To those who took the time to leave some comments on here!

Glitch on my part is why they’re not visible on here, but thanks anyway.

One person commented on the words v pictures nature of the site.

That’s probably down to the fact that I have a print rather than an email/internet based background.

It’s about 30 years since I first started doing music reviews for The Northern Echo up in Darlington and 26 or so since I started writing for magazines such as Climber on a regular basis. I’ve also done editing on magazines here in the UK and spent a little bit of time doing editing on an award winning student newspaper too.

In terms of internet writing, I’ve posted on various websites for around 10 years and started planning wisepacking just over a year ago.

In terms of using the internet, I’ve been doing so since 1994 and have always preferred wordy sites to those that use picture after picture after picture to break up the copy.

A number of sites that I used to visit on a regular basis have switched to picture based breaking up of the copy and that’s when I’ve either stopped visiting the sites or reduced the number of visits to said sites.

As it stands at the moment, I’ll still be going for the wordy approach. There are a few items in the pipeline that will have more pics in them (travel accounts, practical pieces and others), but these will be the exception rather than the rule…

I guess it’s the joys of being a fiftysomething writer!

Isn’t a place that I’d like to be at the moment in the wake of what happened at the weekend.

The news footage shown on the BBC here in the UK has shown some of the after effects in cities and at Everest Base Camp and it’s good to see that countries, governments, non-government organisations and companies have reacted quickly as the effects have become known.

It’s a shame then that some people have been posting messages on forums about how their travel plans have been messed up because of the earthquake instead of thinking about what’s happened and how it affects the people, the families of those who have lost family members, relatives, friends, work colleagues plus the state of play in places, the infrastructure and the economy of the country.

One suspects that the posters should be thinking about others rather than themselves and pondering what it’s like in the places which have  been affected by the quake and aftershocks that haven’t been accessed by rescue & medical teams or by camera crews…

I’m in the middle of reading ‘My Trade‘ by Andrew Marr (Macmillan 2004/Pan Books 2005).

It’s about the media world and how it’s developed over the years, but the section on foreign correspondents has an interesting sentence that’s set me thinking.

‘Jet travel has rather limited the scope for genuinely adventurous travel writing; the bookshelves are crammed with guides giving worldly wise advice for holidaying consumers rather than offering discovery and fresh exploration.’

Are we travellers? Explorers? Or holidaying consumers?

The link to the Kindle book is…