Frank Dowling Tourist- and Driver-Guide

05/11/2024

At World Travel Market with my friend and colleague Edina today

18/05/2024

A very funny thing happened to me this evening. I just got home, literally just closing the door, when I heard something coming from the bedroom, a tune I recognised immediately. Without any kind of prompting from me, indeed I hadn't even gone into the bedroom, my Amazon Echo (Alexa) Show had started playing "Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau" (Land of my Fathers, the Welsh National Anthem) with two young men singing it - in Welsh.

18/01/2024

It seems that owners of Teslas in America, and by implication, owners of other EVs, are having serious problems in the cold weather. In short, their batteries cannot cope with the cold. Drivers are having to abandon their cars, and queues at charging points are many hours.

09/11/2023

Today is the 34th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember it well, a Thursday evening.

It followed a summer of unrest in Poland where one can draw a parallel with the mid 19th century Chartist movement in Britain. Many people had managed to escape from the totalitarian run eastern Europe which was under Soviet/Russian dictatorship, most of them to West Germany, mainly from and through the then Czechoslovakia.

In (West) Berlin itself, at 8:30 pm local time I was driving along the Lietzenburger Strasse, a road that runs just south of and tangent to the famous Kurfürstendamm, when the news came on in the car radio. As one normally does when driving, I was only listening "with half an ear" when the newsreader said, translated into English: "There are reports that with immediate effect citizens of the GDR [East Germany] will be allowed to travel abroad. This is taken to include West Germany and West Berlin." Without further comment he went on to the next item of news.

Did I hear it right? Did he really say that?

Back at my flat I looked at the TV listings. The next news-type programme was Channel 1's Tagesthemen, rather like the BBC's Newsnight in the UK. The programme started with the presenter saying something like, "There are reports that ...; we'll move onto other news but come back to this subject as and when we hear anything more." OK, at least that's a bit more than the previous bulletin I had heard on the radio station Radio 100,6.

I then started to channel hop between news programmes, and at first the presenters made comments similar to that of the Tagesthemen presenter, and then the picture became clearer. Soon every single channel's listings for the evening went out of the window, politicians and political commentators were called away to the studios from the middle of eating their supper, and TV crews went to the border crossing points in the Wall between East and West Berlin. Crowds were beginning to gather on the western side of the crossing points, while some East Berliners started to come through, on foot or in cars, welcomed with cheers, handshakes, hugs and so on from the West Berliners.

At that point I started to wonder whether I should go to one of the crossing points but decided against this as I had to be out of the house by 7 o'clock the next morning, and I realised I would only see East German cars, mainly Trabants and Wartburgs, which I could see plenty of when visiting East Berlin; there was probably more to see on TV than if I was there.

At the works where I was doing a translation contract, on Friday it was, unsurprisingly, the main topic of conversation, and on the way back home that afternoon I saw the first East Berlin car in West Berlin. Over the weekend the entire city went mad, with the city almost choking in the exhaust fumes from the environmentally harmful East German cars, but nobody minded. I met quite a few East Berliners. The city became one big carnival.

The rest is, of course, history.

20/10/2023

Yesterday I was asked the question about the archbishop murdered in 1170 in Canterbury Cathedral, Thomas Becket or Thomas à Becket.

His name was Thomas Becket.

In the 18th or 19th century some Clever Dick decided that a Frenchman should have a French sounding name, so put the à in, and it spread.

Errr ?

Although his first language will have been Mediaeval French (the English language did not develop until around 200 years later) he was not French at all, he was an Englishman!

13/04/2023

https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fbritainsbestguides.org%2Fblogs%2Fthe-making-of-a-king-part-1%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0IXl9t2roqJ4PGV7LQsnR4mr5cpBBYmed7W_qcZCO4H4VtKWge8yobw5U&h=AT1XQBPvka1hGfbFufU-SYWRSpkbp7Q47JkkNWK_QUUYD8K_Kuf2jWD9Ap99Cbh__GoweX62_d-l9dbMD_otGY6Uw5HIb-FgEeXZYm-WE9E21vjP1cr7gZPnJUci1Ivq8A&__tn__=H-R&c[0]=AT2F1MX_2JC4UJHThs4WEYTCCM-SjFcvLN5W-nOSMVmXef26I-wvMwU7cLVEu9rm1dZalr9ZVCOhrWN8uk27jM5VnCiMTOScSS_W96J-pS1XdFdxRoyRXLR427-eXvihykxVahskqX2Z6MIJo-1-hyGuQBODkuop1tQhHlFX0Ka9vdHDMAM

  With the Coronation of King Charles III fast approaching, we will be featuring different aspects of His Royal Highness and the Coronation ceremony over the coming weeks. We begin this Coronation series with 12 fun facts about King Charles III.   1. He became King on 8 September 2022 Charles was ...

31/03/2023

Pleased to have achieved the Brecon Beacons Ambassador silver certificate ahead of taking the South East Wales guiding course next winter. Plan to follow this up with the gold level course when it starts.

10/07/2022

Last night I saw a heavily abridged version of one of Aphra Behn's plays, "The Amorous Prince", aka "The Curious Husband" (1671). Played for the very first time in over 350 years, with some sexual connotations (nothing explicit) it would have been considered very avant garde at the time but would not raise many eyebrows today.

27/02/2022

Went to the launch of the Aphra Behn Society yesterday, with a couple of interesting talks on her. Aphra, née Johnson, born in 1640 in the village of Harbledown, now part of Canterbury is the first woman to have had English language books published and is believed to have been the first female playwright.

Clicking on the link below (attached to my website) takes you to information on Aphra Behn, written by Professor emerita Elaine Hobby.

http://www.southeastguide.org.uk/aphrabehn.pdf

26/02/2022

12/11/2021

Delighted to see one of my photographs has been posted on the official Visit Wales website. To be precise, the photo was taken with my camera by our coach driver, Steve, and I am in it together with fellow Wales qualified guides.
https://www.visitwales.com/info/travel-trade/useful-information/toolkit/wales-best-guides

How to find a Wales Best Guide to es**rt your clients on tours of Wales.

12/11/2021

Many Welsh surnames are men's forenames with the letter S added at the end, e.g. Williams, Andrews, Hughes, and so on. Indeed, somebody with such a surname probably has Welsh ancestry. Centuries ago a man would add his father's name to his, joined by the word "ap", so Rhys, the son of Llewelyn, would be Rhys ap Llewelyn. Sometimes several generations of names would be added, so you might get:
David ap Griffith ap William ap Rhys ap David ap Thomas.....

The story goes that there was a court hearing, and the judge got so annoyed about some of the excessively long names that he told everybody to go away and shorten their ridiculously long ones; only then would he hear the case. So David ap Griffith became David Griffiths. There were other variations as well, so the sons of men called Hugh might become Hughes or perhaps "ap Hugh" shortened to Pugh, and so on.

01/07/2021

And don't forget the thousands of us in the travel industry. Many people don't notice just how many of us work in incoming tourism, (normally) the country's second largest invisible export. In fact, many more people visit Britain every year than British people go abroad. Hotels are standing empty, tourist guides with nobody to be guided, coach companies that meet visitors at the port or airport and take them around the country (most staycationers go by car or train), not forgetting the inbound travel companies, language schools and more. NO WORK AT ALL since the beginning of last year, and none expected before next year at the earliest.
Please sign this petition.

Restaurants, pubs and small businesses are on the brink of collapse. Add your name to the petition:

22/06/2021

Received this today. It will be on my website very soon.

11/05/2021

Have learned this morning that I have passed all parts of the South Wales guiding endorsement course so am now officially qualified to guide there.

23/03/2021

The first recorded case of a national sports team singing their national anthem before a match was in 1905. At Cardiff Arms Park, now the Principality Stadium, the Welsh rugby team responded to the (New Zealand) All Blacks' Haka by singing “Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau” (“Land of My Fathers”). It went on to be the first time ever that the All Blacks lost an international match.