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Latest blog posts from Podtours

Travel in your own back yard
A nice, gently humorous story by Frank Bures in Madison Magazine explores the concepts of psychogeography and travelling in your own back yard. One of the things I’ve noticed about people who walk is that they so often see those tiny details that make life interesting. The hawk in Frank’s...
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Published 4 weeks ago

More on the curse of popularity
When I blogged about the disturbing way that popularity has become the single criterion by which literary or artistic merit is measured, I didn’t have academic journals in mind. But according to the Guardian, a single quantitative measure is now being applied here too - how many people are...
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Published a month ago

Lavatorial travel
I couldn’t resist this story in the Independent about bogs (loos, bathrooms, little boys’ rooms, public lavatorial facilities, necessaria, toilets, rest facilities) with a view. It’s priceless! I recently published a piece  in Norfolk Nips (the local CAMRA newsletter, which I edit) about...
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Published a month ago

Travelling at home - reprise
A lovely post on Brave New Traveler encapsulates some of the themes of ‘travelling in your own back yard’. I really like what this writer is saying - that we are all, potentially, immigrants, refugees, displaced persons. The more privileged of  us are displaced through choice, not...
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Published 2 months ago

Quantity vs quality
I’m getting a bit fed up with sites that list their ‘top articles’ or ‘top buys’  - selected purely by number of clicks. We say we want individual experiences - to be able to see something unusual, out of the ordinary. Yet we travel to places that are in the press, taking our cue from...
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Published 2 months ago

Music and architecture
It’s taken a long time to convince me that the mathematical appeal of architecture can be as strong as the picturesque. That may be in part an Anglo-Saxon prejudice. The Gothic still rules in these islands  - crags, castles, cathedrals, a cult of the picturesque, and particularly of the...
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Published 2 months ago

Railway nostalgia
Long railway journeys do have a certain romance to them. Now, another journey joins the Orient Express, the Trans Siberian and the Raj Heritage Train  - the Danube Express. The Telegraph gives a glowing account of a voyage on this train. It sounds as if the worst extremes of nostalgic snobbery ...
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Published 2 months ago

Heretical Titian
I put in a day’s work at the National Gallery this weekend, preparing a free Podtour of the early Italian masters. I finished that survey with an hour to go till I needed to catch my bus - so I played my little game of wandering around and just seeing what caught my eye. First - Douanier...
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Published 3 months ago

Mudlarking
I was in London at the weekend, and decided instead of doing anything purposeful on Saturday, just to walk out along the Thames and see how far we could get. (Canada Water was the answer to that; we did about seven miles, I think.) And for a bit of it, in Rotherhithe, we went down the steps to...
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Published 3 months ago

Maps old and new
I’ve just written a piece for in-flight magazine Velocity on the way digital mapping is affecting our view of the city. It’s interesting - because we can now map in real time, so we can map flows, not just stasis. That means we can now map, for instance, San Francisco’s nightlife - where is...
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Published 3 months ago