Saturday 17 January 2009

Greetings from Dorset

We move slowly in these parts. The last big thing that happened here was that the Romans arrived in AD 46. Since then it has been very quiet. So starting a Blog is quite an innovation.

However I have decided to replace the Travel Bulletins which have previously clogged my friends' inboxes by a brief note telling them whenever I publish a blog about myself or about my travels. I can put in a few pictures in the Blogs too.

I am not sure how much personal information to give but my relations and friends do not need this anyway.

My first travel news is that I am booked to fly from Heathrow to Sydney on February 10 on the way to NZ and then to South Australia. All being well I am due back at LHR - London Heathrow perhaps I should write - on March 20.

John B.

3 comments:

  1. John. I am very impressed with your blog. I look forward to reading of your travels.
    With regard to the big event in AD 46,I am reminded that close to where you live, excavations in the 1960s revealed strong evidence of an iron age settlement existing for some three centuries until the fourth century AD.

    John F.

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  2. Hi John
    Vry interesting so far, and glad you arrived safely and are enjoying your travels.

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  3. Dear Broadmeadblogger,
    Good to hear from you and that you have safely arrived in New Zealand. Regrettably my stay in that beautiful country only lasted a few days. For several years in 80s I was very fortunate to be chairman of one of the Technical groups of the TTCP (The Technical cooperation programme) originally set up just after WW2 to promote cooperation between defence researchers in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Group meetings were held rotationally in the participating countries; we also took the opportunity, as convenient, to visit various relevant research laboratories of the participating countries. This particular group meeting was to take place in Sydney. Thus we had an arduous journey flying the ‘wrong way round’ stopping off to visit an idyllically sited lab on Oahu where we spent an R&R weekend before flying on to Auckland. Soon after we landed I recall observing that if 100 years ago someone had been foolish enough to predict that it would eventually prove possible to hurtle through the air for several thousand miles in a metal tube at a height of 8 miles whilst listening to the Mozart clarinet concerto they would have been in danger of being committed. My memories of Auckland and its environs are a trifle hazy. I recall that the ‘Greenpeace’ vessel, Rainbow Warrior, badly damaged from an encounter near some atomic test area in the South Pacific, was lying alongside somewhere in the harbour. One of our number got chatting to a remnant of the crew and came away with a trophy (I can’t remember what but not the ship’s log). We, of course visited Rotorua, Lake Taupo, and the area close to the cataclysmic earthquake/volcano of a hundred years or so ago.

    John F.

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