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 […]
Diary of a Tourist Guide:
Writers
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 […]
BRITAIN’S BEST LOVED BEAR
I always advise people never to go to the cinema with a tourist guide. They pedantically pick up on all the mistakes and insist on staying to the very end of the credits to see which locations were used so they recycle […]
SURPRISED BY JOY
The great thing about being a tourist guide is that it is a continuing education. On a recent tour the group leader expressed an interest in visiting the home of C S Lewis in Oxford. I had read many of Lewis’s books but knew nothing of where he lived and was not even aware that it […]