Catching cold...feeling hot

Someone wrote recently in their blog that long haul travel is not for wimps. This wimp is feeling decidedly under the weather, having caught a cold on the packed Emirates flight from Dubai. It seems impossible to shake off, this unfamiliar bug. I am resolved to seek another airline in future! Meanwhile the temperature in Perth today reached 36 degrees, too hot to do anything except read the Sunday papers from cover to cover and then all the e-news.

The travel sections attract me.  In The Guardian J.K.Rowling has written a short piece about Porto, along with a beautiful photo (rather like one I took myself, but hers is 10 times better):



She writes:

 I fell in love with Porto and I love it still. I was enchanted by fado, the melancholy folk music that reflects the Portuguese themselves, who in my experience had a quietness and gentleness unique among Latin peoples I’d encountered so far. The city’s spectacular bridges, its vertiginous riverbanks, steep with ancient buildings, the old port houses, the wide squares: I was entranced by them all.

I've also been reading The Accidental Tour Guide the new book by Mary Moody (who ran away from home at 50 to France and published Last Tango in Toulouse, an account of a love affair with and in France). Now she writes about the sad death of her husband and his fight against cancer, as well as her new profession of leading tour groups in unlikely places (Morocco sounds interesting, but Ladakh and its altitude sickness: no way!)

My Typographia t-shirt, designed to reflect the Porto streetscape.