What a wonderful winter’s day here in the UK – cold and frosty, yet blue skies and sunshine (conditions may vary according to where you are reading this from!). But if you think it’s nice here, you ought to see what it’s like in the Alps at the moment – simply breathtaking. Read the full post

It’s one of the biggest, most flamboyant festivals on the Spanish calendar, broadcast live on television every Easter. Hundreds of thousands of visitors flock to Seville to join the faithful in the noisy, crowded streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of the huge, ornate floats bearing life-size wooden icons as they are drawn along by hooded men in colourful processions throughout the week. Read the full post

It’s one of the world’s greatest bird spectacles – the sight of hundreds of thousands of streamlined demoiselle cranes gliding down to land in the villages of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan after an epic flight over the Himalayas. This is part of their annual migration and there is a very special reason why they now choose to land here. Food.
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Who says it’s grim ‘up north’? Not at the moment, that’s for sure! After some rather exceptional solar activity, the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, have been seen as far south as Yorkshire - as we reported back in September.

(I wish I could say I’d seen them myself, but no such luck.)

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The idea that a picture paints a thousand words – thought to be based on an ancient Japanese proverb – was voiced in Ivan S. Turgenev’s novel of 1862, ‘Fathers and Sons’, in which a character says: “The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book.” Read the full post