Today it’s the fifth anniversary of this Blog, i.e. five years to the day since the very first post appeared here. To mark this occasion, I’ve selected five of my favourite photos ever to have featured on the Blog (and made sure none of those featured in the Blog post on the first anniversary four years ago are repeated). For the new poll, scroll to the bottom …
I’m particularly fond of this first photo, taken from the
Yesterday it was announced that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize goes to “Nihon Hidankyo”. That’s a Japanese confederation of A-Bomb survivors (‘Hibakusha’ in Japanese) that has long been campaigning for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. This choice by the Nobel Committee was surely inspired at least in part by the repeated nuclear threats made by Vladimir Putin since his war of aggression against Ukraine started.
I’m now taking this Nobel Peace Prize choice as inspiration for a Blog Post about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two cities nuked by the
First of all, to explain: Artsakh is the Armenian name for the region that is more widely known in the rest of the world as Nagorno-Karabakh. This has been in the news recently, for very disturbing reasons, now that Azerbaijan appears to have achieved its mission of “reintegrating” the territory, which had been a self-declared republic since 1994, fully back into Azerbaijan. The latest aggression by Azerbaijani military forces, in violation of the peace deal brokered in 2020, seems to have sealed the fate of the Armenian population living in the region. In recent
Just under two weeks ago I returned from a short trip to Denmark’s capital Copenhagen, arranged at short notice too. But I had three wonderful days in that fabulous city. It was in fact the last capital city in Europe I hadn’t yet visited. Now I can’t understand what kept me from visiting Copenhagen for so long.
Well, partially I can: I had put off a visit for years because I had read about one of the main attractions in terms of dark tourism, namely the
about a month ago I went on a return visit to Northern Ireland (NI). My first visit was back in December 2012, but it was short. I knew lots had changed in the meantime and various new developments warranted inspection from a DT perspective, so a return to this highly intriguing corner of the world was long overdue.
And so on 3 April I set off,
And here comes the third of the four themes of our most recent poll (which didn’t have a winner, hence all four are fielded). So now for reflections – and I mean that literally, mostly, though a little bit of reflecting in the figurative sense will also feature. But this is primarily a visual blog post.
I like photographing reflections! I’m always on the lookout for reflections wherever I travel. Hence I have loads of such photos that accumulated over the years. So the
As promised in the previous theme post, I now bring you the other one of the joint winners of our latest theme poll.
So in what ways can pianos be associated with dark tourism? A pretty unique example is this, a piano-shaped tombstone:
The Thornton grave used to have an open lid on the stone piano too, but that got destroyed by vandals. Maybe it’s
As announced in the latest newsletter, our recent themed-post poll ended in a draw, so I decided to feature both winners, one after the other, starting with spheres today, to be followed by DT & lakes next week.
This structure, a steel globe containing the experimental Dounreay Fast Reactor (DFR), is also sometimes referred to as “the sphere”, or alternately “the golf ball”. The reactor inside was one of the first to supply power to the British National Grid but was taken offline in 1977 and is currently undergoing decommissioning (while