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Showing posts from December, 2013

Merry Christmas....

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See you in 2014.... have a great Christmas and New Year holiday...

What does winter mean to you ?

That's a key question posed by the Pole of Cold team who are currently heading for Oymyakon , the coldest inhabited place in the world, to explore how communities cope with extreme cold. I've been thinking about this in the last few days, as we move towards Christmas which (when I was a lad) would guarantee freezing temperatures and plentiful snow.... What's the coldest you've ever been, and where were you at the time ? Please tweet me a reply to  @GeoBlogs , or add a blog comment below. Thanks to those folks who have already replied in the few minutes since I tweeted the original question... All replies will be much appreciated, and I will make use of them in some resources I am currently preparing... after all, I can't do nothing just because I'm on holiday.... While we're on the subject of winter, have some free Mission:Explore missions which are all primed and ready should we get a white Christmas, which is looking quite unlikely judging by th

Let's Zep....

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This week, one of my favourite bands: Led Zeppelin finally had their albums added to Spotify. This is a service I use for many hours every day... and also when travelling. There's a connection between this particular album and my current job. The front cover of Houses of the Holy was designed by Aubrey Powell: a former pupil of King's Ely, where I now teach. He came to pay a visit earlier in the term... Rock on ! And of course there's a geographical connection with the landscape depicted on the album cover....

The Footing

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The Footing is a new collection of poetry on the theme of walking, featuring a contribution by my friend Rob Hindle. Details below: City, country and coast (and the spaces in between) are the settings for these journeys; here, the act of walking is, by turns, exploratory, destructive, restorative, defiant, contemplative and devotional. The poems and sequences in The Footing are The Strait (Angelina Ayers), Tithes (James Caruth), From a St Juliot to Beyond a Beeny (Mark Goodwin), Flights and Traverses (Rob Hindle), Three Night Walks (Andrew Hirst), Death and the Gallant (Chris Jones) and Breach (Fay Musselwhite). The paths taken inThe Footing offer new perspectives on landscape, history and memory; each poem and sequence is marked by the unscreened, the unplanned, the unexpected.  As Rebecca Solnit says in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, ‘every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable…’