that I became an ardent train spotter. It was probably in my blood. I stood on railway bridges or station platforms, noting down the numbers and names of the steam locomotives that chuffed by. It was the last golden age of steam before the rail network got taken over by the boring diesel and electric multiple units that dominate today. For us young boys, all wearing our caps ( as everyone did in those days), spotting steam locos was an all encompassing experience, and a feast for the senses. The sight, sound and even the smell of the engines were ( and are) spectacular.

Back home we had the radio to entertain us. I used to like the music request shows such as “Children’s Favourites” with a presenter fondly known as Uncle Mac. On Sundays we had “Forces Favourites” catering mainly for the British service men and women in Germany and other overseas bases. My Grandma used to listen to a radio soap opera called “Mrs Dale’s Diary” and everyone listened to “The Archers” – an “everyday story of country folk.” Amazingly, over 70 years later, many still do. By the way in those days the radio used to be commonly referred to as the “wireless”. It was all run by the BBC as commercial radio had not yet taken over the airwaves. We also listened to comedies such as “Round the Horn” and “The Goons”. The latter was one of King Charles’s favourites so you can tell how old he is.( even older than me.)

To amuse ourselves, our family often had a jigsaw on the go. Until it was finished, we kept it under the tablecloth. Top tips were to do the straight edge pieces first to create a border and to leave the sky until last. We also used to make “proggy” rugs or mats, by cutting up strips of spare material and attaching them to a special canvas backing, stretched across a frame. As you can see, a lot of our entertainment was communal and didn’t involve looking at one’s own private screen for hours on end.

TELEVISION.

As the 50s decade progressed, televisions slowly started to appear in the home. At first they had small screens ( 12 inch was typical) and were in black and white. A lot of people purchased or rented them for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953. My maternal grandma did. Neighbours then would pile in to watch the ceremonial events in London. As a little boy I used to enjoy all the “Listen with Mother” programmes on BBC such as Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men and Andy Pandy. I used to get a lump in my throat and cry a bit when and Andy and Teddy went back into their basket. Later on I progressed on to The Lone Ranger, a masked lawman bringing justice to the wild west, on his horse Silver and ably assisted by his faithful “Indian” friend” Tonto. Then after ITV launched in the mid 50s, new highlights were “Wagon Train” and “Rawhide”, both exciting westerns. I got special permission to stay up for Wagon Train on a Monday night as my usual bedtime was 9pm and it didn’t finish until 9-30. I would pretend to go to bed and then, unbeknown to my sister, who was 2 years younger than me, I would sneak downstairs in my dressing gown to watch the forbidden fayre.

Like many people have pointed out, life was a lot simpler in the 1950s but just as enjoyable. There was no internet, no unlimited choice of TV channels, fewer cars to ferry us around and few of the luxuries that we now think of as necessities such as double glazing, hot and cold running water, bathrooms and indoor toilets. My family didn’t get the last 2 things until we moved to a brand new council house in 1960. I remember that first wonderful hot bath! No doubt I have missed loads of interesting subjects out, but you can have enough of a good thing. I don’t want to outstay my welcome. I had a great childhood with lots of freedom — except on Sundays. I then went on to a very exciting teenage-hood in the 1960s, the age of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and “Swinging London”. Even in the relative backwater of Chesterfield, the 60s were pretty exciting. I feel lucky to have been in the generation that has lived both before and after the advent of the internet. The pace of technological change has been difficult to keep up with at times but I’ll keep trying to move forward, as well as fondly looking back. It’s called nostalgia.
Cheated By Churchill.

September 27, 2025

The big day had finally arrived. We were at last on our way to discover “Britain’s Greatest Palace.” My travel buddy, Ian, and I were on the top deck of a bus leaving Oxford for Woodstock and Blenheim. Our expectations were high. A guide at another stately home in the north had raved about Blenheim, saying it was the most splendid building he had ever visited. The Rough Guide to England describes it as “England’s finest example of Baroque civic architecture.” It was all set up to be an amazing day.

However, as we travelled through the Oxfordshire countryside, I harboured my doubts. Was it really going to be that great? Afterall, I was born and bred in Derbyshire. Everyone in that neck of the woods knows that Chatsworth is the greatest stately home in the country, no argument, and that is not even mentioning Haddon Hall and Hardwick Hall in the same county. Together they form a magnificent trio. I am prejudiced I know but I was more than a bit cynical about Blenheim’s grandiose claims.

Ian and I had debated long and hard about whether to even go to Blenheim on a day trip from Oxford . The admission price was an eye-watering £41 each with no concessions for OAPs. It had better be good we muttered as we took a deep breath and paid up. We had been advised to book in advance because of the Palace’s immense popularity. As well as being the great architect, John Vanbrugh’s masterpiece, it had also been the birthplace and home of one of Britain’s most famous leaders, Winston Churchill, so it was bound to attract lots of people.

After half an hour or so the bus approached Woodstock. The stop before the town centre was actually right beside the large, ornate, wrought iron gates of the palace. We disembarked, showed our tickets and headed up a dead straight avenue to an elaborate stone gateway. Beyond this was the great palace itself. The gateway led into a courtyard surrounded by old stone buildings. It was the usual set up. The stables or whatever had been converted into visitor facilities — a cafe/restaurant, toilets and the inevitably priced -up shop. We were in need of a rest and a drink after the journey and so headed straight for the cafe. Incongruously there was modern pop music playing in the background. We had encountered the same thing at Christ Church College shop back in Oxford. Nobody seemed to have thought it important to create an appropriate atmosphere for the exploration of an early 18th century building.

As we rested and sipped our drinks, we looked forward to our exploration of this special monument, a Grade 1 listed building and a World Heritage Site. Like good, conscientious cultural tourists we had researched the history of the place. The story began in 1704 when John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, led an army that defeated Louis XIV’s French and their Bavarian allies at Blenheim, an Austrian village on the River Danube. It was part of the War of the Spanish Succession, where the British were trying to stop the French from controlling Spain. Like much of history, it’s terribly complicated and led to countless tragic deaths. Anyway, Churchill defeated the previously formidable French army and Queen Anne rewarded him with the Royal estate of Woodstock, along with the promise of enough cash to build a gigantic, celebratory palace.

Work started promptly in 1705 with Sir John Vanbrugh as the principal architect assisted by Nicholas Hawksmoor, a talented protegee of Sir Christopher Wren. Vanbrugh had first made his name as a playwright, creating several Restoration comedies which were scathing and controversial satires on English society at the time. He was also heavily involved in politics and took part in the plotting to replace the Catholic King James II with his protestant daughter Mary and Dutch son in law, William, in 1688. ( known as the “Glorious Revolution.”)

When Vanbrugh switched to architecture, he had no training or qualifications but he did have a brilliant imagination and an unerring eye for perspective and detail. Assisted by Hawksmoor and a team of skilled craftsmen, he created an English version of Baroque architecture, the fancy, decorative style popular in Italy and France and across Europe. His first big success was Castle Howard in North Yorkshire. On the basis of this, Vanbrugh got the commission to design what was to be Blenheim Palace. The architect of Chatsworth House,( the first Baroque country house in England), William Tulman, also applied, but Vanbrugh probably got the commission because he was a smooth talker, moved in high circles and knew the Duke through the Kit Kat gentlemen’s club in London.

Vanbrugh’s vision for Blenheim was to create a national monument to celebrate the Duke of Marlborough’s famous victory. It was going to be more than a family home. This soon led him to clash with the Duke’s strong-willed wife, Sarah Jennings. Her wish was for a cosy, middle class family home not some grandiose edifice. She had also wanted Sir Christopher Wren to do the job but perhaps he wasn’t one of the Duke’s mates at the Kit Kat Club. Who knows? The Duchess and the architect were constantly at loggerheads, and in the end, Vanbrugh walked off the job in disgust in 1716, vowing never to return. Further delays were caused by John Churchill’s involvement in political infighting and at one point, he was even banished to France for 3 years. After his great military triumph, he didn’t seem to want to rest on his laurels and settle for the quiet life.

The upshot of all this is that construction stopped for years, and Queen Anne lost interest in financing the expensive project. The palace was only finally finished after the Duke died. It was mostly paid for by his widow Sarah and she hired Hawksmoor to complete the task as Vanbrugh was still sulking elsewhere. It was finally finished in 1722, seventeen years after the building had begun. By then Queen Anne had passed away as well and Britain had entered the age of the Georgians.

Blenheim became England’s largest non-Royal domestic building. It is built of pale mellow, yellow stone ( apologies to Donovan.) It consists of 3 main blocks. The centre contains both living and magnificent state rooms, inspired by Versailles. Then there are 2 large rectangular wings, both surrounding a courtyard. In the cafe, draining our Americanos, we were sitting in one of these wings. The main dazzling show was still to come. We looked forward to seeing the tall slender windows and monumental statuary on the roofs. On the inside we would see the 20 metre ( 67 ft) Great Hall and a huge, frescoed Saloon. As we left the palace tearoom, our appetites were well and truly whetted….

But, as you may have guessed already, we were going to be severely disappointed. As we approached the main entrance to the famous palace we came across a notice thanking us for our contribution to the major restoration work that was currently being carried out. We rounded a corner and found that the whole central section of the magnificent south portico was completely hidden behind scaffolding and protective sheeting! It was a massive shock and anti-climax. We stood there for a couple of minutes in complete disbelief! We had paid all that money to look at a flapping wall of white plastic!

So we just had to imagine the spectacular array or piers and classical columns, and the huge bust of the “Sun King” on the roof, being forced to look down on the splendours and rewards of his conqueror. The best consolation they could offer us was a large postcard of the magnificent frontage in the shop, or maybe we could have bought a jig saw. The whole situation was like a big, sick joke. Surely they should have warned us about the restoration work before letting us shell out all that money? Either that, or they could have significantly reduced the very steep entrance price.

However, we just had to lick our wounds and get on with it. We entered the building, showed our tickets again and followed the trail. To be fair, the interior is stuffed with high class paintings, tapestries and objects d’art. There is furniture from Versailles to rub the salt into the wounds of the defeated French and superb carvings by Grinling Gibbons, who had managed to stay on the right side of Duchess Sarah. We saw a great painting by Singer Sergeant and two by Anthony Van Dyck, which were strangely not clearly labelled or explained. The attendants were good but there were too few of them such that not every room could be covered. We came across a room full of paintings by Sir Winston Churchill which were being proudly displayed. However they were just so-so. He might have been a formidable war leader but he was strictly an amateur artist.

We came to the Saloon which has an apparently breath-taking, frescoed dome, but this too was hidden behind scaffolding and sheeting. Earlier we had been unable to see a famous painted ceiling in the entrance hall. We had to swallow our disappointments. I couldn’t however help blurting out to Ian, that Chatsworth was 10 times better than this! At this point we bumped into 2 Americans who we had met in the hotel breakfast room back in Oxford. They were “doing” stately houses of England and had mainly come to Oxford to visit Blenheim. What a disappointment for them. I later learnt that the work has been going on for 2 years and still has at least another year to go. I don’t suppose they’ll be rushing back from Texas to see it once it finally reopens in all its glory. We recommended a lesser known Vanbrugh building — Seaton Delaval Hall– for them to possibly visit when they made it up to the north east. They seemed interested.

Our tour of the state rooms and private living quarters on the first floor didn’t really take that long and before we knew it we were back in the formal garden that sits in front of the entrance. Obviously, it being September, the garden was somewhat passed its peak. We admired the views down to a lake and an extensive park, landscaped inevitably by Lancelot Capability Brown. Across a narrow part of the lake was Vanbrugh’s Grand Bridge. Then the parkland swept up a hill, topped by the Column of Victory featuring an heroic statue of the 1st Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill. I wonder what French visitors make of all this over -the- top British triumphalism?

We were just about to stride out to explore the park when the dark clouds overhead turned into persistent cold rain. Our disappointing day was continuing! We dived back into the palace for shelter and ended up on the ground floor. Here we saw all the usual upstairs-downstairs stuff in quite a good exhibition. We saw the kitchen, the servants quarters and a table laden with pretend food being prepared for the aristocrats above. A lady dressed as a Victorian chambermaid gave us an interesting, little talk. Apparently the palace had fallen into disrepair by the end of the 19th century and was only saved by funds from the 9th Duke’s marriage to the American railroad heiress, Consuelo Vanderbilt. It was a loveless marriage of convenience. He got the money and she got the title.

We went on to view the exhibition about Winston Churchill, the revered war leader who was born and brought up at Blenheim. He was given a grand state funeral when he died in 1965 and I remember it being on the black and white telly most of that day with commentary by Richard Dimbleby in his sonorous tones. I don’t subscribe to the Churchill cult. Neither did my mum who described him as a “war monger.” It’s strange to me that he is regarded as one of Britain’s greatest statesmen. First of all he was half American, as his mother, Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill came from across the pond. It was the same deal as above — money for a title. Also I note that Winston Churchill ordered striking Welsh miners to be shot, when he was Home Secretary in 1910. In the First World War he was responsible for the disastrous Dardanelles Campaign in Turkey that led to many needless deaths. In the 1920s as Chancellor he put Britain back on the Gold Standard, causing economic hardship for many and leading to social unrest culminating in the 1926 General Strike. In the same decade he threatened to gas rebellious Kurds in British run Iraq. ( Thankfully he didn’t carry out his chilling threat.) Even in the Second World War, when he was Britain’s great leader, he was the architect of the failed Narvik campaign which tried to secure northern Norway from German occupation. General Dwight D Eisenhower was reputed to have remarked that the allies won the second world war DESPITE not BECAUSE of Churchill. I won’t continue with the hatchet job. Suffice to say — I am not a Churchill fan.

When we came out of the house a second time it had stopped raining so this time we were able to descend into the park towards the lake. From Vanbrugh’s bridge we watching cormorants and grebes diving and fishing. We also saw a couple of young visitors go down from the bridge to the waterside and take a selfie in front of an unusually shaped tree protected by a low fence. When we checked it out we found from an information board that this tree had featured in a Harry Potter film and was now visited by hundreds of fans every year. There seemed to be no getting away from the fictitious boy wizard in this part of England.

Finally we strolled out of the park and exited via another gateway into the little town of Woodstock. It was now late afternoon and very quiet. The town is picturesque, having quite a few historical buildings. I spoke to a lady in an oriental rug shop that I visited about the repair work at the palace. It seemed the roof was leaking in places and priceless frescoes were in danger of being destroyed for ever. So the urgent renovation work is understandable but she agreed with me that visitors should be warned. There seemed to be an uneasy relationship between the palace and the town. The rug lady told me that there were plans to chop down a bluebell wood and destroy other countryside owned by the palace in order to install one of the largest solar farms in Europe. Many town’s folk were up in arms.

We enjoyed Woodstock, especially as we didn’t have to pay £41 to see it. We admired the old buildings and then went to sit in a peaceful, beautiful churchyard as some late afternoon sun at last came out. It was a magical half hour or so.

Finally we enjoyed an excellent Italian meal at a local bistro, before catching the bus back to Oxford. It had been a very interesting day and we had really enjoyed it. However, as the bus passed Blenheim’s grand gates and we glanced again up the avenue to the scaffolding covered Baroque towers, we couldn’t help thinking that we had been cheated by the descendants of Churchill. They should have told us! Lastly, if anyone of you out there wants to enjoy the greatest house in England, get yourself to Derbyshire and visit Chatsworth!

NB To locate my earlier posts, please go to : https://scrapheapstuart2.wordpress.com
From Scrapheap to Donut — My Blogging Journey.

September 24, 2025

For the last 15 years or so I have been blogging. In other words I have been writing down my thoughts about various subjects on the internet and, incredibly, people from all over the world have read them. I say “incredibly” because for over half my life the internet didn’t exist. The thought of exchanging views with a stranger in America, Italy or Singapore would have seemed like something out of the wildest realms of science fiction. Even H G Wells didn’t think up that one. I never became a “vlogger” or an “influencer”, but I’m very happy expressing myself through blogs.

I am now 75 years old and have a birthday in only a few weeks time. Most people would describe me as “elderly.” The internet has been a pretty steep leaning curve for me. I used to be a school teacher, retiring in 2006 when I was approaching 57. Computer skills were fast becoming a necessity in the teaching profession , and, towards the end, I was starting to struggle. The chalk and talk days of the blackboard were fading into distant memory and I missed them. In other words I was becoming a bit of a dinosaur. In my last job at a tough, little middle school in Blyth, Northumberland, most classrooms had been adapted to have interactive whiteboards. They looked pretty incongruous in what was still an old, red-brick Victorian building. I was issued with a laptop and was encouraged to type my lesson plans on there. Stuff like: headings, diagrams, maps and pictures would then magically appear on the whiteboard in the classroom, to stimulate the interest of the pupils. In the past, I used to draw them in different coloured chalks. I taught history and geography and used to pride myself on being able to draw a map of the British Isles in 30 seconds or one of the whole world in 2 minutes. Together with another “stick in the mud” geography teacher, I continued to write on the board, but by now it was a white board and I wrote with pungent smelling felt pens. Some kids used to sit on the front row just to get a whiff of them. If the room had an interactive white board, I had to rely on help from the pupils to do my “virtual” writing with a pretend pen. They loved helping me but it was all a bit embarrassing.

Anyway I retired. I managed to cling on for the last few of my 35 years in schools without becoming fully computer literate. I also remarried and one of the first things my new wife and I purchased together was a desk-top computer, advised by the IT teacher at my old school. It sat there in the spare room and I circled it warily, trying to pluck up courage to learn how to use it. Gradually I got into emails and word-processing. Then I learnt how to Google to find out things.( My encyclopaedias became obsolete overnight.) At the time in 2006-7 this was all new to me. It was almost as if I had regressed into being a little child again.

My next foray was into social media which I know has become a hot topic of conversation today. Back in the noughties Facebook was the big thing. People left behind “Friends Reunited” and migrated to Facebook to get in touch with friends and acquaintances on a more regular basis. The adverts exhorted us to stay connected. ( they still do).Today it’s regarded as mostly an old people’s thing but back then it was very popular with all ages. The spur came when my wife’s daughter had a holiday in New Zealand and then told us all the photos were on Facebook. At first this meant we couldn’t see them. We were locked out. So I decided to enter this brave new world and join the party. One day I took the big step and registered and started to find my way around the site. We eventually saw the NZ photos and congratulated ourselves that we had caught up with the latest trend and we weren’t missing out.

I enjoyed being on Facebook and still do to a certain extent. It keeps me in touch with a whole range of people. I have swapped photos, news, ideas and recommendations. However, after a while I started to get fed with all the trivia on there — the selfies and photos of people’s breakfasts. Thus it was that after a visit to the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, I decided to raise the level of discourse a bit by putting up a review of a William Blake exhibition I had just enjoyed. I thought it would make a change from looking at someone’s new haircut or what they had just eaten for dinner. Of course it went down like a lead balloon! Nobody seemed to care whether I liked William Blake or not. However, against the odds, it did lead to something significant. My daughter, Catherine saw it and suggested that I might like writing a blog. She suggested WordPress.com and a friend of hers kindly helped me set up my site. All I needed was a good name.

The idea came when I was walking with a friend F and his wife, M. It was only a couple of months since I had retired and M asked me if I had been back to the school to see my former colleagues. I said I hadn’t and then commented that it had often been awkward when people came back and I didn’t have any time to talk to them. M then came out with the classic sentence: ” I know, and who wants to speak to somebody on the scrapheap anyway?” I was taken aback! Considering I had just retired myself, I thought it unbearably crass and rude to refer to people in that way. Needless to say, the conversation didn’t continue. But every cloud has a silver lining. Out of this moment of acute embarrassment came my blogging name : scrapheapstuart . I decided to call my blog — “Tales from the Scrapheap.” Also, I decided I wanted the blog to show that life doesn’t end when one retires. Unlike M, I didn’t define my life through my job. In fact, retirement is not just an end; it is also a new beginning. Corny I know, but true.

Therefore my blogging journey began, somewhere back in 2007. I chose a username and password and I was off. I planned to write essays about my life — my thoughts on current affairs, looking back on my past through memoir pieces and describing my travels and interests. My first blog was basically introducing myself. It was an exciting moment when it first went out “live” into the world, and even more exciting when someone actually read it. The site told me how many hits I had had and what countries they came from. I had always been in the top 3 for English at school and got an A grade at GCE A Level so I was pretty confident that I could string a few sentences together in a coherent manner. However, my blogging career almost ground to a halt before it began..

When I tried to get on to the wordpress site to write my second essay, I was confronted with the dreaded words: “incorrect password.” I thought I had written it down carefully but the wordpress algorithm wouldn’t let me back in. It was immensely frustrating. In the end I joined wordpress again calling myself scrapheapstuart2. I had to open a new email account in order to do this as the computer kept telling me there was already a site connected to my normal email address. At this moment, please imagine me screaming at the machine and trying to tear my hair out! Once I got in under my new name and password, I wrote a furious piece — “Who’s in Charge – Them or Us?” By “them” I was referring to machines. Today the answer to the question is easy — it’s them, the machines that are ruling our world. Artificial Intelligence is invading most aspects of life and stopping us humans from doing our own thinking. I have friends who rely on Alexa to do all sorts of things, from answering questions, to playing music, to switching on and dimming the lights. But I won’t go on.

I later figured out why the machine was right and I was wrong, which is always the case of course. In my original blog name I had accidently missed out the “r” and ended up calling myself “scapheapstuart.” Somewhere out there in the ether there is a sole blog in that name. It’s weird to think it will outlive me but I cannot even remember how to get into it.

Thus began an important new part of my life. All my holidays now had 5 parts — 1. Planning. 2 Going on the actual holiday. 3. Taking photos. 4. Compiling a picture book. 5. Researching and writing a blog. After taking advice from my journalist step-daughter, I always tried to give my blogs an angle rather than merely describing or explaining something. As I suggested to my English students at school, rhetorical questions are always a good ploy to draw readers in. Another way of attracting readers is to have a good title. One of my early travel blogs about a trip to Albania was titled “Don’t gulp you raki.” On arriving at a hotel after an exciting trip through the mountains on the border with Greece, the hotel owner gave the taxi driver and us a glass of raki, the local firewater. Stupidly I started to gulp mine down but was quickly put right by the Albanians who told me in sign language that it should be slowly sipped and savoured.

Another popular blog which had scores of hits in my scrapheapstuart2 days was “Lovely Little Dirty Darren.” This shows the value of a good title. It was actually about a visit to Darwen, the old East Lancs mill town which Chris ( my wife) and I included on our “Hills and Mills” bus -pass trip. Darren is actually the local pronunciation of Darwen. In the church there I spotted an affectionate poem to the town on a stained glass window. Thinking back to its industrial revolution hey day, the poem finished with the line : “Lovely Little Dirty Darren.” There might be lots of people out there who are interested in Darwen but I think the real reason for this blog’s popularity is because some people were expecting a smutty tale along the lines of “Confessions of a Window Cleaner.” I wonder how many read on beyond the first paragraph.

All went well for 15 years. I attracted readers from all 5 continents and got some kind, encouraging comments. I picked up 91 followers along the way, including a couple from the USA . I only have ever got one negative comment. I had been criticising soap operas and reality TV programmes. The comment was : ” Some people watch rubbish, while some people write rubbish.” One fault of mine is that I can get quite judgemental and opinionated so this feedback was perhaps deserved. On the other hand, it was my blog and nobody can categorically say my opinion is wrong. On a few occasions I wrote eulogies for lost loved ones including my own mum and dad. The writing gave me an important emotional outlet.

So I blogged quite happily for the best part of 15 years. Every time I went on to my free WordPress site it kindly put in my username and password automatically. It was easy. Until, that is, a morning in August, 2025, only a few weeks ago. After checking my emails I decided to quickly look at my wordpress stats to see if I had had any readers or comments. Unusually the site asked for my password. When I put in what I was sure the password was, it told me, in red lettering “incorrect password.” I did this a few times and then decided to go through the forgotten password procedure. I was sent an email , which included a link to reset my password. I followed the instructions and chose another secret word, but when I went back into the wordpress site , I was told that my newly approved password was still incorrect. This happened 5 times with the same frustrating result. I was locked out of my own blogging site by an algorithm!

I tried emailing the help section of WordPress about the problem. Someone introduced themselves and said a member of their “Happiness Team” would get back to me in 24 hours. Well it took 48 hours to get a response and then I just got sent on the same fruitless forgotten password loop. I tried all sorts — going into settings and security but I got nowhere. I found out that if you have a free wordpress site ( paid for by adverts) then the only help available is from an AI bot!

Then, as if my situation wasn’t bad enough, a truly bizarre thing happened. WordPress A I changed my user name from scrapheapstuart2 to — wait for it — joyfuldonutf881a2b165-kitwe.wordpress.com Such a strange name could only be made up by a bot. So I left the scrapheap after 15 years and turned into a happy donut. You couldn’t make it up! I kept on trying and trying to retrieve my old site but now I was doubly locked out. Both my username and password were different to what I had thought they should be.

I thought about starting up writing with another free blogging site, but the joining process was a bit drawn out and I lost heart. Then I had the idea to give up blogging altogether and draw a line under the whole sorry saga. I would look back on it as just a phase I went through. I felt really down though as I had really enjoyed expressing myself in writing and getting stuff off my chest. As a last resort I decided to try and create a password for the new joyfuldonut site. To my great surprise, it actually let me do this. The machine had at last taken pity on me. I got a welcome from wordpress as if I was a new member. It invited me to write my first piece. I went along with this and wrote about a recent city break in Oxford with a mate. It felt good to be tapping the keys on the laptop again after all that frustration. When I had finished I published it and it went “live”! What an exciting moment it was for me although I don’t know if anyone out there in the world at large even noticed. By another small miracle I managed to share the blog on to my facebook page. I was up and running.

I sent my new convoluted blogging address to a couple of close friends, asking them to try it out. The first to respond said the link had not worked, so I was thrown back into the dumps again. However, to my great surprise and delight, the second friend said it had worked and he actually went on to read the Oxford piece. It turns out I had carelessly given the first friend an incorrect link. I had missed out a number. I then tried again and missed out a letter! Why is it such a long, stupid address? I had a little rant again! But 3rd time lucky, my friend at last succeeded in accessing the blog at his 3rd attempt. He had been very patient with me. This episode taught me how priceless real friends are — they help you when you are in trouble.

This is my second full blog under the new donut address. Thanks for reading it. Soon, following advice from one of my more IT savvy friends, I will attempt to link my new blogging site with my old one. Wish me luck. Then finally the happy donut can sit proudly on top of the scrapheap and I can hold my head up high and describe myself once again as an “international blogger.”

NB To locate my old blogs, go to :https://scrapheapstuart2.wordpress.com
OXFORD — Dreaming Spires and Waving Wands.

September 18, 2025

WHY OXFORD?

I’ve just been to Oxford. I know that’s not very original and not much to shout about. It’s on every bucket listers hit list when they are “doing” England. However, I had 3 really good reasons for going there : 1. My travel buddy, Ian, has never been. 2. It’s a fantastic city break destination. 3. It’s not Cambridge…. Let me explain.

Don’t get me wrong — Cambridge too is fabulous. In fact my Rough Guide informs me that Oxford and Cambridge are “arguably the two most beautiful seats of learning in the world.” The thing is, my wife spent her formative years in Cambridge, still has friends and family there and so we have been on numerous occasions. In fact we had a very enjoyable visit there earlier this year. So, to put it simply, I fancied a change. Ian was easy as he’d not been to either of these venerable university cities. Predictably, as soon as I told my wife Chris, she immediately responded with “Why don’t you go to Cambridge?” She’s prejudiced as she quite understandably loves the place. But I stuck to my guns and chose Oxford. It meant we could also visit Blenheim Palace and dip our toes into the Cotswolds.

JOURNEY and ARRIVAL.

After a day of mis-adventures on the trains — “We’re sorry that your journey will take longer than planned” — we arrived late in the afternoon of September 1st. A quick electric bus trip took us north up the Banbury Road and delivered us to our hotel in a plush area of leafy avenues and grand Victorian mansions. Both coming from the relatively deprived north east of England, we were immediately bopped firmly on the nose by the North-South divide.

That evening, after getting over the shock that the hotel had no hot water ( it’s boiler had expired), we ate a nice Italian meal in the city centre and then had a stroll around as dusk fell and the floodlights flickered on. The centre of old Oxford is an architectural tour de force. What’s more, at 8pm, we virtually had it to ourselves. The day trippers had all gone away. It was like walking into an atmospheric film set. We wondered through a stunning wonderland of Gothic, Jacobean and neo-Classical statement buildings. We strolled from Sir Christopher Wren’s, 17th century, Sheldonian Theatre, into the ornate Old Schools Quadrangle from 1619, and on to the mighty rotunda of the Radcliffe Camera ( 1734-45) which looks as if it’s just been beamed in from ancient Rome.

Going back to the Sheldonian, it is Oxford University’s main ceremonial hall where degrees are formally dished out and so on. It’s Grade 1 listed. It was Wren’s first major work. It’s a grand rectangular building at the front and gracefully semi-circular at the back. Wren based it on the Theatre of Marcellus in Rome. It’s roof is topped by a white tower with a light green cupola.

The Bodleian Library next door to the Sheldonian, stands in the Old Schools Quadrangle. It is a beautifully proportioned, ornate quad in Jacobean-Gothic style. Within it there is access to all the university’s academic schools, their titles written in gold letters above the doorways that ring the quad. At one end is a tower featuring all the different types of classical columns. . At the other end , slightly incongruously, stands a statue of the great Flemish artist, Peter Paul Rubens, wearing full 17th century military armour. Nicholas Hawksmoor designed the Clarendon Building which houses the library. He was Wren’s talented protegee. The Bodleian is the UK’s second largest library, after the British Library in London, and is reputed to have 117 miles of shelving!

The Radcliffe Camera, the 3rd building we saw in this magical ensemble, was designed by James Gibbs. It was the result of King William III’s physician, Dr John Radcliffe, giving mounds of money to construct a library and secure his legacy. It is another Italian design as Gibbs trained in Rome. He created a huge Baroque, circular concoction of limestone columns, a delicate balustrade decorated with urns and an enormous dome.

Ian and I stared at it in awe for a while. It stands in quiet, pedestrianised Radcliffe Square. On one side of the square are the ancient walls, towers and pinnacles of All Souls College. We peeped through its elaborate, wrought iron gates into a picturesque, floodlit quad. Meanwhile at the bottom of the square is the 15th century Church of St Mary with a soaring tower.

It was all quite mesmerising and we were in a kind of swoon. However, we were quickly brought down to earth when we decided to have a glance into the town’s covered market and found rough sleepers blocking every entrance. We were reminded that Oxford is not all about gowns and mortar boards and the rarefied world of academia. With this sobering thought we completed our first day amongst the “dreaming spires” and returned to our boiler-less lodgings. It was back to reality with a bite. We drifted off to sleep, remembering the age of flannels and strip washes and dreaming of hot, steamy water. Maybe tomorrow?

CHRIST CHURCH COLLEGE.

After a good breakfast at the hotel ( but still no shower) we walked into Oxford down the Banbury Road. It started to lightly rain but it soon cleared. We were amazed by all the enormous mansions and villas, some of them converted into private schools or university departments. Many had fancy porticos, stained glass windows, and large, Tudor -style chimney stacks. We entered the centre via the Martyrs memorial. This commemorates the burning at the stake in 1555 and 1556, of Bishops Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer because they refused to succumb to Queen Mary I’s orders and join the Catholic faith. No wonder she was nicknamed “Bloody Mary.”

We walked on to Christchurch College. It is Oxford’s largest and most famous college. We were guided to it by Sir Christopher Wren’s striking Tom Tower which was added in 1681 to house a great bell. We couldn’t go in via the main entrance, as tourists like the servants are smuggled into a hidden side entrance to the south. We walked past a colourful herbaceous border to a modern building which processes visitors and houses the inevitable shop. We had booked a timed entry and were given audio guides to help us make sense of the place. Unfortunately this building failed to set the mood as it had pop music blasting away. I cheekily suggested they might be better playing some Jacobean harpsichord music but I don’t think they appreciated the joke. So it was that we set off on our medieval, Tudor and Jacobean experience with the 3 chords of Status Quo’s “Down Down” pounding in our ears. Finally leaving the modern world behind we entered the ancient college, greeted by bowler-hatted attendants.

We soon stepped into Tom Quad which we had glanced into from the street. It’s the largest quad in all of the University’s colleges and one of the loveliest. Its historical buildings from the 16th and 17th centuries are all in soft, honey coloured stone and form an harmonious whole. Overlooking it all is Wren’s fabulous Tom Tower ( or Thom Tower) and in one corner is a small statue of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey who had had a lot to do with the development of Christ Church

A wide, stone staircase, beneath a spectacular fan-vaulted ceiling led us up to the Hall, the grandest refectory in Oxford. Long tables decorated with little green lamps were being set for some big, formal meal later in the day. They are surrounded by portraits of monarchs, bishops and past scholars by famous artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds and Millais. It was fairly quiet when we went in but we kept nervously looking over our shoulders as it’s this hall that was recreated in the studio as Hogwarts’ Great Hall in the Harry Potter movies. Other scenes were filmed in Christchurch and also in Oxford’s New College. I had spotted that some companies specialise in ( expensive) Harry Potter tours where fans of J K Rowling’s boy wizard can pose for selfies waving wands or wearing the famous long, woollen scarf. Diehard fans half believe they are visiting Hogwarts, not Oxford University. Surprisingly, the university seems to be pushing this connection. The audio guide brought up Harry Potter before it even mentioned Cardinal Wolsey!

We enjoyed our visit to Christchurch and it was a highlight of the holiday. We got invited by one of the bowler hats into a very old library not usually open to the public. It had an exhibition about Cardinal Wolsey to celebrate 500 years of the college’s birth in its present form. After ascending a curving staircase with a delicate wrought iron banister, we entered a beautiful, peaceful room with antique furniture and an ornate ceiling. In the exhibition we saw Wolsey’s red cardinal’s hat and his exquisitely illustrated 16th century prayer book given to him by a representative of the Pope, plus a collection of fascinating old documents from the 16th century.

We eventually made it into Christ Church’s college chapel, also known as Oxford Cathedral. It has a mixture of styles but has lots to admire and think about. In one area there is another stunning ceiling and a medieval -style triptych above the altar. There are windows with medieval stained glass dating back to 1320. There is also a replica of a shrine to St Frideswide which many pilgrims used to visit. Her original tomb and shrine was destroyed in 1530 during the Reformation. Frideswide was a Saxon princess and abbess who supposedly performed miracles and who founded the original church on this spot in the 7th century. Behind the shrine is a ravishing stained glass window by the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Edward Burne -Jones, which tells the story of the revered saint. It shows her being pursued by a rejected suitor. In the end, according to legend, the suitor was struck blind by a lightning bolt sent by God. Bizarrely this picture of life in Anglo Saxon times includes a depiction of a modern, flushing toilet. It’s thought to be something to do with Burne-Jones’s industrialist sponsor. There are 4 wonderful stained glass windows by Burne-Jones in the Cathedral. He is one of my favourite artists with his exquisite depictions of idealised beauty. It was a great finale to our visit to Christchurch and there was not a wizard’s hat, long scarf or wand in sight, thank goodness.

We wound down by having a stroll along the banks of the River Cherwell. It is separated from the city and university buildings by meadows and playing fields. The river was lined with colourful house boats. Small flocks of Canada and Greylag geese swam around or flew, honking overhead. We saw a few rowers and a couple of punts. We walked through to the Botanical gardens and Magdalen college where the Cherwell has its confluence with the River Thames. We ate wraps at a middle eastern cafe before returning to our base and thankfully finding that the broken boiler had at last been replaced. We enjoyed our hot showers as we looked back on a very satisfying day.

OTHER COLLEGES.

Oxford University was founded in the reign of Henry I, the so called “scholar king”. He was the 4th son of William the Conqueror. It is the oldest university in the English speaking world dating back to 1096. It is only beaten for age by Fez In Morocco( 8th century) and Bologna, Italy in 1088AD. It has 38 colleges, most of them set up by wealthy bishops who wanted to promote learning but also ensure their own immortality. We visited Merton College ( 1264) which featured 3 peaceful quads, an impressive chapel and an exotic Fellows garden. We almost had it to ourselves.We also saw some of Oxford’s famous gargoyles — grotesgue , carved water spouts up on the roofs.

Later in the week we visited New College which is actually very old of course. ( 1379) We were now also back on the Harry Potter trail and we had to detour past fans taking selfies in the quad. The college’s atmospheric, long corridors, great arched windows and cloisters combine to form the illusion of a magical boarding school. It’s a film director’s dream. New College has a large, plain Front Quad which leads to a lovely colourful garden, partly bordered by the original Oxford city wall dating back to the middle ages.

New College had a lovely historical refectory or hall and a stunning, Perpendicular chapel with rows and rows of stone saints and apostles behind the altar. It was like looking at the west front of Lincoln or Wells cathedral. I think it is an immaculate Victorian replica of a medieval cathedral entrance by Gilbert- Scott. It contains over 50 figures and its technical term is a reredos. The chapel also features a striking, hammer-beam ceiling. It was commandeered for a location in a Harry Potter film , and after having it almost to ourselves for a few minutes, we were invaded by Potter fans all furiously snapping selfies on their phones.

New College chapel also features outstanding medieval stained glass windows from the 14th century and an 18th century window designed by the artist, Sir Joshua Reynolds. It includes a nativity scene and apparently, according to the blurb that I read, it features the famous artist himself as one of the shepherds, wearing a bright orange robe. I told one of the guides this and he didn’t know — presumably because it has nothing to do with any of J K Rowling’s creations. What a shame that her fantasy world seems to have taken precedence over real art and history.

CULTURE VULTURES. — The ASHMOLEAN AND PITT RIVERS MUSEUMS.

An essential ingredient of Ian and I’s city breaks is to chase down culture whenever possible. As well as architecture and history, this usually involves visiting galleries and museums. Thus it was no surprise that, when in Oxford, we prioritised a visit to the Ashmolean Museum. It looks like a huge Greek -style temple. It has thousands of exhibits spread across 4 large floors. It’s second only to the British Museum in importance. Artefacts from all over the ancient world are displayed along with an excellent collection of paintings on the top 2 levels. The floors are connected by a lift or by a grand staircase. Imagine the British Museum and the National gallery rolled into one and you will have an idea of what the Ashmolean is like. It’s technically free and there is no pressure to donate but we gladly paid the recommended figure of £5. Considering the treasure trove of art and history within, this has to be one of the bargains of the century.

The Ashmolean is huge and can easily overwhelm the visitor both physically and mentally. So we made a plan — looks at the superb ancient Egyptian collection, have a rest over a coffee, then go and view the paintings, and in particular, the 19th and early 20th century works. After depositing our bags in a locker we made our way down a long gallery of ancient Greek statues and busts to get to the Egyptian rooms. We then split up, on the understanding that we would meet in the cafe . I quickly got absorbed in the Ancient Egyptian collection. They had whole carved tombs and shrines as well as grave goods, wall paintings, stone carvings, statues, mummies and painted mummy cases from all eras. It is fascinating and the explanations are very clear and interesting.

I then went to the cafe and texted Ian expecting him to follow me quite soon as I had taken my time. However he never turned up and didn’t answer my texts, so I drank my coffee alone, feeling a little worried. Afterall, I selfishly surmised, he had the key to the locker where my rucksack was stored! All the best plans of mice and men…. Not to worry –we eventually met amongst the Italian Renaissance pictures on floor 3. Ian had been absorbed by the art and artefacts from the eastern Mediterranean civilisations especially those of the Ancient Greek Cyclades islands. It was a good thing to happen as he had been drawn in and been intellectually stimulated instead of just ticking items off from a list. We looked at the paintings together. We particularly enjoyed the Impressionists and post Impressionists and the Pre-Raphaelites, although I know they are not everyone’s cup of tea. They had some big hitters in there such as Pissarro, Manet, Van Gogh, Samuel Palmer, Turner and Corot. I particularly liked an exquisitely painted wardrobe by Burne Jones which he gave to William and Jane Morris as a wedding present. It’s not everyday you get to see an exquisitely painted Arts and Crafts wardrobe. In fact it was a unique experience for me.

After all that culture and information overload, we wound down in the tranquil courtyards of Merton College and then enjoyed Mexican veggie burritos at a fast food food joint. We munched away and sat out a sharp shower.

Later in the week we visited the incredible Pitt Rivers ethnological museum. It’s in a Victorian quarter opposite Keble College which is decorated with different coloured bricks in geometric patterns. Pitt Rivers is situated at the back of the Natural History Museum which is housed in a splendid building similar to its close relative in South Kensington. It is all curving cast iron and glass and dominated by the skeletons of two huge dinosaurs including a fearsome T Rex.

Entering Pitt Rivers is like plunging into an amazing Victorian time warp. I agree with my guide book’s description of it as “an exotic junk shop.” It’s the main place emblazoned on my memory from previous Oxford trips. Crammed cabinets display artefacts from all over the globe, covering all aspects of human life. They include: religion, music, food, clothes, transport, jewellery, weapons, writing, masks, headgear etc — the list goes on and on. Its set out in a large atrium with the 2 upper floors looking down on the displays below. The ground floor is dominated by native American totem poles. Cases around display African fetishes, model boats, religious deities, shell and bone jewellery, gruesome masks and even mummified crocodiles. It’s in fact impossible to describe everything. This treasure trove or stolen horde ( take your choice) was brought back to Britain by explorers such as Captain Cook and ethnologists and archaeologists such as the man himself — Augustus Pitt Rivers. The latter’s 22,000 collection of objects was eventually donated to the University of Oxford and forms the core of the present display bearing his name.

Of course this incredible cornucopia of treasures is not without its controversies. It’s very much like the arguments over the Elgin Marbles and the Benin Bronzes in the British Museum. Many say these precious objects were stolen , using British military might ,and should be returned. Until recently the Pitt Rivers museum displayed shrunken heads from Ecuador, trophy heads from south Asia and the ancient Egyptian mummy of a child. These were removed in 2020 on the orders of the museum’s ethical committee as it was thought wrong to continue to display human remains . They are to be kept in storage until the countries of origin are contacted and a returns arrangement negotiated. It’s a thorny, sensitive issue and a notice about it all is displayed prominently in the museum today.

Anyway, what we did see was more than enough to keep us absorbed and excited for a couple of hours. Amongst the highlights are cabinets where one can pull open multiple drawers to see what surprises are inside. In one drawer I discovered little religious icons from the Orthodox church. They were all individually labelled in neat, precise handwriting. The next drawer I slid open contained tiny pieces of jewellery from around the world.

Ian and I found the whole experience so stimulating that we were forced to flop into seats outside the museum and consume coffee and cake from a conveniently situated refreshment van. Luckily the sun was shining.

TOWN AND GOWN.

For much of our visit to Oxford, we concentrated on the areas dominated by the university. However, Oxford is also a workaday town or city. Beyond Magdalen college, going east up the busy Cowley Road is where the car workers lived and worked. At the other end of the High Street, to the west of the Carfax Tower, there is a sudden transition from gown to town, from academia to normal life. Thus within a minute or two of Christ Church College is Westgate Shopping Centre, a typical mall containing all the usual suspects. Typically the area is packed with everyday shoppers rather than tourists. The train station is up there as well. Near the end of our stay we decided to have a complete change and have a stroll up the Oxford Canal. It’s just beyond the shopping mall and Oxford castle which is now nothing more than a mound adjoining a luxury hotel, and a cluster of shops, bars and restaurants. The canal is picturesque and peaceful. Parallel to it runs an old mill stream. Ducks and moorhens potter about and colourful barges are moored up on the canal banks. It was a lovely walk. We had been told about it by a friend who went to Oxford University back in the day.

We strolled for about 20 minutes to a bridge, which we crossed to enter a bohemian, former working class area of terraced houses, some of them painted in pastel colours. The area is known as Jericho because it used to sit just outside the city walls. It is dominated by a large brick church with a tall tower like a Venetian campanile. The area seemed to have a strong community spirit with everyone greeting each other on first name terms. It was a bit like walking into a southern version of Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. It seemed to have the same vibrant arts scene, independent shops and sense of togetherness. It even has the lovely canal side location. We liked the atmosphere of the place. Ominously though, we spotted a couple of “Save Our Jericho” signs. Maybe the developers are threatening to move in!

It was our last night and we ate at a very nice Lebanese restaurant in Jericho. It’s opposite a synagogue and I’m sure one of the waiters was an orthodox Jewish boy. Maybe Mr Netanyahu should go there to learn some lessons about peaceful co-existence and cooperation, rather than death and destruction.

It had been an excellent visit to Oxford. Over 7 days we had seen so much and even fitted in 2 interesting trips out of the city to Blenheim Palace and the Cotswold town of Burford. ( Maybe the subjects of a future blog.) The next day we had our last stroll around the central sights and along the river. Then it was back on to the trains home. We got stuck in Birmingham for a while, but that’s another story. “We are sorry that your journey will take longer than planned.

NB To read my old blogs please go to : https://scrapheapstuart2.wordpress.com
Hello World!

August 27, 2025
Welcome to WordPress! This is your first post. Edit or delete it to take the first step in your blogging journey. Hello, my name is Stuart. I am a retired teacher now in my mid 70s, god help me. I live on the north east coast of England. I have been blogging on wordpress.com for over 15 years under the site address: scrapheapstuart2 I got the idea for the name because the wife of one of my friends, cruelly described retired people as being on the scrapheap.

I enjoyed my writing about travel and current affairs. I also did quite a lot of memoir writing. I built up a small following and got some kind, positive comments. However a few weeks ago, wordpress suddenly locked me out. It said my password was incorrect. I went through the forgotten password routine but every new password I chose was deemed incorrect by the algorithm. In the middle of trying to sort out this problem, wordpress bizarrely changed my user name from scrapheaptuart2 to joyfuldonutf881a2b165-kitwe.wordpress.com It was obviously generate by artificial intelligence. I tried and tried to change it back and get into my blogging site but failed. Apparently you only get help from an actual human being if you have a paid plan with wordpress.com I was on the free plan, paid for by adverts that they put into my posts.

So I gave in and went with the joyfuldonut name. So it looks like I have just started as I have only written one blog so far under that name. It’s one of the frustrations of the internet and modern technology. Maybe I should write a blog about it while in the “grumpy old man” mood. In the meantime my first blog under the new name is about a city break in Oxford. If you go on to read it, I hope you enjoy it.

This link will go to my ScrapheapStuart2 webpage.

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