Greek flame, UK route

It's all Greek to me.

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Here's how to join in the Greek-lit Olympic flame on its journey around the UK.  This post is by Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).   

The 2012 Olympic flame was lit in Greece  - the original home of the games - using sun rays as they met a parabolic mirror on 10 May. Sounds like a super efficient way of creating fire to me.  And now  - whatever the weather throws at it - the flame is on its journey travelling up the UK from Cornwall. The route aims to take the Olympic flame no further than 10 miles from 95 per cent of the population. Quite an amazing piece of planning!

Look here to see where it passes you, and when.

As a little tribute to the moment the Olympic flame was lit I popped into a Greek bakery in Enfield (just by Oakwood tube) and bought a sesame seed loaf plus a box of olive paste-filled pastries as a gift for friends (see pic above). For £4 I got nearly 20 little snacks (rather different finances are used at the French bakery Paul where you generally spend an arm and a leg on daily bread). Yum.

Over to you
Will you see the Olympic flame pass? And have you ever used a parabolic mirror? For anyone interested in trying out a parabolic mirror for cooking, rather than just lighting a runner's torch, have a look at this video from the US. Or buy one for home cooking (assuming you are in the US) at http://www.greenpowerscience.com/SHOPARABLOICHOME.html

Margate gets its mojo back

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Here are some thoughts on art, sand, chips and shells at Margate. This post is by Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about books and blogs).  

Margate isn't the only seaside place to slip out of fashion.

Spain's Torremilinos was all the rage in the 1960s (Monty Python mocked it as the Costa del Sol's home of spam and chips); there was Paxos in Greece as the place for your bit of fun in the sun during the 1970s. Where did you go in the 1980s (Kenya?) or 1990s (if Thai backpacking try Alex Garland's The Beach) or 2000s (Croatia) - all subject to tourist trends.

But when the visitors move on towns - even countries - can suffer horribly too. That's what Margate was finding. With it's lovely sandy beach it had been the perfect Victorian resort. Plenty of East Enders - and other Londoners - were still happily visiting in the 1950s and enjoying the famous funfair, Dreamland (closed since 2003). But each year things seemed to go a little more downhill. In the 2001 census it was a place of high unemployment, and even now as you walk around it's very obvious the B&Bs are filled with social tenants, not holidaymakers.

Have you been?
But suddenly Margate's THE place to visit again. In 2012 the new Turner Contemporary exhibition was opened which offers a Tate-art experience (white walls, small labels, a caf downstairs), and expansive sea views out to the Isle of Thanet windfarm. The first exhibition is fabulous - as it should be for JMW Turner had strong links with Margate.

Tie that exhibition to a really friendly place, a super fast train across Kent to St Pancras and the knowledge that this is the town where Tracey Emin grew up and you have plenty of reasons for taking a trip.

Nell, 11, just wanted a day trip featuring ice cream and chips (both eaten on the beach). I also wanted a beach that allows dogs to tear around (until 1 May) and Pete suspected we'd all love Turner and the Shell grotto. Turned out he also found a pub to watch West Ham beat Bolton 4-0 too. What's not to love about a quickie to Margate?

Where in the world?
However, it turns out you can't be anywhere else when you're in Margate. I tried, but it is a uniquely British experience. However the Shell Grotto offers a fantastic puzzle - who could have built an underground temple decorated with 4 million shells without anyone noticing? Despite English Heritage listing it as a Grade 1 site, theories are varied. Although my instinct says this is obviously a Victorian fake (my dad didn't do end of pier exhibitions for nothing you know!) it's fun to hope that it is really a Phoenician temple built in the second half of the first century. These traders (busy trading tin from Cornwall and on to the Continent lived in an area roughly where the Lebanon is now.  For examination of the evidence see Patricia Jane Marsh's booklet The Enigma of the Margate Shell Grotto.

Over to you
What do you think is fun to do in Margate? Or which UK seaside towns offer a little taste of the places other travellers like to visit via planes?

Here be dragons (aka griffins)

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Here's how to find fantasy beasts via a trip through London. This post is by Nicola Baird 


I love visting the City's griffins. The picture above looks rather like a sacrifice, although it really shows Nell trying to climb on to one of the City's guardians between Temple and Blackfriars tube. Using the old I-spy game a griffin deserves at least 10 points (a pigeon would be 2, a cathedral 6), and there are plenty of griffins to find in the Square Mile, so a good way of exploring London as you look around the protest site at St Pauls.

Griffin ID please
Look for the body of a lion, the head and wings of an eagle and furry horse ears & what do you see? Scales. Clearly the griffins guarding the City are actually dragons. I doubt such a mish-mash beastie could ever have been real - although the Greeks and ancient Egyptians made statues of them. As for dragons, I've always assumed they are a folk lore memory of dinosaurs (or at any rate dino bones).

More info about Griffins on Wikipedia here. And if you want to remind yourself about I-spy books, then look here.

If it's London dragons you want though, then go to the National Gallery and enjoy Uccello's St George and the Dragon - a slaying of what appears to be the lady in pink's pet.

Where to watch the World Cup 2010?

Pete, Nicola, Lola and Nell spent the summer of 2007 travelling around Britain without resorting to planes (simple!). Now they're home and keep up the carbon-lite world travel habit in all sorts of ways. This post is by Nicola

So where's the best place to watch the World Cup this July? I'm asking this less for myself, more as a puzzle. I know one sports writer/lecturer who is taking her toddler to South Africa for the full atmosphere (but worrying as much about which malaria tablets to take as how to get tickets). My Brazilian-based friend plans to come back "home" to London just in case England does really well - I also happen to know he likes being around the UK for the soft fruits season, so that's two draws. Meanwhile his wife thinks it might be more fun in Brazil, just in case her team does really well. While the Dads group from Nell's school look set to fall back on a CAMRA (ie, real) pub near Baker Street that serves Abbot Ale and when they drank there last undoubtedly set up England's recent victory in the friendly against Egypt. A winning ritual should not be broken they claim.

Where you watch and how you get to that place can be a brilliant way of sharing the joys and blows of being a football follower, or it can be rubbish (yes, that's why there's a picture of the rat infested rubbish truck from the recent Rio carnival!). I'm guessing I'll see some of the games with friends and family on outdoor screens, walkable distances from my home.

It's been 10 years - this coming April - since Lola and I took our last flights (first as well in her case as she was not quite two years). Nell is nine years and still hasn't gone on a plane. Pete has flown in the past 10 years but only twice, once for fun and once for work, so our family footprint has stayed low for a significant length of time compared to our friends.

Our no-plane boast is not so great if we compare with our own childhoods - Pete never took a plane journey with his family, it wasn't until he was 18 that he set off for an airport check-in. I think I made one return flight to Northern Ireland as a toddler (apparently noisily confusing nuns with Father Christmas) and then another aged 15 when my Dad suddenly took us all to Paxos, a Greek island.

Our family's experience shows you can have fun at home in the World Cup (why, even Lola was born at the start of the 1998 kickathon), in fact home is probably the only place you can watch every game, keep up to date with every bit of information and still keep that carbon footprint a blistering zero. Here's to an England win...

Athens of the north: battlefields and poppies

We've been to Edinburgh before, but never up Calton Hill with it's fantastic views of the Castle, Arthur's Seat - and the Firth of Forth. And once you've had a picnic there's the memorials. The Parthenon copy (still with scaffolding!) was a war memorial to fallen soldiers at Waterloo and the construction that led to the city being dubbed "the Athens of the North". This post is from Nicola Baird



Scotland is proud of its war contribution (even if colonisation has been air brushed out of history up at its national museum), with memorials of generals and "the fallen" in all the best places.





Up at Edinburgh Castle there's Ensign Ewart's marble block which marks the "lucky" solider who grabbed the French eagle for our forces. Impressive as this was the memorial didn't go up until 1938. But it did spawn 1,000 demands for large golden mirrors encircled by a cowed eagle - something still very on trend. There were two in the appartment we borrowed!



War still seems very distant even if there's never yet been a whole day of peace in the world I've lived in. See more about how to resolve this at War Child here. Meanwhile Lola is learning about the second World War and perhaps understanding how the first World War carnage (from 1914-1918) helped lead nations into another six years of war in 1939.



<<>Mervyn James Hamilton, a soldier who died in November 1914 from his wounds. Phoebe (we know her as Gebe and Lola was old enough to have several Christmases with her and also went to her funeral) never knew her dad. She was yet another generation raised by single mothers.



<< href="http://www.gordonhighlanders.com/">Gordon Highlanders at Scotland's National War Memorial, within the grounds of Edinburgh Castle, see more here. I don't think we were meant to take pictures, so many apologies.

Nell had a good word for war memorabilia: on a sunny day the cannons provide the best seat for views across to the Firth of Forth and beyond...

And then Lola <<>I believe in Yesterday (Jonathan Cape) and look for the battle scenes.

My conclusion is that we all left our attempt at remembrance a little confused.

Athens of the North

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola

Athens of the North is how Edinburgh is fondly known. Without having Greek aspirations it is hard to be convinced, but from certain angles (eg, the descent of Arthur's Seat) you can see columns, pick out Grecian style temples and chat about Doric and Ionic columns until the Olympics arrives nearby in 2012 (admittedly to London, not Edinb).

However we are determined to get our girls to use a Greek viewfinder and so the picture will helpfully convince them - and you.