The Pits and Pieces

I’ve just returned from a week spent in Amsterdam. The notoriously fickle Dutch weather put on a splendid display for me while I was there – sunny, temps in the mid to high teens (going up to 21C a couple of days). Arriving sleepless and tired after an overnight flight, I took a train to my hotel. Let me say here how great the transportation is in Amsterdam and the Netherlands. Trains every few minutes into the city centre; trains that will get you anywhere and everywhere; and plenty of methods of public transportation around the city. You don’t even need to purchase a ticket/OV card, just tap your debit/credit card in and out. Seamless, easy. Whenever I travel to Europe I always marvel at: a)     Their public transportation b)     How Europeans speak two or more languages (sometimes four or five) with such ease, sometimes switching fluidly from one language to the next in the same breath. I travelled solo (as I frequently do) and, if you’ve followed ...

  Dear Blog Readers I don’t know who the majority of you out there are, but I know there are people in various parts of the world reading my blog posts. Maybe some of you are new readers, and some, hopefully, are regular ones. Thank you for reading. My blog posts have diminished in the past little while. At first, I used to blog weekly, and now it seems to have dropped to twice a month or so. I’ve been asking myself (as well as discussing with a few other bloggers), what is it that keeps us/me blogging? During the COVID years, when I walked for hours, thoughts would arise and I would return home, flip open my laptop and bang out a blog post. Or a book I’d read would send me off on another tangent of thoughts that I felt I HAD to tell you about. Now, the urge to blog seems less urgent. And I’m wondering why. Is it because I have nothing to say? Have my thoughts dried up? Or has the world at large been so filled with a bombardment of news that it’s become too much to decipher and...