About ten years ago – actually almost exactly ten years ago, my husband and I went to Damascus for the weekend. A strange thing to do, I suppose, as it is quite far away – normally we try to go to Paris for our anniversary weekend, but that year we wanted to do something different. […]Read Post ›
This is a story which my son discovered about some of his paternal ancestors. I have translated it from a newspaper article which I attach below. And a link to a a map. At the beginning of the nineteenth century in the centre of the present park stood a hunting lodge belonging to the Doschot […]Read Post ›
For MO When I was very young my parents went through a very acrimonious divorce, and one outcome was that I was not allowed to go abroad with my mother, or even out of London without my father’s sayso. My mother had a full time job and so found it difficult to look after me […]Read Post ›
So I intend to wallow in it. But this week has been busy too. Two days teaching French at the Guru Nanak School. I surprised myself by how much French I still remember – luckily I still know a bit more than any of the pupils I came across. But two days was enough! A […]Read Post ›
Going backwards from today. This is to help me remember. The rain it raineth everyday. I don’t particularly need to remember that, but diarists always seem to mention the weather. I’m never particularly interested in the weather. I don’t like being too cold or too hot or too wet any more than the next person, […]Read Post ›
Today is my husband’s 67th birthday. Significant I suppose, as we began celebrating it last week when my daughter’s boyfriend took us out for a superb meal in the magnificent restaurant Pod Gigantami in Warsaw. (We had gone for the weekend to visit my mother in law) Pod Gigantami – Beneath the Giants – so […]Read Post ›
For LP Over a week has passed since Holocaust Day. 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz there is a great danger that people are forgetting – indeed some of us cannot remember, because we did not live through those times then – but that is splitting hairs. You do not have to witness everything […]Read Post ›
January 8th would have been my grandmother’s 124th birthday. Ive decided to send up for her birth certificate to the archives in Bratislava to see if I can find out any more about her background. It was so exciting to receive certificates about my maternal grandmother from the state archives in Lwow that I want […]Read Post ›
I don’t really know how I managed to forget to write about this place when I was writing about our four day trip to Kraków. We had gone to Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of Kraków, not to do anything as exciting as sightseeing but to change my battery in my phone, which had been […]Read Post ›
A very pleasing number. We were back in London, ready to go to Cookham for a VERY SPECIAL OCCASION. As usual I had managed to get a lot of the arrangements wrong, but we arrived early afternoon to find the house tidy after the eldest daughter’s sojourn therewith her young man. We had lunch together […]Read Post ›
Life Through Basia's Eyes 