Nigel Hey's Blog, page 6

A flashback: War, peace, adventure and love in pre-1950 Middle East and India

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Dad's Army, 2013

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An unforgettable opportunity to walk the boards of Nelson's HMS Victory

HMS Victory (Photo by Nigel Hey from painting at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard)
It gave me a thrill to walk through the great HMS Victory again, moving from deck to deck and seeing everything shipshape and seaworthy, as though this 250-year-old warship were ready to move out from drydock and put to sea again. Striped in her distinctive horizontal yellow and black, she was lying in dry-dock with her stern galleries, mostly reserved for officers’ quarters, glittering with windows and richly decor...

Public learns about the disaster of King Henry VIII's sunken "Mary Rose"

Image: Mary Rose Trust
What was life like for sailors who manned the decks when Britannia truly started to “rule the waves”? We went to Southampton, England, to take a look.

This is the second of several short travel memoirs written in the English west-country, where I stayed with my London family at a small village cottage. My purpose here is to let readers know about some of places of interest in Thomas Hardy country, which are often left out by tourist day-trip excursions that may range out...

Visiting the unnamed mystery town that was flattened by Romans 2000 years ago

Daughter and grandchildren atop Eggarsdon moat, Dorset. (Photo: Nigel Hey)
We were on a pilgrimage to a fortified English castle built centuries before the Romans arrived. After our first morning’s breakfast in Dorset we shot away from our cottage at Maiden Newton (many names are double-barrelled hereabouts) into the maze of country roads that tooks us a few miles to the grass-covered Eggardon hill fort. Nobody knows how old it is, or even its real name, because like Stonehenge there were no h...

Bananas About Bananas

[image error] Banana recumbent, depliée
This short blog post is excerpted from my book Wonderment , an autobiography that is available worldwide in paperback and eBook format. It recounts the time that, as an newly arrived in the United States, I encountered a ripe banana,  For me at the time, learning about this humble fruit was an adventure..

Let me give you my opinion about the truth of adventure. If not overly hurtful, it is something exciting or intriguing that you do, or which happens to...

Classical music spectaculars in London? Try the Proms!

Royal Albert Hall, London (Photo: Nigel Hey)Tonight I celebrated my birthday – at London's Royal Albert Hall. Except that it wasn’t my birthday. On my real birthday, six weeks ago in New Mexico, my son Jonathan presented me with a most unusual and much-appreciated gift, two tickets to the BBC Proms concert of Tuesday, July 16.
The Albert Hall is a magnificent domed structure that epitomizes Queen Victoria’s determination to fulfill the wish of her husband, Albert, to promote understanding...

Visiting London's Albertopolis for a classical 'night at the Proms'

Royal Albert Hall, London (Photo: Nigel Hey)
Tonight I celebrated my birthday – at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Except that it wasn’t my birthday. On my real birthday, six weeks ago, my son Jonathan presented me with a most unusual gift, a ticket to the BBC Proms concert of Tuesday, July 16.
The Proms are a philharmonic concert series performed in the Albert Hall, a magnificent structure that epitomizes Queen Victoria’s determination to fulfill the wish of her husband, Albert, to promote un...

Moscow, anti-missile missiles, a blind date, and the Bolshoi ballet

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Moscow, anti-missile missiles, a blind date, and the Bolshoi ballet

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