In a year where there has been little travel and many health issues I am challenged where best to post and how to write this blog! For most of us it has been a year of great uncertainties and lows, with a few highs. On the whole we don’t share our lows as we maintain our oh-so-very-British stiff upper lip. So here goes – my year in review. Continue reading
Lockdown life is different for everyone. I’m the first to admit that my cunning plan of going straight from the Maldives to Switzerland was a good one – no quarantine and a remarkably liberal attitude to social gatherings, restaurant, bar and shop openings up until Christmas, when the shutters come down on all but socialising privately with up to six people – and this is really a blessing. Continue reading
7 December 2020
Louise would have been 31 today. Almost ten years since she died. It is simultaneously like yesterday and an aeon ago. This morning – 3 am to be precise due to jetlag – I flipped though her Facebook photos and her joie de vivre, sense of naughtiness and good humour shone out to me. Of course she had her moments – we all do – and I remember when she was about 14 or 15 regularly waiting on the stairs listening for the late night bus to rumble past in the hope that she would be on it…and at some point she would tumble through the front door and I would pretend to be asleep. Continue reading
Prague Castle at dusk, where Hermann Ungar worked in 1929
I had been invited to Prague to commemorate 90 years since my grandfather Hermann Ungar died aged only 36 from sepsis. He was a Czech Jewish writer who was beginning to build a reputation for himself as a formidable talent amongst the Prague and Berlin literary circles of that time, which included Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Bertolt Brecht among other illustrious names. At the last minute the dates were changed but I had bought tickets and booked the hotel so off we went. Continue reading
vickygoestravelling 