It’s dark and starting to get a little cold so I don’t feel like wandering around for too long. I manage to find somewhere open on a square near a tram stop.

The restaurant is pleasantly busy. There’s a family and a few couples. There are also three men, other than me, dining alone.

This video of an elephant going for a walk reminded me of the time I rode one myself when on holiday in Thailand.

We clambered onto the wobbly wooden seat that was perched on the animals back. The driver sat in front of us just behind the elephants head. He had a worrying stick that he used to give “encouragement” and directions. There were a number of us in the group and we had a caravan of elephants, or whatever the collective noun for elephants is.

You can get a measure of my life this year when when you realise two things: my trip to Brittany was the first time I took much more than a week off work in two years; and we went in June and July this year. It’s taken me nearly six months to even start to write this. And not even I know how many times I had to revise that last sentence so that it’s accurate now!

I went to the north of Spain twice in the early nineties and visited Barcelona for a day each time. I only remember bits and pieces — walking down the Ramblas and how weird the Gaudi cathedral was — and can’t find any pictures from either trip, so it made sense to make it the first city break of 2013 and the first time we’ve done something like this since the birth of Junior¹

Is wasn’t really my idea. I saw it in the newsagents in Rhodes Town and laughed but I never really thought of actually buying it. The credit for that goes to my wife.

I’ve been posting pictures of each month entry on Twitter and Facebook but I thought it would be nice to group them all together in one post. That’s what you’ll find here.

I barely recall any mention of Halloween when I was growing up. That’s changed in the last few years. It’s certainly being much more heavily promoted these days and I want to say — though I have no evidence to support it — that it’s at the expense of Bonfire Night. Presumably children asking strangers for sugary treats is safer than fireworks and piles of burning wood?

This amused me but didn’t quite fit in with the “story” I was trying to tell in my blog about Oslo…

I Have really fond memories of summer 1994 when I did a summer job in Ipswich. (Yes, I’m talking about Ipswich in a blog entitled “Oslo.” Bear with me.) Now Suffolk isn’t a glamorous location necessarily but it was a good time for me and it was a great, hot summer. A few years ago I stopped back in the town on the way back from a wedding. I really wish I hadn’t. Maybe it was the grey and the rain or maybe the years had not been kind, but Ipswich just wasn’t what I remembered.

There are no guarantees when travelling in the UK. Even in May the weather can be all over the place, beautiful, bright and sunny one minute, drab, grey and miserable the next.

There are no guarantees when travelling with a five month old baby. They can be bright and cheery and laughing one minute and crying and screaming the next.

Both of these things made my trip to the Lake District rather different to most of the travel I’ve ever done. Except when I travel with a tour group, I normally have a pretty relaxed schedule. That was more-or-less mandated this time!

I have to say that I love this slideshow feature in Aperture. I know it’s not new, it’s been there for a couple of years at least, but I just found it. To test it I put in a bunch of pictures that I took on my travels last year. I originally put some music on it too, but I had to take it off for the version on YouTube…