MRS TURNBULL GOES TO TEES.

What a long time we spent in that moving box they call car with only the briefest of interludes to stretch my legs and pee. And boy, did I need to pee! It's all this cold weather, I just nip outside for a couple of minutes and the urge comes on.
Amazingly even though she and I were travelling from Pembrokeshire and he was going to Eaglescliffe from Felixstowe we all arrived at exactly the same time.
We stayed in a smart hotel that had a grand staircase and thick carpets with a bright pattern you could lose your shoes in. Well, I can't because I don't wear shoes but they can.
When we got into the room I immediately smelled biscuits and some kind person had put them  on a tray with cups and things in a cupboard down near the floor. Well, I was in there like Flynn but no sooner had I knocked over all the cups to get at the biscuits than he started yelling and removing the whole tray from under my very nose.
She then made herself some tea using the tray which I am sure was meant for me. She put the remains in the waste paper basket - I leapt in quickly and ate them before she could stop me. Apparently it was something called teabag - very soggy and stringy. After that they put the bin right up on top of the wardrobe. We did lots of visiting and the weather was bitter not like warm wet Wales at all. Luckily she had packed my fleecy coat. On the last night we went out for dinner - delicious but I fail to see why I got so little of it. They ate nearly the lot, venison, pheasant, cheese, lemon tarts and all. Back at the hotel I was quite tired after my evening out and where I had got used to the sliding doors that opened in front of me without needing any pushing I made a mistake and tried to walk through the plain glass bit at the side. There was quite a bang when my forehead connected with the glass and my head rang for some time afterwards. But I soon went to sleep - snoring again, them not me, oh no not me - and the next day we went home again.

Here's a picture of me (and him) on Fylingdales moor in Yorkshire. Quite breathtaking it was, and oh such fascinating scents to follow.

Mrs Turnbull goes to France

Another adventure for me, Mrs Turnbull. It’s been a long time but I have been a busy old pooch. I went to France with my people. See my passport. Yes, France. Just imagine me going through the tunnel all the way there. They woke me up specially to tell me to look so I did - for 5 seconds but it was dead boring, nothing to see but the sides of the truck we were in so I sank back down into my comfy bed. We stayed the first night in someone’s house, a friend of theirs. All I can say is that it smelled of cats but I wasn’t allowed near them. And I had to stay in a bedroom with my people. They accused me of snoring which maybe I do a little but you should hear them. We drove all the way down through France even going through Paris. Yes, Gay Paris. But I couldn’t see anything exciting about it. Just one big traffic jam that we crawled through. We eventually arrived at our destination in the Dordogne. Lovely - lots of sunshine, not like Wales. I  even went for a bit of a swim in the big river but then I got into trouble because I put my nose in the bait bucket of some fisherman who had no sense of humour at all. 

We went to a big castle built by Richard the Lionheart as a true English dog I stood proudly on those ramparts. And I loved the cafés - I could really get used to this French way of life. See my photos. 

Then on the way home when we arrived at the tunnel we saw a notice saying we had to go to pet reception so we turned right as shown and found all the way there was marked by giant paw prints on the road. I am glad we didn’t meet that dog in there, even I would have been afraid.

Tenby Arts Festival

Brochure with all details of the festival is now available in TIC's throughout Pembrokeshire.

Highlights include a concert with Sheku Kanneh-Mason, BBC Young Musician of the Year 2016, also a night of Romantic Opera with Swansea City Opera Company. 

The festival runs from 24th September - 1st October 2016 opening with a book fair with 20 top authors and publishers.

Wilderness & Paradise

More great news - Wilderness & Paradise is now available on Amazon as an e-book. Much as I prefer physical books, the feel and look of them, the way you can surf back and forward so easily in them and the fact that they don't run out of battery, I have to admit that the kindle or other e-reader is very convenient when travelling.
I hope all of you out there enjoy the book on either Kindle or as the real thing. Contact johammo1@gmail.com for book orders.

GREAT NEWS - MY NEW BOOK IS IN PRINT!

Wilderness & Paradise 

My new book goes back to my interest in the Middle East inspired by my family connections there. My grandmother was from Basrah in Iraq and my mother grew up there. This book is dedicated to my mother who went alone to work in Sudan teaching just after the Second World war. The foreword of the book tells a little of her story among the tribes of Southern Sudan.

Wilderness & Paradise is a collection of short biographies of women who travelled alone through the deserts of North Africa, Syria and Mesopotamia now called Iraq. Their adventures in love and travel make for exciting stories as they fight their way through the prejudices of the day which dictated that women should stay at home stitching samplers and rearing children. They were involved in politics, archaeology, and a great love of the wildness of the desert and its people. They wrote books and diaries as well as keeping sketch books. 

Read about Lady Hester Stanhope who was the niece of William Pitt the Younger who tried over and over again to be a spy on behalf of England in the struggle for supremacy against France in the Middle East during the Napoleonic wars. 

There is Lady Jane Digby who was the most beautiful debutante of her day who fled to Europe and was drawn ever further East marrying ever more exotic husbands.

Not all of them were so high born. The story of Isabelle Eberhardt tells of her origins as the bastard child of her mother and her family’s tutor and her sense of always being an outsider in the French society she was  brought up in. She takes her love of Islam to the ultimate conclusion when she becomes a moslem.

Gertrude Bell too, though from a very wealthy family had no aristocratic ancestors. She mapped the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia and it was her knowledge of the area which was used to guide TE Lawrence in his campaign with Bedouin warriors against the Turks in the First World War. 

Agatha Christie is probably too well known to need much explanation but she too went alone to explore the East, attracted by her interest in archaeology and the romance of the ancient world.

Freya Stark had a very unconventional upbringing, and spent most of her childhood in Italy. Always regarded as a foreigner by her contemporaries owing to her foreign accent she nonetheless felt British. She became one of Britain’s most famous travel writers and lived to be a hundred.

The final chapter tells the story of twin Scottish sisters. Their interest in the desert was quite different from the others. They went to discover not Islam but the earliest manuscripts of the Bible hidden away in a remote mountain monastery in Syria. 

The fight to be taken seriously in what was then a man’s world and the hardships of their journeys across the desert show enormous courage and determination - an inspiration to us all.

Available from Hammond Associates. Price £10 plus £2 p&p To order: e-mail johammo1@gmail.com

Tenby Arts Festival 2015 was a great success. Rachmaninoff - Variations in a Life for which I wrote the script was well received. Plenty to be sad about but a few laughs too. My talk on Sarah Bernhardt called La Divine Sarah was also much appreciated. One person in the audience was kind enough to say that my talks were the best thing in the Festival - and I didn't pay her I promise.
We had talks on poetry, on the Moulin Rouge which got everyone dancing and on Venice with an Italian meal to enjoy afterwards. There were plays too - one about Mrs Beeton presented by Alison Neal after which the audience enjoyed a Mrs Beeton style supper and one about E. Nesbit author of The Railway Children. And we must not forget the Pint-Sized Plays which take place every year in various pubs around the town. Each one a gem of dramatic art telling a story in ten minutes sometimes to make you cry, other times, laugh.
We had a variety of concerts too - four hands on a piano, a flute and harp duo, the Tuxedo Jazz Orchestra and the Kanneh-Mason family who are semi-finalists on the Britain's Got Talent TV show.
So look out now on tenbyartsfest.co.uk for exciting events in 2016 - 24th September to 1st October.

Hi there everybody. I am just testing this out on my new computer - an apple mac. It is huge and rather scary but very exciting. Everything fits and works just so and with such simplicity.
I will also soon be launching a new look to the Tenby Arts Festival web site. It will be a fresh more modern look to suit the new and exciting events we will be putting on this year.