I went for a week's vacation to England in October. And as usual, I combined a number of individual visits in a single trip.

To go directly to the individual pages:

• Birmingham
• Selwyn and Tina and Joanna and Leo
• Glyn and Cath
• London
• Gill and Morgan
• Rebecca and friends; Tony and Pat
• Tiddles

First stop was Birmingham. I don't know Birmingham very well — I had hardly ever visited the place before I started going to stay with Selwyn and Tina a few years ago. So I enjoy the guided tours of the more obscure parts of the city, in particular the canals.

We also called into St Philip's Cathedral, which has spectacular stained-glass windows by Edward Burne-Jones. And we stopped by the two towers of Edgbaston — Perrott's Folly and the tower of the Edgbaston Waterworks. J.R.R. Tolkien lived in this neighborhood as a child, and it has been suggested that these two towers were an inspiration for the two towers of the “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy.