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The Doric-style Temple at Segesta, NW Sicily I have a soft spot for Greece. Greece was only my second foreign country to visit (after a rowing trip to Lille in France). I got there via first my first ever flight, from London to Athens on Olympic Airways. It was 1987 I think - when I was up at Keble College, Oxford – and I was one of about 170 Oxford rowers who descended on the naval college on Poros Island to take part in the first sea-trials of a newly constructed Greek Trir

Trapani with Mount Erice in the background. Missy Bear is moored about three-quarters up the right hand side of the photo. Why have sailors since ancient times favoured landing at Drepanum (Trapani) whence to climb Mount Erice (pronounced E-ree-che )? Ten points if you said, “For the sacred prostitutes!” The mountain has always had a cult of divinity to Venus. The early local tribes built an open-air temple there. When the Phoenician-Carthaginians arrived, they identified th

Re-launch! It was about 00:30 on Wednesday morning. There was no moon and the sky was a pitch-black shroud punctured by tiny pricks of light of varying lustre. The brightest and biggest had been Venus, but she had already set. The next most dazzling was Jupiter, following both her and the dimmer Saturn downwards on the ecliptic to the horizon on our starboard beam. The cruise ship Bonaria, approaching on our starboard quarter. Off the port beam appeared Orion, doing a super-s

There is a great scene in Blackadder Goes Forth about the causes of WW1. Baldrick says “ The thing is, the way I see it, these days there’s a war on, right? And, ages ago, there wasn’t a war on, right? So, there must have been a moment when there not being a war on went away, right? And there being a war on came along. So, what I want to know is – how did we get from the one case of affairs to the other case of affairs? ” And Blackadder replies, “ Do you mean why did the war

Regular readers may recall that when we arrived in Aubeterre in late August, Richard and I spent some time doing a deep clean of the main parts of the house. A lot of that involved wiping spider poo off various surfaces, and it did look nice when we had finished. I then read the papers, and discovered that September is the month when spiders mate, certainly for British house spiders. I have to say that in my experience, this does not apply to French house spiders. These littl