Call to Place: Australia

Cathy from ~wander.essence~ is re-inventing her travel blog(s) and encouraging us all to think about the ways, the reasons and the whys about how we travel. Her posts are certainly making me think about how I blog.

The Call to Place: “I invite you to write a 500-700 word (or less) post on your own blog about what enticed you to choose a recently visited or a future particular destination.”

There is one place that has had a very strong pull on my emotions pretty much the whole of my life. And still does.

The Land Down Under

I was ten years old when my parents told me that we were going to move to Australia. The other side of the world. I was so excited. There lived kangaroos and wallabies and parrots. The sun shone every day, everyone lived by the beach and doctors flew in planes.

It didn’t happen. At the last moment my dad backed out. He was fifty and worried that he wouldn’t find a job and with a wife and three kids to support he decided that being a £10 POM wasn’t for him. Or us.

For years I dreamed of that big island continent. I learned about Australia in my geography classes and the more I learned the more I wanted to be there. A friend in the same class as me emigrated when we were both fifteen. She was a Judith too. I was so jealous.

Several years later and I was ready. I had just finished six months working in a hotel in Norway and had saved almost every penny (or kroner) I earned to make the journey to Australia. I was going overland with a someone I’d met who was returning to South Africa. We made it to India together which was where we would split up. He to the west, me to the east. Continue reading Call to Place: Australia

home thoughts from abroad

Home thoughts from abroad is a new series on Travel Words featuring a single photograph that reminds me of a country visited and showing something that uniquely identifies it as being ‘abroad’.

Kioni Village on Ithaca

A birthday treat from one island to another involved a ferry and a coach. Narrow roads curving around tight bends with no barriers. The mountain on one side, the sea on the other. Eyes closed. Stopping for coffee and a stroll beneath shady trees to keep cool. A fishy lunch down by the harbour with skinny feral cats weaving between your legs. Hot, tired and happy at the end of the day.

Spam, spam, spam

Just a quick note to let people know that there has been a lot of spam on WordPress this weekend. I noticed that many of the comment likes (NOT post likes) had comments from .ru addresses. These were on comment likes on my posts and also those I had made on other people’s posts. This issue is not confined to me. I have been in contact with the WP team and they were looking into the problem at the time.

I have switched off comment likes for all of my blogs for the moment until I am sure the problem has been sorted. You can still like a post and comment as usual.

It isn’t possible to remove likes or prevent someone from liking posts (or comments), however you can turn likes on or off for individual posts or pages.

You would do this by clicking on ‘Sharing’ in your post/page editor settings menu, and checking or unchecking the relevant boxes.

If you want to turn off comment likes for ALL posts then go to My Sites / Configure / Sharing / Buttons / Options and uncheck the Comment Likes for All Posts box.

Another spamming problem is coming from @outlook.com and @yahoo.com addresses. Flooding posts and comments. Fortunately Akismet seems to be capturing them, but you might want to check your spam folders and delete them. I regularly check my comments and the spam folders in case someone I know has slipped through. Today I had 470 comments in there including one from a friend who has a hotmail address. And don’t worry if you find thousands, the spam comments automatically get deleted after 30 days.

If you are getting loads of emails then you might want to change the settings in your notifications for your blog(s). To do this click on the notifications bell and then the little cog wheel. You can then decide what notifications you want to receive by email.

Spam is annoying and let’s hope WP can get to the bottom of this recent spate. It’s not easy. So please have sympathy for the engineers. They will be doing everything they can to resolve these issues.