CROATIA BLOG (written 6/9/19)

If you want a sandy beach in Croatia, come back in 10 million years.
So it's just as well Croats don't like sand.
Travellers – me included – search for white grains like the holy grail. But Croats complain sand is dirty.

Balkan beaches are too young for their rock to be worn into sand by waves and wind.
And so Croatia has pebbles – and that means size is everything.
White and smooth and 2cm wide is lovely underfoot and on the eye, 5cm rounded is OK, but 10cm and rough is awkward – but still popular in a country of rock-loving sand-haters.
And the Adriatic Sea? Transparent, clean and even with coral – a first for me in Europe.

OLD TOWN DELIGHTS
Every town in Istria (northern Croatia) has an old warren of lanes with cobbles worn slippery-smooth and somewhat crumbling houses with big shutters and balconies - looking very like buildings in Venice.
That's because the people wearing the cobbles smooth for 500 years were...Venetians, in charge from 1267 to 1797. 'Venetian Gothic' is the architecture style.
The town of Rovinj inparticular has lanes so narrow neighbours could touch across the street from first-floor windows.
Pleasingly – unlike in other countries' often over-restored old towns – these lanes are lived-in, with old ladies stringing washing from upper windows.
The Italian influence continues today and it's everyone's second language, despite the Austria-Hungarian Habsburg Empire being in charge for a century until 1918.

The Romans were here first. But these days, the world's best-preserved Roman amphitheatre (the original height for an entire 360 degrees; it once sat 25,000), rather than gladiators, now hosts World Cup football screenings and music events.
The volume can't be turned up too loud, for fear the 2,000-year-old walls will collapse.
Leo bobbed along to drum 'n' bass at his first ever music concert.
Shows getting the biggest attention at Pula's famous amphitheatre are those by national heroes, the simply brilliant '2 Cellos,' the world's most famous classical music pop cover performers.

TUSCANY AND TRUFFLES
Away from the beach and old towns, the countryside is in places Tuscany-esque, with tall pine tree-lined roads, yellowing fields and a scattering of kazuns; 200-year-old, dry-stone, 10 metre-wide circular shepherds' huts (a good use of rocks littering fields).
Coastal areas are tangled with pretty bright green trees loaded with pine cones (Leo now even says he prefers them to conkers).
Briyuni Island, a car-free mini Tuscany just offshore, has lagoon-like water and 125 million-year-old, 60cm-long dinosaur footprints, when the land the beasts stood on was amazingly 2,000 miles south where present-day Libya is.

Istria's olive oil has been voted the world's best four years in a row, so that accounts for all the olive groves.
And there are plenty of grapes for wine – although our favourite was the sweet blackberry variety.
The countryside's most sought-after treasures are truffles - and not the Cadbury's Roses chocolate version.
But the pricey fungus tasted like a garlic overdose to me.
Fruit and veg shops are stacked with produce almost entirely from Croatia.
And the garden of the house we stayed in had apricots, mandarins, limes, grapes, pears, apples, strawberries – and the fruit seemingly every garden has; figs.

SLAVIC SUPER-STATE
Yugoslavia was formed in 1918 by Slavic peoples to prevent Italy marching back in after World War I. Slavs had had enough of centuries being controlled by Italy and Austria-Hungary in the north, and Turkey's Ottoman Empire in the south.
Yugoslavia's constituent parts were areas we now call Serbia, Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Slovenia.

What seemed a decent idea – teaming up to prevent bigger powers taking over - was ruined at the start and the end of the 80-year period by some Slavs' hatred for one another.
Inter-ethnic fighting dominated World War II, before the fighters winning internal wars formed the world's most successful communist state, with a booming economy and free travel.
But leader Tito died after a 34-year rule in 1980, the economy collapsed, ethnic and religious (Catholic v Orthodox v Muslim) tensions grew and, after Communism collapsed, states withdrew from Yugoslavia.
Appalling Serb-driven wars starting in 1991 killed 140,000 – half in Bosnia – with (also Serb-driven) ethnic-cleansing, genocide, war crimes and massacres, including in Sarajevo and Srebrenica (shamefully under the noses of Dutch UN soldiers).

The Slavic countries are not friends now, but some peoples are, to an extent - for example Croats and Serbs.
Life seems normal now in Croatia, the first Yugoslav country in the EU (but not yet the Euro). Bosnia is still struggling.

CROAT CHEERS
Tourists – who loved Croatia in the 80s – are back in hordes. I'd never seen a hotel comparable with the spaceship-like, 500 metre-wide one we walked past in Rovinj.
Everywhere is clean; there's no litter anywhere.
I enjoyed learning some Croat. My favourite new word (it means 'cheers') is zivjeli - pronounced 'djibili' - hard enough to say before the first rakija grappa shot, never mind after several.
And my toast?
Peace in this pretty land.

NORTH-EAST ENGLAND BLOG: written 29/8/18

I once wore shorts to visit family in north-east England, and it was snowing when I arrived.
A nearby moor-top reservoir usually looks like it belongs in Hound of the Baskervilles.
And Whitby's windswept beach is better known for being sand-blasted than sun-baked.

But this time was different.
Stand-up paddle boarders were on the reservoir (Scaling Dam).
On the Costa del Whitby, the harbour could have been in Greece, with a lake of water, al fresco diners, graceful fishing boats and twinkling lights.
The August Bank Holiday heatwave was so hot we even saw a three-foot grass snake.
And on the Teeside Riviera, locals cowered in the shade for fear of melting on the streets.

Ee ba gum, as they say around here. It means 'by god,' by the way.

HOME TRUTHS
I've blogged about French Polynesia and Indonesia – but this blog is closer to home, and closer to my heart.

I'm not from London, where I was born and live now.
I'm not from Lincoln, where I grew up.
My family – and therefore me - are from Stockton, a town 200 miles north of London.
Here, my grandparents lived, ran corner shops, worked for Home Guard patrols in World War II, and enchanted my childhood visits with joyous memories of farm visits, card games, home-made biscuits and fudge.

Houses and beer are half the price of London here. But life seems twice as nice.

YORKSHIRE LIFE
Real-life Postman Pat.
That's one way to describe the area's North York Moors, where we stay with family in a beautiful old house with flower-decked gardens.
There are farms, rounded valleys formed by glaciers' meltwater - and nearby Lealholm, described by the Sunday Times as the 'prettiest village in Yorkshire.'
Between the nest of light-grey stone houses straddling a humpback stone bridge, kids – including mine – love playing on the stepping stones in the River Esk, in which I swam for the first time since childhood.
The sunbathing throng meant no-one was using the village green's horseshoe-throwing quoits pitch.
But the shop selling lush fresh scones (Nati!) and ice cream (Leo!!) was open.
The pub is the centre of the community, selling locals' rabbit, pheasant and beef - and with a darts board with no trebles.
Yorkshiremen's gruff accent soon melts after a pint.
The phone service on my phone says nowt, of course, but - ey up, lad - that's part of the appeal.

STEAMY NOSTALGIA
It was from Postman Pat to Thomas the Tank Engine as the North York Moors Steam Railway's engines chuffed and Leo cheered.
We were back in the 1950s and the heyday of rail, with pastel-coloured station tearooms decked with 60-year-old posters promoting beach resort day trips.
George Stephenson's assistant built the railway, but when it opened in 1836, it was pulled by horse, and even rope on one hill.
These days, the soot-caked, sweating faces of engineers shovelling coal into fires on the world's busiest steam railway belong to 100 staff and 250 volunteers, one of whom told me he had worked on the line since it reopened in 1976.
Steam is romantic and nostalgic – but just not practical: it takes four hours' coal burning to build up enough steam pressure to power an engine.
We stopped off at the village of Goathland, with its train station used as Hogwarts station in Harry Potter, and where TV show Heartbeat was filmed.

PURPLE PATHS
Over the purple heather one way is Whitby, with a replica of local boy Captain Cook's Endeavour in the harbour, the Abbey on the hill and a straight-off-the-boat fish market.

Over the heather the other way is Stockton, one end of Stephenson's world's first steam rail line to Darlington in 1825.
The line, built to take coal from mines to the port, saw the town boom.
My parents were born there in the post-World War II baby-boom, the years of rationing, the excitement of the first cars and TVs, knowing everyone on your street and leaving your front door unlocked.
The town's engineering industry slumped in the 1980s, but the friendliness remains, always notably higher than London.

MEGA HISTORY
Giant-scale theatre sees a helter-skelter history of England told in the 'Kynren' show.
It's part-inspired by the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and is held in a coal-mining town near Durham.
Its 8,000 seats sell out for every show. If it was near London, it would be a media sensation.
Swords clash with the Romans, Vikings, King Arthur and William the Conqueror; you can actually smell the smoke from the Industrial Revolution's chimneys; and cinema-style surround sound is stunning for the growl of a World War II plane.
There's even snow, in my favourite scene: the mist-shrouded World War I battlefields Christmas truce.

During the show, Leo was the most animated he has ever been watching anything, waving his arms like an orchestra's conductor.
500 volunteers are the show's actors, and most have performed every summer Saturday for the past four years.
An ex-banker who went to school nearby dreamt up the show to bring tourists to the area.
He recruited Steve Boyd, the laid-back London-based American who has directed mass choreography at every Olympics ceremony since Barcelona 1992, and guided Nati and I as we danced in London's Olympic opening ceremony.

Oh, and 'Kynren'? It's Anglo-Saxon for 'generations.'
This blog is the tale of my family's generations.
My kynren, or as we say in modern English, my kin.