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Montmartre, Paris, March 2019

We're just back from a trip to France and Switzerland. You should see a picture from Paris above, and be able to drag the image around and zoom in and out. You might be able to see the Eiffel Tower if you look in the right direction! If things don't work, try another browser.

More of my spherical images are on the Ricoh Theta site, including some from this recent trip. Here I am inside the Musée d'Orsay, for example. On that site, you can probably also view them full-screen.

Also, here's a short bit of video, from the ski slopes of Saas-Fee, Switzerland, last week, where we also found a nice spot for lunch.

A garage at Oradour-sur-Glane...

Newhaven this morning, shortly after I disembarked from the Dieppe ferry.

The sky over my campsite yesterday morning; I hadn't seen any blue up there for quite some time!

And the sky over the same campsite as I returned to it in the evening:

My pitch was just under the darkest bit at the bottom right.

It soon settled down to the standard grey rainclouds again afterwards, though!

I'm in the valley of the Vézère river, just north of the Dordogne. It's been raining almost all day, but the moisture really adds vibrance to the splendid colours of the trees.

Fangorn

We met some local residents...

No, really! I'm very ferocious too!

Then we had a final brief pause in the rain, just in time for a dog-walk just before sunset.

We went to Lincolnshire last weekend. When I told some friends of our plans beforehand, they said, "Lincolnshire? Really? For a whole weekend?", or words to that effect. And I must confess to being somewhat apprehensive myself, though we had visited Lincoln itself before and knew that to be a lovely city.

But there's lots of good stuff in Lincolnshire.

They have some very impressive churches, for one thing. In addition to Lincoln Cathedral (above), we visited Boston, from where some people once set sail to found a colony in Massachusetts.

Boston's name comes from "Botolph's Town", and the church of St Botolph is almost a cathedral itself.

It's been informally known as the 'Boston Stump' for the last, oh, seven hundred years or so, a name which hardly conveys the fact that it's really awfully tall. We can assert this, having climbed it, via a very narrow staircase. They let us in at the bottom and shut the door behind us; the only way was up...

Emerging at the top, you can walk around the rather narrow walkway with a lowish handrail, before descending via a second similar staircase.

A fun and very memorable experience, but definitely not recommended for those suffering from corpulence, claustrophobia, or vertigo!

Lincoln itself is built on quite a steep hill, but much of the county is very flat, so Lincolnshire's drainage ditches are almost as impressive as its churches.

There are lots of marvellous windmills, used both for pumping and for corn-grinding.

And here's another cool thing you don't find in every county: a bubble-car museum!

We visited a lovely beach at Huttoft, as the sun was setting.

Tilly did feel, however, that they had rather too many seagulls, so did her best to rectify that problem.

We stayed at "Long Acres", a delightful and well-run campsite which suffers only from not being very close to most of the major attractions. As a result it's very peaceful, especially at this time of the year. And if you enjoy looking at bubble-cars as much as we do, they at least are not far away!

I haven't talked about the quaint teashop we visited in the pretty village of Tealby, or The Usher Gallery in Lincoln, or the Sibsey Trader Windill... But all in all, we had a very enjoyable weekend in our trusty campervan.

Isn't sand wonderful stuff?

We went to Holkham Beach -- a favourite spot -- at the weekend.

All of these textures were within a few minutes' walk of each other.

Oh, and Tilly likes it too.

There was a miraculous event at my brother Simon's house in Winchester this week, as the new plaster in their sitting room started to dry...

I told him not to paint over it, and he could then retire in comfort, as long as he didn't mind having a lot of visitors.

Actually, the miraculous event was that -- being, he freely admits, somewhat unfamiliar with Photoshop or anything similar -- he created this image in Powerpoint.

Anyway, I thought it was great.