Author: Robin Rowland

The whales that travel from Kitimat to Lahaina

There is an interesting connection between Kitimat and Lahaina the site of the Maui fire disaster last week. After I saw the item on CBS Morning  Sunday News last Sunday about the Happy Whale tracking site, I uploaded all the photos I captured of humpback whales in Douglas Channel over the past few years. Of […]

Is it Kitimat or Star Trek’s Delta-Vega?

“There’s something familiar about this place.” I was on a bus tour of Kitimat’s giant $40 billion LNG Canada facility on Saturday, July 8. I’ve never been on site, but had this strange feeling I had seen it before. The LNG Canada Liguified Natural Gas project, is the largest industrial construction project in Canadian historythe […]

It was “a dark and stormy night” in 1813

A dark and stormy night 1813 edition (I don’t usually full post excerpts from my work in progress, I often put far too much into first drafts and then have to drastically cut. This episode of “a dark and stormy night”  I discovered is too good to pass up. I am working on stories about […]

Captain’s log 1819108

  I’ve just completed five days of research for my Pennell Projects at the British National Archives at Kew. (And a couple of weeks earlier I spent the afternoon at the British  Library in London). William Pennell was a diplomat and a spy under diplomatic cover from 1814 to 1832.  That meant I had a […]

Topsham Devon, home of the seafaring Pennell family

Topsham  on the River Exe, in Devon, is the seaport for the larger city of Exeter. In the past week, I have had the chance to explore one of the towns where my roots are, the Pennells, on one main branch of my father’s side of the family. There were villages in the area of […]

The Ottawa protestors are partying on the 80th anniversary of a real crime against humanity the sook ching massacre in Singapore.

(Warning: This post may be triggering to people or their families who were victims of real crimes against humanity. I didn’t want to raise the temperature of the  Ottawa protest debate but the continuation of the blockades and remembering the anniversary date compelled me to write this). The so-called freedom convoy protestors on the streets […]

My own private London. A gay life in the first year of It’s a Sin.

Version 2.0   Updated October 2023 Long read (Contains spoilers for It’s a Sin and may trigger some AIDS survivor readers. Names in quotation marks are pseudonyms. Many of the names from the 80s aren’t mentioned because I don’t remember. Other names are real, taken from my occasional diary or letters I wrote) This is an […]