Nobody turns down a free concert do they? Well, I don’t. Though on this occasion, I almost did. My mate Neil has a knack of spotting random things happening nearby. He reads newspapers and magazines and keeps up to date with what’s going on, much more than I do. This means it’s great to travel…
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What is a Carillon? I’m not really sure and I’m not going to look it up in a dictionary, and the first time I’d heard that word was January 2010, while in Canberra, Australia’s under-rated and often over-looked capital. Sitting nicely and obviously in front of Lake Burley Griffin, lies this “Carillon”, which is actually…
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Its almost too obvious doing all the major cities when you’re a traveller or a nomad, but somehow you end up in them anyway. In China I done Beijing, in Belarus Minsk and in Australia Melbourne. I like to get a mix of the big cities and the random smaller settlements however. But yet Melbourne…
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I have always loved ships. Ever since the days of getting the St David or the Galloway Princess from Larne to Stranraer or from going out boating with my mate Peter Bell and his step -Dad Ken Taylor on the Impala yacht in Ringhaddy. Then in 2008 I worked on the Isle of Wight ferries…
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Cronulla was another of the famous beaches in and around the Sydney area. It wasn’t on my list of must sees, but we decided to do it anyway. My current pub job normally means I have two full days off (or one over Christmas and New Year!), and so at the start of December I…
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Live music often helps you have a good night – but this was an unexpected rock gig in the middle of The Blue Mountains – one that we didn’t even know about as we paid to get in. We were staying in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains Central Backpackers and had been out one night…
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On my last weekend in Taiwan, I ended up in the capital city of Taipei. We had spent the full day sightseeing (and also went to the thermal spas) and returned to our hostel for the night out. Jenny had gone back home after the sightseeing, so there was just me and Neil for the…
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Its amazing you know where and how you find things. This one was random – I found a “Beatles Bar” slap bang in the city centre of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia! It was by chance. I mentioned before how English traveler Niki Whitley spent a day with Natalja and I and helped us firstly by loaning…
Read MoreThe dreary depths of 1993 saw the Manic Street Preachers surprisingly NOT split up, as they had planned after their first album, Generation Terrorists. Instead they went even more sublime, upped the stadium rock moments and delved into issues such as sleep deprivation, suicide, childbirth and the horrors of life really. This dark album rocks…
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One of the calm survivors of the “britpop era” happens to be the Bluetones. They are still going, having had their biggest hits in the 1995 – 1998 era, when British Guitar music and young bands were at the core of music popularity. Now the kids wouldn’t even have heard of Mark Morriss, or even…
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