Leave a trail

We have a properly awful chain of shops here in the UK called Iceland. They peddle frozen offal and blandly derivative cack - tikka pizzas, sweet-and-sour samosas and other types of schizophrenic franken-nosh.  To persuade people to actually buy this nonsense, there are ghastly advertisements featuring the national sweetheart putting out plate after platter of aneimic prawn rings and frozen balls of poo with chocolate on, gurning madly amid the madcap antics of unattractive and ill-behaved brats, all with the tagline 'Mum's Gone to Iceland.'

Which makes one of my favourite blogs all the funnier, because that mum really did go to Iceland and wrote a delightful account of the trip and several more European and further-flung destinations since then.

Reading Trish's blog is like having a long-awaited letter from a very witty old mate.  Her travels feature her long-suffering Doctor husband and teenage son, and she manages to combine both irreverence and appreciation for her destinations.  She's a Newcastle girl and one after my own heart; she makes me laugh out loud and is one of the few people I could ever imagine actually travelling with.  I know that she'd see all the quirky, ridiculous and fanny-shaped things first and point them out with glee.

She's also annoyingly well-informed about the places she goes to.

An unexpected treat is her second blog, where she writes up the memoirs of her beloved dad, up to and including his time as a Cambridge undergraduate in the 1950s.  These are a complete delight; his intelligence, humour and right-on politics, both as a student and while doing National Service, have clearly gone straight to his daughter.  Which gifts, combined with her mother's old-school North-East tell-it-how-it-is make both blogs such brilliant reads.

And not a frozen prawn ring in sight.

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