Scotland

Join a highland regiment,meboy. The kilt is an unrivalled garment for fornication and diarrhoe.

(John Masters)

For so long as one hundred men remain alive, we shall never under any condition submit to the domination of the English. It is not for glory or riches or honours that we fight, but only for liberty, which no good man will consent to loose but with his life.

(The decleration of Arbroath. 1320)



Venice

I have never been in my life so struck by any place as by Venice. It is the wonder of the world. Dreamy, beautiful, inconsistent, impossible, wicked, shadowy, d-able old place! I entered by night and the bright morning that followed is part of me for the rest of my existence.

(Charles Dickens)

Though there are some disagreable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreable as the visitors.

(Henry James)

Venice

Venice has never been painted as she should, never....That foul son of a deal board, Canaletti-to have lived in the middle of it all and left us nothing.

(John Ruskin)

He used to say Venice was an impossible to place to sit down and sketch,'there was something still better around the corner.

(Miss Edith Bronson on Whistler)

Venice

Venice will linger in your mind and wherever you go in life you will feel somewhere over your shoulder, a pink, castellated, shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinnacles of the serenissima.

(James Morris)



'If you read a lot, nothing is great as you've imagined. Venice is - Venice is better'.

(Fran Lebowitz) 

Norfolk

'Often times within the circle of your sight there is neither house nor man visible. A grey church tower or windmill, or the dark brown sail of a wherry in the distance breaks the sense of utter loneliness, but the scene is wild enough to enchain the imagination of many'. 

(George Christopher Davis 1884)

'If this were the time or the place to uphold a paradox, I am half inclined to state that Norfolk is one of the most beautiful of counties'.

(Virginia Woolf)

Norfolk

'I am a Norfolk man and glory in being so'

(Horatio Nelson)



'Oh rare and beautiful Norfolk'

(John Sell Cotman)



Norfolk

'Some counties vaunt themselves in pies and some in meat excel; For turnips of enourmous size fair Norfolk bears the belle'

(Old Rhyme)

'There are few places in England where you can get so much wilderness and desolation of sea and sandhills, wood, green marsh and grey saltings as at Wells in Norfolk.

(W H Hudson)





Allotments

To dig one's own spade into one's own earth! Has life anything better to offer than this?

(Beverly Nichols)

The highest reward for man's toil is not what he gets from it, but what he becomes by it.

(John Ruskin)