GetAwayFromTheGames.com

For those of you who don't live in London and therefore have not had the delight over the last few months of constant reminders to carefully plan your travel during the Olympics - including by the Mayor himself, Boris Johnson, via recorded audio messages that surprise you on the underground - this is a witty inversion of the web address set up to help with this planning, GetAheadOfTheGames.com. We have followed this advice and carefully planned an Olympic Escape - in fact I am writing this on the train, as it speeds out of London, heading to the North West of England. Carlisle, to be specific, from where we will be starting our Great Walk of Hadrian's Wall.

We're starting our holiday by travelling in the height of luxury - First Class on the train (due to the vagaries of the British rail network sometimes it only costs a little bit more than Second Class!) and the first couple of nights in a quite-nice-looking hotel near the Cathedral. The level of luxury will decrease quite quickly - in a few nights we'll be youth hostelling in a place that provides no meals!

This afternoon's post-arrival plans are to see the Castle & Cathedral and have a nice dinner! Early tomorrow morning we will get a bus to the western-most point of the wall, and walk back along the Solway Firth. After that it's rucksacks hoisted and the proper walking begins. I'm a little nervous, as it's pretty much my first walking holiday since going to Iceland on an A-level Geography field trip about 20 years ago, and the rucksacks are pretty heavy... But excited too, to see Hadrian's Wall and all the Romano-British archaeology along there, as well as the amazing landscape. I'm especially looking forward to spending time outside and taking exercise, because it feels like I have been locked up inside chained to my desk for the whole of this year so far, and much of last year!

Our reward at the end of the walk - which we have planned to take about 9 days - is to spend a few days chilling out on the Northumbrian coast with some friends who have a cottage up there. I am also looking forward to getting some good use out of our English Heritage and National Trust memberships!!

I don't plan to spend any time looking at emails or really keeping in touch with the outside world, though I may be moved to blog as we have our adventures along the Wall. In case I don't, enjoy the Games!

From Brixton to Ballaró - and beyond...

I can't believe it is exactly 3 months since I last had time to write a post here. It has been a mad mad year for busy-ness, one which I do not want to repeat for a while. I have just emerged though, having on Thursday evening had the launch party for the Festschrift volume I was editing in all my available spare time over the last few years, which was a triumphant and lovely evening; before that, I was in Pisa and Florence at the end of last week, giving the last of the conference papers I had signed up for this year, all on totally different subjects of course, each requiring new research which I had to scrabble to do in amongst everything else (oh, and on top of the busy day job!). So having written 4 papers, 4 articles (one of which has even been published already!), edited one (huge) book and begun the work on guest-editing a journal issue already in the last 6 months, I am feeling pretty exhausted!! So here's to the new resolution to say 'no' to absolutely everything else that comes along, with varying degrees of success already.

So the relaxing starts here - we have some friends from afar coming to stay over the next few weeks and it will be wonderful to see them. We are also (belatedly) starting to plan our Olympic Escape - to walk Hadrian's Wall, from west to east. More on that another day. Though it doesn't actually stop - K is at this moment preparing for a job interview on Wednesday. Keep everything crossed!

But I have wanted for a while to share with you these photos I took in the Ballaró market in Palermo, when we had our week's holiday in Sicily in April, after the end of one of my conferences. It was totally fantastic - we saw and experienced so so much (the food!), though as one friend observed, it was a bit of a busman's holiday. But with our ever-growing love of Brixton Market, we very much appreciated the sights and smells of this Saturday morning food market in downtown Palermo, where the vegetables and fruit were huge and their colours intense! I loved how they were grouped by colour, so tomatoes and strawberries were side by side. It was also amazing to see the tuna guy butchering a whole carcase which had probably started out about the same size as him! (I don't have photos but I also ate some delicious big and juicy cherries bought in Florence's Mercato Centrale last Friday - I love markets as you can see!)

So, here is a little photographic tour of Ballaró market, a feast for all the senses. And I will try to be a better correspondent from this point on...