Brit's away today so I thought that for a change I'd visit Derry in Northern Ireland in his absence. The news out of Belfast wasn't good, only 24 hours before they'd been burning flags on the streets. The Dabbler always aims to seek out the quirky and offbeat, and here I ... Read More...
Travel
Luke Honey, proprietor of The Greasy Spoon Blog, takes a grand tour to Venice, and one of the world's most famous bars... I'm not sure how many "Harry's Bars" there are in the world. Quite a few, I expect. There's that famous pub in Paris, there's the late Mark Birley's smart ... Read More...
The lucky winners of the latest Dabbler Book Club selection… Free books. What’s not to like? Especially when the book in question is Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways, a book that has deservedly been sitting in the bestseller lists for weeks now. Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive and celebrated voice, the book ... Read More...
In the company of Anne Ward, author of the Nothing to See Here blog and book, we pay a visit to a huge pile of bones. The crypt of St Leonard’s Church in Hythe contains one of only two ossuaries in the UK (the other is in Rothwell, Northants). It holds ... Read More...
The Dabbler ventures into the exciting world of travel blogging in the company of Anne Ward, the mastermind behind the remarkable Nothing to See Here blog and now the author of a Nothing to See Here book, subtitled A Guide to the Hidden Joys of Scotland. (Incidentally, it's published by Pocket Mountains where you ... Read More...
Travellers in need of a good night’s sleep are hardly likely to want to stay at the nearest station hotel. And, if you’re a regular commuter, you certainly won’t relish the thought of a room that looks out onto a station concourse… These are some of the reasons why I ... Read More...
Dabbler correspondent Toby Ash recalls a really dreadful weekend he once endured in Glasgow. A recent post by fellow Dabbler Susan on why the British put up with lousy hotel rooms brought to mind the self-declared ‘boutique’ hotel in Glasgow I stayed in while working in the city over a weekend ... Read More...
Occasionally, you'll get lucky and be pleasantly surprised – but, before you even walk through the door, you know when you’ve picked a lemon. It’s usually a hotel where the rooms cost around 100 Euros a night, as opposed to the sort where the simplest of breakfasts will set you ... Read More...
Our friends at Slightly Foxed (the real readers' quarterly - buy a subscription now!) have once again kindly allowed The Dabbler to dip into its rich archives. In this article from the Autumn 2004 edition (issue 3),author Julia Keay recounts a remarkable river journey... I guess (but I don’t know, since it’s not often ... Read More...
Jason Webster is the author of five books on Spain, including Duende, which has been translated into a dozen languages. Or the Bull Kills You is the first in a series of detective novels involving Chief Inspector Max Cámara of the Spanish National Police. The second novel, Some Other Body ... Read More...
