The last leg of our long Summer break involved a visit to London to the Van Gogh “Poets and Lovers” Exhibition at the National Gallery (a chance to see some of the companion pieces to the works we had seen in US and Japan); a few days in Kent including some golf at Leeds Castle and then a trip down to Bristol to catch up with E and V (via Guildford to see Micheal Palin in his “There and Back” tour publicising his latest book of Diary entries) before heading back to Dubai.
Considering that he is 82, MP is remarkably spry (although the picture below does not really do him justice) and it was a very entertaining evening. As noted elsewhere on this blog, it was he who inspired me to keep my own daily Journal starting in 2021 (he started in 1969…) which has provided a degree of competition/battle for content with this Weblog but which has provided a valuable reference point for the main topic for this year’s November post a day (now extended in January…).
By way of comparison I also went to see Joanne Lumley performing a similar type of retrospective travel/film/book show when I arrived back in Dubai. Although only a few years younger than MP, JL was similarly lively and engaging and whilst very different personalities, their career trajectories and themes (TV/film/Travel shows) are very similar and of course both now have the status of national treasures.
Probably quite fitting to end the big Summer tour watching two doyennes of the TV travel show genre recounting their memories. Whilst our own trip did not exactly follow the original plan (and hopefully V and E will have a chance to visit Japan again at some point) it was lovely to be able to spend some time with all the family on the river cruise early in the Summer and to have a chance to see so much of A in Japan and the US.
My last “World tour” with E in 1999 involved a journey in the other direction - starting in Brazil and taking in Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Argentina in South America before heading to New Zealand and Australia and returning to UK via Singapore. This trip was probably less ambitious but just as fun and I cannot wait to do it again!
No comments:
Post a Comment