Trans Pennine Trail: The Long, Winding Goodbye

MikeachimThe Everyday4 Comments

It’s midnight, and I’m looking up at a signpost. The best way to see England is on foot. (The second best way? Ask Sustrans). It’s a country designed to fit your feet, whether via the National Trail network or by those enticing mystery dashed lines you see winding their way into the trees at the fringes of your Ordnance Survey … Read More

Dead Air Under London

MikeachimThe Everyday12 Comments

London breathes on my back. Around me, shirts billow, dresses flare and hats are clutched, as the stuffy, tasteless air roars past us in search of somewhere to dump its heat. Behind me, the mournful screee of an Underground Tube train – and around me, a subterranean London that is far from solid. Imagine laying a cross-section across the city, … Read More

Nobody Expects The Orkney Haar

MikeachimOrkney3 Comments

Surely my eyes have blown a fuse. The world is blank – not a hole (because holes areĀ *in* something) but a total absence, a blackness filled with light. Vertigo sweeps over me. And…that strange muddled sense of depth, like when you’re drifting off to sleep in a darkened room and suddenly you can’t tell if the ceiling is a million … Read More

Megabus: No-Budget UK Travel (If You’re Tough Enough)

MikeachimThe Everyday5 Comments

I’m hollow-eyed and bleary today, and I haven’t had enough coffee. A little later I’ll be pootling round York, picking up travel essentials and converting my Brit money into Euros before jetting off to Austria tomorrow afternoon. Tomorrow will be my second visit to London in 3 days, and yet again I’m using the train. If you know what rail … Read More

Balderdash! – Busting 5 Myths About England

MikeachimEngland39 Comments

Ah, England! The mist-shrouded Arthurian ruins, the rolling green hills dotted with sleepy hamlets, nuns on bikes free-wheeling over cattle grids, tankards of warm beer, castles and orchards, jodhpurs and shooting-sticks, where monocles legally replace spectacles and more than two people will automatically form a queue, where everything is quaint and quintessential and steeped and… On and on. Planning a … Read More