Have Bag, Will Travel

Looking Back to the year 1962 – Sex , Space and a Symbol

I unexpectedly came across Marilyn once in Haugesund in Norway and I discovered that the reason she should surprisingly turn up here is that her father, Martin Mortenson, came from the village of Skjold, just fifteen miles away and lived in Haugesund before emigrating to America in about 1880. After abandoning his family after only six months of marriage, he was killed in a motorcycle crash without ever seeing his daughter – Norma Jean Mortenson.

Marilyn was a iconic sex symbol and this another that I came across in Tossa del Mar on the Costa Brava in Spain. Ava Gardner who had three husbands (including Frank Sinatra) and by some speculation over one thousand lovers…

And this is Catherine the Great of Russia who I came across in Saint Petersburg, another woman with a reputation…

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Looking Back to the Year 1962 – Cold War and Cold Winter

On the 29^th to 30^th December a blizzard roared across the southwest of England and Wales, snow drifted to over six metres deep in places and this caused road blockages and cut railway lines.

The snow left villagers stranded and power and telephone lines were brought down. Stocks of food ran low and farmers couldn’t reach their livestock. As a result thousands of sheep, ponies and cattle starved to death. The continuous freezing temperatures meant that the snow cover lasted for over two months and the winter of 1962/63 was the coldest over England and Wales since 1740, colder even than 1947, with mean maximum temperatures for January and February 1963 more than 5 °c below the average.

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Unlikely Bible Stories – Loaves and Fishes

I have mentioned here before that at school I always enjoyed bible stories and to illustrate this I have come across an old drawing that dad kept for many years in his scrapbook. This was my early attempt to create a pictorial record of the feeding of the five thousand and it always amused him because he always wondered where the other four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine people were?

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Looking Back to the Year 1961 – Walls and Spies…

When I started my blog it wasn’t about travel or holidays it was about growing up and I tried to look back on the first early years of my life through the news of the day.

I began in 1954 (the year that I was born) and I have already re-posted those so I am jumping forward now to 1961 where I have picked out significant events from that year.

Through 1961 the Cold War continued to worsen with the USSR exploding some very large and nasty bombs during testing and then commencing the building of the Berlin Wall to separate East from West Berlin.

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This was the Berlin Wall…