Buzzin Travel

2012 is going to be a good year for the UK travel industry as tourists flock to London for the 2012 Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.  For UK holidaymakers who don’t want to run the risk of queues or strikes at UK airports or spending hours on a plane, there is so much more to see by taking a holiday in Britain and Ireland – the largest and second largest islands in Europe.

Don’t get me wrong, I love visiting other countries and the guarantee of sunshine.  But equally, there’s nothing like packing the car, recording some CDs for the journey and exploring the UK; and there’s so much to see.

Living as we do in the south-east of England, we always like to choose a family getaway where we can relax, away from the trappings of modern busy life where I can switch off from 24 hour contact and chill out with the family.

My favourite places in England include Cornwall, the Lake District and Norfolk, where as a child we holidayed on the Norfolk Broads.  I carry fond memories of the excitement of living on a boat for two weeks and mooring in remote places, miles from city lights and crowds, amongst nature and the quiet darkness.

I recall the first time we took a family holiday in Cornwall.  I was concerned for our two boys who hitherto had been used to being entertained with amusements, clubs and theme parks. Here we were simply trying to ‘get away’ from all that.  But my concerns were unfounded, as we spent times together exploring rock pools on secluded bays and eating out at fish restaurants in quaint fishing villages like Polperro, Looe, Falmouth and St Austell where life, as much as time, appeared to go very slow.  The boys loved it and we returned the following year for more of the same.

The Lake District is perfect in summer for long relaxing walks amongst wild looking sheep and beautiful scenery.  Mountainous walks in hiking boots eating mint cake, visiting the quaint towns like Cockermouth, Keswick and Ambleside among others; and stumbling across an old English country pub or three, along the way. Perfect!

Being able to manage your own journey, stopping on route for food or to visit family and friends or possibly an attraction along the way allows you to be in control and relaxed from the minute you leave home; and for peace of mind, I recommend breakdown cover in case of an emergency.

Gone are the days where we could afford two family holidays each year – one in the UK and one abroad. So this year we are currently considering a couple of short breaks to Aberystwyth in mid-Wales and a return to Cornwall.  Let’s hope we have a British summer to remember.

Camping in style at Scotland’s T in the Park music festival

The Stone Roses, Kasabian and Snow Patrol will headline T in the Park, Scotland’s major summer music festival. Elbow, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, Chase & Status, Florence and The Machine, New Order and David Guetta are among the 180 artists who will also play across nine stages to a daily crowd of 85,000 this July.

This year, as well as the normal camping facilities, there will be an exclusive Residence area for luxury accommodation. Options include solar-powered Pod Pads that sleep two and have wooden floors, fitted carpets, interior lights, shelving, mirrors, windows and a lock on the front door. Bunkpads will have similar comforts and sleep four people in two bunk beds. There will be luxury yurts called Squrts with king-size beds, white linen, duvet and mattress for two and Suite Hut log cabins with en suite shower room, flushing toilet and hot running water as well as TV and DVD player, IPod dock and fridge.

The residence area will also have a bistro, a Festival Recovery Spa and a cocktail bar.
Festival Director Geoff Ellis, who was recently awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the UK Festival Awards, says: ‘It’s really important to us that we listen to the fans and make every effort to book the bands they tell us they want to see. With some of the biggest bands and the greatest audience in the world, we hope this weekend will be unforgettable for fans. Opening the campsite gates for the first time is still my favourite moment of the festival weekend and I can’t wait to see you all in July!’

The festival site is 20 minutes from Perth train station, 50 minutes from Edinburgh and 80 minutes from Glasgow. Citylink shuttle buses will run to and from all three train stations.

T in the Park music festival started in 1994 with a crowd of 17,000. The 2012 Festival is over the weekend of 6–8 July, with tickets costing from £70 for Friday (£77.50 for Saturday or Sunday) to £189 for the whole weekend including camping. Festival tickets including accommodation in the Residence, a VIP Hospitality pass per person and a Residence car park pass cost from £1,066 for two sleeping in a Squrt to £4,000 for four sleeping in a Suite Hut log cabin.

T in the Park, Balado Airfield, Balado, Kinross, Angus KY13 0PF
For more information visit www.tinthepark.com.

The latest figures from the Office of National Statistics show that every household in the UK has £430 less to spend today than they did in 2010, as household disposable income fell by 1.2 % last year, the biggest annual fall in spending power since 1977.

However, going by the latest research from an independent digital marketing agency, Greenlight, it seems this has not stifled UK consumer appetite for entertainment which would seem to have taken a thrifty, some might even say active and cultured route too.

The Agency’s latest report, ‘Entertainment Retail – Issue 8′ profiles online search behaviour in the entertainment retail sector, covering Gaming Consoles & Games, Going Out, Movies and Music. It also reveals the most visible brands, retailers and review sites in each sub-sector and assesses those that interacted well on social media networks.

The research shows that the search term ‘British museum‘ is more popular than other London attractions such as ‘Buckingham Palace‘ and ‘Madame Tussauds‘.

There were 1.5 million searches for going out-related terms. ‘British Museum’ attracted the most number of queries for this sub-sector – 135,000. ‘National History Museum‘, ‘Science Museum‘ and ‘Tate Modern‘ followed with 110,000 searches a piece.

By comparison ‘Buckingham Palace‘ and ‘Madame Tussauds‘ had 74,000 each whilst ‘Big Ben‘ and ‘London Shows‘ managed 40,500 each.

For information on exhibitions and opening hours visit the British Museum website.

The V&A’s major autumn exhibition is Hollywood Costume, bringing together more than 100 iconic costumes designed for famous and unforgettable characters from Hollywood movies of the last 100 years.

The exhibition will display cinema costumes that have never before left the private and archival collections in California. Most of these clothes have never been publicly displayed and have never been seen beyond the secure walls of the studio archives.

Visitors will be able to view the costumes worn by the characters of Indiana Jones, Scarlett O’Hara, Jack Sparrow, Holly Golightly, Darth Vader and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

This exhibition, which opens in October, will help visitors understand the costume designer’s process in the creation of character from script to screen including the changing social and technological context in which the designers have worked over the last century.

Three galleries will plot the evolution of costume design from Charlie Chaplin through the Golden Age of Hollywood to the cutting-edge design for Avatar (2009) and John Carter of Mars (2012).

The first gallery (Act 1) will show the process of designing a character from script to screen. The second (Act 2) will examine the key collaborative role of the costume designer within the creative team, and the third (Act 3, Finale) will celebrate the most beloved characters in the history of Hollywood and the silver screen.

The V&A is open daily 10am–5.45pm (10pm Fridays), admission free. Hollywood Costume runs from 20 October to 27 January 2013, admission £14 adults, £11 seniors, £9 students, £23 family ticket (online booking prices, plus £1 handling charge per transaction).

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL

For more information visit www.vam.ac.uk.

The Science Museum in London is planning a year-long exhibition to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of a pioneering computer scientist. Codebreaker – Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy will look at the achievements of the man whose influence is still felt today and whose wartime code-breaking to helped shorten World War Two.

It will be the most extensive collection of Alan Turing artefacts ever assembled under one roof. Visitors will be able to see the Pilot ACE computer he developed in the early 1950s, which was the fastest computer in the world at the time and a forerunner of today’s machines.

Other key exhibits include a piece of Comet jet fuselage wreckage analysed with the aid of Pilot ACE in 1954 following a series of crashes. The computer’s work eventually helped to reveal the source of the problem, leading to changes in aeroplane design. Pilot ACE was also used by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dorothy Hodgkin in her examination of the structure of vitamin B12 and insulin molecules, and it was also put into use as one of the earliest computer traffic simulators.

Other highlights of the exhibition include German military Enigma machines and the few remaining parts of the revolutionary electromechanical ‘bombe’ machines that Turing devised during World War Two to crack codes. More than 200 were built, each weighing a ton and operating constantly at Bletchley Park and other secret sites in the UK. During the War Turing was known at the secret government intelligence site Bletchley Park as ‘the Prof’.

The Science Museum is open daily 10am–6pm, admission free. There is no charge for Codebreaker – Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy, which runs from 21 June to June 2013.

Science Museum
Exhibition Road
London SW7 2DD

For more information visit www.sciencemuseum.org.uk.