There's lots of attention this year on the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, understandably so. But I've been considering the vast number of significant UK and world events that occurred a mere quarter of a century ago, in 1989. The Berlin Wall came down, signalling not only the reunification of Germany but the end of 40 years of Cold War; the Solidarity movement won the first free elections in Poland; the environment took an almighty hit from an oil spill from the Exxon Valdez in Alaska; the Hillsborough Stadium disaster in Sheffield caused the deaths of 96 Liverpool football supporters; Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was executed; the world watched in horror the bloody outcome of student protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square; Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses earned him a fatwa; Sky Television plc was launched in Europe; the House of Commons was televised live for the first time; a plane crash on the M1 embankment at Kegworth saw massive loss of life, as did the collision of the Marchioness pleasure boat with a Thames barge; Microsoft released their first Office suite and Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
And I got married.
In celebration of our Silver Wedding anniversary, my husband and I are treating ourselves to a cruise on the River Danube, and I'm counting down the days. There'll be so many places to visit and experiences to recount, that I've decided to revive my old travel-diary-writing habit, but with a 21st Century bent; so blogging here I come! With free WiFi on the ship and an iPad for my birthday, there'll be no excuse, although it comes more naturally to scribble in a notebook. Somebody else who was used to tatty but treasured journals rather than a computer screen was Patrick Leigh Fermor. He wrote an erudite yet engaging account of an impressive three-year trek from London to Constantinople as a young man in the 1930s, spanning three volumes and capturing much of what will be our own Danube route in the first one, A Time of Gifts. He has a truly remarkable eye for detail and eloquent turns of phrase in word-painting his adventures, their settings and the characters he shared them with. I'll do well to be half as observant, and will be tuning all my senses as good travel writers should. Hopefully it'll serve not only as a precious souvenir for us but also give readers a flavour of our various destinations. One in particular that I shall not so much be looking out for as hoping to hear, is an 'acoustic foible' the young Paddy encountered in the Wachau valley east of Melk. He witnessed a tug pulling a string of barges between steep cliffs and sounding its siren. Three seconds later the boom was joined by an echo precisely an octave higher, making a chord. Once the original note died out, the higher one lingered for another three seconds. This neat symmetry parallels the skilful structure of the narrative, as several chapters later the writer looks westward from a bridge in Bratislava as more barges passed below heading towards Austria, and he muses enviously that they'll eventually be 'waking the two-noted echo of Dürrenstein'.
I'm anticipating the river traffic being somewhat different these days, but I'm hoping for plenty of music, natural or man-made, to write home about.
And I got married.
In celebration of our Silver Wedding anniversary, my husband and I are treating ourselves to a cruise on the River Danube, and I'm counting down the days. There'll be so many places to visit and experiences to recount, that I've decided to revive my old travel-diary-writing habit, but with a 21st Century bent; so blogging here I come! With free WiFi on the ship and an iPad for my birthday, there'll be no excuse, although it comes more naturally to scribble in a notebook. Somebody else who was used to tatty but treasured journals rather than a computer screen was Patrick Leigh Fermor. He wrote an erudite yet engaging account of an impressive three-year trek from London to Constantinople as a young man in the 1930s, spanning three volumes and capturing much of what will be our own Danube route in the first one, A Time of Gifts. He has a truly remarkable eye for detail and eloquent turns of phrase in word-painting his adventures, their settings and the characters he shared them with. I'll do well to be half as observant, and will be tuning all my senses as good travel writers should. Hopefully it'll serve not only as a precious souvenir for us but also give readers a flavour of our various destinations. One in particular that I shall not so much be looking out for as hoping to hear, is an 'acoustic foible' the young Paddy encountered in the Wachau valley east of Melk. He witnessed a tug pulling a string of barges between steep cliffs and sounding its siren. Three seconds later the boom was joined by an echo precisely an octave higher, making a chord. Once the original note died out, the higher one lingered for another three seconds. This neat symmetry parallels the skilful structure of the narrative, as several chapters later the writer looks westward from a bridge in Bratislava as more barges passed below heading towards Austria, and he muses enviously that they'll eventually be 'waking the two-noted echo of Dürrenstein'.
I'm anticipating the river traffic being somewhat different these days, but I'm hoping for plenty of music, natural or man-made, to write home about.