The world from my window

It's been non-stop on this colourful trip of a lifetime to Peru, which I won in a travel writing competition run by The Telegraph and Saga. You'd think a Saga holiday might be a bit slow for a woman approaching fifty (albeit from the wrong direction). But I don't think I've been on the go so much since a press trip to the Falkand Islands in 1987. I've seen some wonderful things. We've been here, there and everywhere, on dry land and on Lake Titicaca, by plane and by bus and on foot. The sights, sounds, smells, taste and the feel of things has been incredible. There is lots to tell but I'll just let the pictures do the talking.                      There's been sunrises... ...and sunsets. There's been altitude sickness, discovering your fellow travellers know people you know (it's a small world, after all) and a few coca leaves to chew every day. But the best is yet to com...

And at eleven o'clock on the eleventh of the eleventh of the eleventh, Mr Grigg and I stood in silence outside the church. I could hear the cawing of rooks overhead, the sound of gunfire in the towns beyond the hills as everyone else's two-minute silence began and ended at different times. And I thought of my grandfathers, brave old souls, giving it all in the war to end all wars, with my maternal grandfather stopping every now and then to write a poem about it. I thought of my paternal grandfather's best friend, killed in France and lying in the British ceremony at Courcelette, a fact we discovered only through the marvels of internet research a year or so ago. And I thought of Mr Grigg's uncle, killed on HMS Glorious by the German battleship Scharnhorst in World War II, never to know his nephews, one of whom was named after him. Similar stories repeated to this day,widows and orphans made from the Falklands, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan. And I th...