Just a quick one to let you know that I’ll not be online for a wee while. We’re going to Norway for a week, I’ve been pining for the fjords since I first went to Scandinavia when I was just eleven years old, I was on one of those great heavily subsidised educational school cruises that we had way back in the 1960s and 70s – on the MS Uganda. That was when I discovered that I enjoyed a good rough sea as it was wild, the roughest that the captain had ever experienced, but I seemed to be the only passenger not afflicted with sea sickness. Since then whenever I’ve been on a ship it has been a disappointing flat calm, so I’m now left wondering if I’m still a seasick free zone!

After coming back from that trip we’ll have one night at home and then we’ll be going off to visit friends in the north-west of England. Some other very good friends have taken to calling us the nomads and I sort of see what they mean as we have been travelling around a lot during the last year, but it’s good to have something to look forward to when you’re retired.

You might not realise that my blog title Pining for the West is a bit of a pun on the famous Pining for the Fjords Monty Python sketch, in case you have no idea what I’m talking about you can see it below.