On our last day in London we left the hostel in Knightsbridge, not far from the Natural History Museum, and walked across Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park before making our way past Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, through to Whitehall and eventually up to Leicester Square, Chinatown, and Covent Garden. I realised as I walked that although I have been to London a number of times in the past fifteen or so years, I don’t think I have walked those particular streets, and past those particular sights, since a primary school trip to the capital in what must have been 1989 or 1990. I had sudden flashbacks, such as walking past Baden Powell House, or Westminster Abbey, that took me right back to that school trip, and memories that I would have presumed were long forgotten.

The other thing about walking through these most famous of London cityscapes, along with all my fellow tourists from around the world, was how familiar it all was. How many times have I seen the Houses of Parliament, on the news credits or on a bottle of brown sauce? So many time that it was only standing there looking at it in the flesh that I considered how preposterous the architecture of the place actually is, whilst trying to imagine how it was in the days of the plague and the Great Fire when the river was so polluted and foul that they had to hang chlorine-soaked sheets in the windows of the Parliament to try and alleviate the smell. I heard that story on one of the archive editions of In Our Time that I had downloaded to listen to before the trip, trying to get a crash course in London history as I waited on the S-Bahn platform at 5 in the morning for the train to the airport.

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A recent survey in Russia suggested that over two thirds of Russians want Lenin’s embalmed body removed from Red Square, at a time when the mausoleum is closed for renovation and speculation is rife as to what the future holds for the former Soviet leader. It is almost exactly five years since we stood on the cold expanse of cobblestones on a grey February day, and the mausoleum was closed for repairs that day as well, just a week before the election that saw Putin replaced as President by Medvedev. Putin is back in charge again, and he recently appears to have come down in favour of leaving Lenin exactly where he is.

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By Anja Ahrens:

We were only in the United States for two weeks – a flying visit really – and we had decided to spend three of those days driving through the desert. With a four year old child and my in-laws in the back seat. Everyone said we were crazy, and maybe we were. But we loved it. During those days on the road I understood how fascinating the mountains can be, how the desert does not stay the same (as you might imagine) but instead the landscape was changing every twenty minutes, or with every bend in the road. The back seat passengers were happy and so were we.

My memories of that trip begin with the turn off along the old Route 66 and an abandoned town, my son playing cowboys amongst the buildings before it was time to hit the road again towards the Grand Canyon. We drove along a dead straight road for hours, passing only a lonely hotel and an airstrip to deliver those tourists who flew in rather than driving across the desert. We got to the canyon with fifteen minutes before nightfall, the amazed guard of the National Park surprised that we wanted to enter. Within less than an hour all daylight had gone, an incredibly fast process that we were not used to, and so we picked our way through the darkness to find our hotel.

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Memories of a trip to Croatia:

“When we get around this corner, I promise… something you will never forget.”

We are rounding the southern tip of Kornati Island. Gradually a cove appears, surrounded by rocky hills that fall steeply into clear, turquoise waters. We see masts of a number of sailing boats. A couple of houses around a small harbour. Small fish swim alongside the boat, just under the surface of the water. Smoke rises from a chimney. We’ve reached our mooring for the night.

According to Darko, the skipper of our hired boat, this is the only way to reach the Restaurant Opat, unless you fancy an epic hike across the rubble-strewn moonscape of the island. The island looks as if it is exactly how nature created it, although we learn later that it was once covered in forest which was burned down to create grazing land for sheep. Stone walls that hemmed them in remain, oftentimes the only sign of human life. The sheep have long gone.

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