Some years ago I was bringing a group of well-educated girls from a private school in the USA back from Stratford and, held up by traffic, they started playing a game in which someone shouted out two alternatives and they […]
Diary of a Tourist Guide
This is my new blog. For older posts please go to: http://diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.co.uk.
THREE WARM WEEKS IN IRELAND
Just over a month ago I was invited back to extended touring by Trafalgar, who I used to work for full-time, and accepted a couple of tours to Ireland, where I had not been for two years. We had a great time (at least, I did) on both […]
KYLEMORE – THE GIVER AND THE GAMBLER
In England many country houses started off as abbeys before becoming homes for rich and aristocratic families. With Kylemore Abbey, however, it was the other way around. Built as a home by a wealthy Englishman Mitchell Henry it later came into the […]
LATE TO YEATS
I have always loved poetry and often use it on tours – less so, these days, as I am more self-conscious about appearing over-intellectual. That was not something which worried W B Yeats, the greatest of Ireland’s poets, who chronicled the move of Ireland to independence in the late nineteenth and […]
WHO CRACKED THE CODE?
The Rosetta Stone is really a very boring object and yet it is arguably the most important one in the British Museum. It is a piece of granite forty five inches tall proclaiming an edict by King Ptolemy the Fifth in 196 BC and discovered […]
THAT WAS THEN THIS IS NOW
I actually paid to go on a tour the other day, which is almost unknown in the high season. Still, I was intrigued by the premise and coughed up my £20 to go on an alternative tour of the National Portrait Gallery. […]
SUFFRAGETTE AND SUFFRAGIST
Our Prime Minister Theresa May took a break last week from the problems of Brexit (unavoidable) and the Windrush scandal (self-inflicted) to be present at the […]
LONDON’S LONGEST RUNNING SHOWS
Blue badge guides often have to take groups to the theatre and, even if they do not do this regularly, it is a good idea to know what is running in the west end in order to advise people. With this in mind, I thought it would be fun to see which were the longest […]
NEW PLACE(S) IN STRATFORD
William Shakespeare would be 454 years old today (23rd April 2018) and it would be 404 years since his death, which occurred on the same date as he was born fifty two years later – or is assumed to have as we only have a date for his baptism rather […]
NATIONAL TREASURES AT SAINT PANCRAS
Sometimes guides meet groups who are coming into London on the Eurostar train. It used to pass near to my house in Brixton and the one occasion I was on it, coming from Paris with my family, I was tempted to ask them to do an unscheduled stop at Brixton station […]