********* NOW PUBLISHED IN BOOKSTORES THIS WEEK OR BUY DIRECT ***********

Although this blog is my personal view of education, and particularly some of the numbers around teacher supply in England, it doesn’t encompass everything I do.

Regular readers will be aware of the poem written to commemorate the sacrifice of young men in war, published as a blog post on the 4^th August 2014, the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War One.

Coincidentally, world War Two features in my latest book: Twin Tracks. This is an account of a journey my twin brother and I took by rail around Europe in the autumn of 2019. We wrote it as a manual to encourage others to take such trips, but it has become a record of a vanished life since covid-19 struck the world.

Twin Tracks will be published at the end of November 2020 but, as the ISBN has been allocated, it can be pre-ordered through good bookstores and other sources. The ISBN is 978-1—19163099-3-7 and the cover price in England is £12.99. Sadly, the first edition of 200 copies has now been sold out – July 2025. we are investigating a new edition covering our 2024 rail trip around Australia as well as .the chapters in the first edition.

Below is a short extract from the chapter in the book about the shadow of World War Two.

Four of the nine places in which we stayed displayed visible reminders of the war. Two of them had modern museums devoted to the war. It sometimes felt that every major city had a tank on display somewhere. We had planned possible visits to the modern museums and were glad that we had done so. There were other places, such as Budapest, where time did not allow for a visit to the military museum, enough merely to note the presence of the T34 tank outside. It would have been intriguing to have seen how the museum dealt with the tanks on the streets of the city in 1956. There are still signs of the ‘uprising’ if one has time to look.

No doubt there are signs of uprising in what was the Soviet Zone of Germany post-1945, what became known to us in the West as East Germany. Certainly, in Berlin there are more visible signs of that era, with remnants of the famous Berlin Wall that encircled the parts of the City not within the Russian sphere of influence for more than 20 years. Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing point between the American and Russian Zones is also remembered. It is interesting that the films of the Second World War have now been replaced by films about the post-1945 Cold War that often feature Berlin.

On a happier note the book also contains details of the memorable meals we ate during the trip. Here is an account of one of them.

This restaurant is worth the trip up Buda Hill for dinner. It was too cold to eat outside, so we were in the relatively small main room that is two tables wide and stretched back from the road. There was a pianist located near the door, but the music wasn’t too loud as to be intrusive.

Food was to a high standard, although the menu was not that shown on their web site, and why should it be. The best dish as far as I was concerned was the pork with puffed rice and a sauce. The baked cheesecake with red berry compote was also good. I cannot fault the porcine mushroom soup for flavour, but I did feel that the presentation could have been better thought out. The mushrooms were quartered and not sliced and for a restaurant of this quality it wasn’t the best way to start a meal from the presentational point of view. I must make it clear that I was not unhappy with the soup, but with its presentation….
The wine list was good, and there were three different Tokaj wines of varying ages. I had a glass of a very mellow 10-year-old wine. We had no difficulty in ordering in English and there was a menu in English as well. This was an enjoyable experience just short of memorable.

For anyone interested in travel, this might make a good Christmas present. Send me a comment either if you need more details or your bookshop won’t stock it. But, the first edition published by Oxfordfolio is a limited one. Signed copies are available for a small donation to the charity Children Heard and Seen.