"Home, Home on the Page" TheLongTone's Profile

......People say he looks just like me. If I can find* a fit-to-publish photo of myself I'll let y'all be the judge of that
STOP PRESS SEE FOOT OF PAGE

I MAKE MY PLANS FROM STRING NOT FROM IRON

I thought this was the Duke of Wellington, but can't confirm...any ideas?
(My first ever VT travel motto.)

Why is a travel motto like a T-shirt?
(answer in Chapter 4)

Warning
I MAKE MY PAGES FROM FLUFF NOT FROM FACTS

"I grow old, I grow old
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled"

(T S Eliot scavenged from The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler)

When I am abroad I often like to wear socks with my sandals It means your feet aren't skidding about on a film of sweat. They absorb the sweat. Also helping to preserve the shoes.

I am aware that this a highly charged issue. But it's not just us Brits. The men in,for example, Greece wear socks with their sandals.

Need I say that the trousers are long? Like The Tone? And that when the trousers are rolled I'm off for a paddle, sans footwear.

And the fluff accumulates in the rolled up trousers.....

Dipping in a toe: Qat debris, Yemen.

And while we're on the subject of socks and sandals....
( you started it)
(Well, those rainbow heel n toes socks bought for my Istanbul trip are um...on their last legs (this sock business is wearing as thin as your socks-Ed). All failed across the heel about 1cm north of the colour divide.

There are of course certain socks with sandals unforgivables.Like black socks/white legs/scoutmaster shorts & so on. Only one of the many sartorial faux-pas routinely inflicted on the eyes of the world by tourists, along with radioactive coloured shirts and those 'please rob me' pouches worn round the waist.

Actually I rather like radioactive shirts. My more recent pages are the fruit of solo travels and hence pretty much devoid of any images of me, but having recently acquired a scanner I have begun to construct a Mexico page or two, and there are some very lush bits of gent's shirting on view. Paul Smith in the Eighties. Things have changed, and not for the better as far as shirts are concerned. (At last! Got the bugger off the subject of socks-Ed)

(This is one of those lucky photos. Taken in the park near the Topkapi in Istanbul. Lots of fountains and evening light: I was chasing rainbows. Can't remember why I pushed the button for this one, but its a perfect advertisement for mobiles with cameras built in. Formally it's on the good side of passable, nicely balanced & I like the strong diagonals. Subjectwise, The girls to the left are taking the photo of the fountain, while to the extreme left someone checks out the photo they've just taken. Just luck. And pushing the button lots.)

Travel slowly, see more
Just take time to stop and look around. seems obvious.

Put away that camera!
Life is better looked at over a cafe table than thru a viewfinder.

Take more photos
When I do take photos I really like to push a lot of film thru the camera. You may never be there again.

Travel light
If you haven't packed something you actually need you'll probably be able to buy it locally. Only provided that there are local people to buy it from. For the Antarctic, I'd seriously consider what to take, but anywhere else.. a toothbrush, a couple of changes of clothes and several books is enough.

Travel alone
You're much more likely to engage with local people. And planning is less contentious.

Eat the street food
Usually freshly cooked with a high turnover-so safer than many tourist eateries. Almost invariably cheap and tasty. You are what you eat: how can you hope to understand a culture without eating it's food?

Get Lost
Many of my most amusing, enlightening or downright pleasurable travel experiences have been the result of getting lost. The art in doing this and it being a pleasure rather than panic-inducing lies in firstly only getting a little bit lost and secondly in notbeing in a hurry.

Up your serendipity level and....

Expect the Unexpected
You have to be prepared to take the rough with the smooth.....

Leave room for more
You'll never see it all, and most things repay a second look

I'd like to take this opportunity of thanking everybody and everything involved in the production of this page, a list so long it would strain the very limits of cyberspace itself but an especially big shout for the Big G & all his myrmidons for VT itself, all VT members regardless of race colour or creed (with one exception, who knows who they are), my parents who did their best, my children, the butcher the baker and the candlestick maker,all those who work for HM revenue & customs, Tim Berners-Lee and all the various people from Archimedes onwards who have made the internet possible, the Wright brothers, all the tyrants of history for their megalomaniac projects that now serve to drag tourists to distant and exotic lands, the tectonic plates for their part in making the landscape, dark matter for holding it all together, Lucifer and his legions for that always valuable alternative point of view............................


Homer, Homer Simpson he's the greatest guy in historee
Homer, Homer Simpson, he's about to hit a chestnut tree.

The drop-dead answer to the anti-americanism that lurks within many of us Brits!

'Beer... the solution to, and cause of, all Man's problems'

On the other hand, you also gave us Barry Manilow. Still, respect, allegedly his favorite songwriter is Tom Waits, which makes you think...

<<ans: because it should be changed frequently>>

Travel Mottos we have loved:


If God is with you, why worry? If God is against you, why worry?
Arabic Proverb

There is water at the bottom of the ocean
From 'Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads

You're either on the bus or under the bus
NOT Ken Kesey

To arrive is, hopefully, better than travelling.

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Some likes and dislikes
Rather than the more usual list of music or book choices, I am going to reveal my tastes in kitchenware.

LIKES

The Bialetti Moka Express coffee maker.
O.K, the handle and knob on the lid fall off after a while and they are a bit of a faff to clean, but they make such good coffee.

Sharp knives
what else is there to say? . A sine qua non.

A bunch o' twigs for clettering the dishes.
Just kidding, but I'm a great fan of Cold Comfort Farm and am definitely a minimalist when it comes to the jolly old batterie de cuisine

Hard-boiled egg slicers
You know. Those thingies where a frame of stretched wires is brought down upon the helpless egg, in its little aluminium nest with suitable slots for the wires to pass through... very Good Housekeeping 1959 stylee.
Yes. They are completely unnecessary. And a sod to clean. And I'd never dream of actually having one seriously in my kitchen. On the mantelpiece, maybe.

DISLIKES

Toasters
In a word, why? They simply don't do the job properly.

Garlic presses
Any time or effort saved will be more than offset by the time necessary to clean the thing. Unless preparing garlic on an industrial scale. Crush with the flat of a knife.

Electric coffee grinders
Noisy and inefficient. I don't know which is worse.

As my old mucker William of Ockham is so fond of remarking, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: Posit no unneccesary entities.

.

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Ahh, the short-lived pleasure of a new pair of Converse Hi-tops.
(Shoes, feet and legs belong to Finn, who is turning into a right little fop, bless him)

Stop press shoe news!!! the laces are now GREEN

Mine are - or rather were...white. (Colour me grubby. Think Pigpen, maybe minus the flies) Time for a new pair!

Of course, as Dad, anything I wear is, ipso facto, the very nadir of Cool (a peice of argot with real legs)

.

....while Johnny opts for apple green accessorised with magenta and black striped socks.

Note the fine selection of Bristol graffiti.

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All is revealed

Get people to take photos of me in front of Taj Mahals, that is. But I couldn't resist this one.
It's in Istanbul, a model of the Galata tower near the entrance to the Museum of Islamic science & technology. On it's own it's a cute object, but a dull photo without some kind of secondary action and, being a model, it needs something to scale it. So I got the museum bloke who had just closed the museum up (I was, as ever, running late and arrived just as they were locking up: he was the only other person around) to take this snap using the only available object to insert into the picture, to wit myself.

Careful examination of this photograph will reveal socks with sandals. The toes are yellow. The somewhat odd stance is due to my trying not to tread on the roses surrounding the towerette.

To be exact, this is a photograph of Antony. TheLongTone is his evil twin brother.

Footnote

Q: Whats with all the stuff relating to feet, dude? You some kind of fetishist?

A: For the life of me I don't know. I seem to remember putting up the guff at the top about socks and sandals (There's proof of Roman legionaries on Hadrian's wall wearing socks with their sandals, btw) just to have something on the homepage when I first started on VT, and it all sort of ran away with me.

LEGAL STUFF
(We have to have this because of health and slippery regulations)

All opinions, recommendations, warnings and putative facts are supplied by TheLongTone on the strict understanding that they should in no way be considered as necessarily correlating with any objective reality. All tips and so forth are designed solely for my own amusement and I am not responsible for any loss, injury (including death) misery or disorientation arising from taking them seriously. Do not scale off drawing. Verify all critical dimensions on site. Beware of the dog. Product may contain traces of nuts.