Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

It's just occurred to me to check the operating details of the Beacons Bus for 2014. For the last ten years or so, these popular services have run on summer Sundays, departing from several major towns in South and West Wales and heading into the Brecon Beacons National Park. They all met at Brecon, enabling easy interchanges and giving tourists plenty of time to explore before heading home. Well, brace yourselves for the bad news. It's been discontinued as a result of funding cuts. http://www.breconbeacons.org/beacons-bus The withdrawal of the Beacons Bus will obviously have environmental and social repercussions on an already fragile Welsh tourist sector. Successive summers have been washed out by the weather, and many shops in Brecon are struggling to survive. Those of us without cars will be unable to visit the area and take advantage of its amenities. Given the lack of any alternative provision, those people who do want to visit the area will have no choice but to take thei...

Since leaving politics, the former Conservative MP Michael Portillo has carved out a new career as a broadcaster. His Radio 4 series The Things We Forgot to Remember looks at major historical events from angles which don't normally get covered in books. However, in my opinion, his real triumph started from a brilliantly simple idea: to use a Victorian guide to the British railways as a basis for exploring the history and culture of these islands. Great British Railway Journeys does exactly what it says on the tin. Mr Portillo criss-crosses a section of the country by train, visiting places which were mentioned in George Bradshaw's guides from the 1860s. At each stop he meets a local guide and gets a potted history of some of the events which shaped this country's development in Victorian times. I watched three of these programmes back-to-back last night, and only stopped because my medication had kicked in. To be perfectly honest, I could have watched them all night witho...

I was awake early again on the Monday morning, after my rather haphazard exploration the day before (see  …And Also The Trees .) When I looked out, a good number of the other tents had gone, and my own looked rather sad and lonely in the field. I gathered a few things together and walked down to the farmhouse for a nice hot shower. There were a couple of children playing in the next field, and there were signs of life in a caravan parked next to the fence. The chickens were roaming around in the yard, and I muttered a quiet curse towards the cockerel, who had woken me for the second day running. I emerged from the shower room refreshed and ready to face the world. It was only about eight o'clock. I decided to hit the road early and aim for the 0925 bus to Monmouth. Even though I wasn't in a great hurry to get back to Aberdare, I could feel the usual post-trip-away-comedown coming on. I wasn't looking forward to the next job of the day – dismantling the bloody tent. It was s...