Jon Worth Euroblog

I went to a branch of Barclays Bank in central London yesterday in order to make an international bank transfer. Should be fine you would have thought? London, international banking centre etc., etc. Firstly, you have to fill out an enormous form in the bank – it takes ages. But […]

The local Lidl supermarket puts flyers through doors in Clapham, letting the locals know about its latest offers. Some things are quite amusing – they were promoting care products for your horse (yes, indeed, in Clapham!?!) a few weeks ago. Anyway, this weeks promotion tops all the previous ones. The […]

I seem to be writing all my posts here in the wrong order! I write about the journey back to the UK after the Easter weekend before explaining what I was doing over the four days… Anyway, Helena and I went to visit Elina and Antti (friends from JEF) in […]

I have just finished reading The Art of Possibility by Rosamund S. Zander and Benjamin Zander (link to Amazon’s page about it). Helena’s mother had given it to me to read after some interesting debates about management and leadership a few months ago. The book offers a series of Practices […]

Whenever I fly with Ryanair I always seem to have the bad luck to end up sat close to some Aussies in the plane. Does not even seem to matter where: they have been on flights to Stockholm, Altenburg, and now to Berlin. Now I would not wish to generalise […]

Every able bodied Muslim is supposed to make a pilgrimage to Mecca during their lifetime, and yet it seems this duty is bound to involve fatal sacrifice for some. This year 345 people have died today (as I write – the number may increase) and more than 1000 have been […]

I have just spent most of the morning in long queues at the consular section of the High Commission of South Africa in London – my sister is due to spend 8 months working on charity projects there from 4th January onwards. Now, it might not be as nasty there […]

London can get somewhat frustrating, but take a trip out of the capital and into the wilds of the rest of the UK and the situation becomes to dire it’s horrid. I’m sat writing at my seat 42F of Coach C of the 20.15 departure from London Paddington to Swansea. […]

Christmas is fast approaching and – as usual – that means heading home to the town of my upbringing, Newport in South Wales. The place is famous as the hometown of Goldie Lookin’ Chain and has an interesting transporter bridge, one of very few examples in the world. Christmas in […]

There are some small things about spending time in other countries that it’s just hard to get your head around. Matters that are more complex than translation difficulties. One such complication in Sweden has been the lingon (-et) which literally translates as lingon berry. So what, you ask, is a […]