​2017 ended and 2018 began with public tours on the Discover Manchester programme. This is where a group of guides under the heading Manchester Guided Tours have teamed up to provide tours everyday at 11am: that’s every day including Christmas Day. They’re excellent value, under £10, and the tours provide a general introduction to Manchester rather than being themed on a specific subject.

For the guide it’s a voyage of discovery too, as you have no idea who might turn up and where they might come from. The two small groups I picked up from the 11am rendezvous location outside Central Library before and after New Year, included people from Germany, Canada, Belgium, USA, China, as well as closer to home in Preston, Prestwich, Stockport and Manchester.

For these tours my usual route is St Peter’s Square, Central Library, Town Hall Extension, Albert Square, St Ann’s Church, Royal Exchange with a finish at the Cathedral, or at the rear of the latter, at the National Football Museum. This route hits several prominent city centre buildings while also covering a richness of history that no other provincial city can compete with in the UK. Yeah, I know, that’s a bold statement, but I stand by it. Come on the tour and you’ll understand why. It’s also a route that takes guests inside a lot of buildings, which as well as providing occasionally welcome shelter, provides a more comprehensive tour than simply keeping on the streets.

On 2 January there were two guests from Lubbock, Texas. One of this pair lives in Cologne for the time being and was showing his friend some other parts of Europe with a non-traditional itinerary of Dublin, Manchester, Antwerp and then back to Cologne. “What’s Lubbock, Texas, like?” I asked. “It’s got the Buddy Holly museum, is in a cotton growing area, is very flat, has a quarter of a million inhabitants but it’s four hours from the nearest  major city,” said one of the friends. “You could describe it as the most disappointing city in the USA,” said his pal with a grin. “Wow,” I said, “they should market it that way, people flock to places with a point of exception. The city authorities could have a campaign called ‘Lubbock, it always disappoints.’”

Strangely enough this observation from citizens of the city made me want to go to Lubbock. Places that seem dour to the natives often have something worthwhile to experience for visitors. Part of the paradox of tourism is that residents feel contempt for qualities visitors find fascinating. Not that I'm a big Buddy Holly fan. 

My last tour of 2017 had included an extremely dapper gentleman with a bow tie.  When I'd asked the guests where they hailed from, our dandy self-described as an Indian Italian Scouser working at Manchester Royal Infirmary. I said not only are you the first Indian Italian Scouser I’ve ever met but you’re the best dressed Indian Italian Scouser I’ve ever met. The two Canadians on the group were visiting because the male half of the couple was a football fanatic who supports Everton Football Club passionately through a family connection. He was here to visit the National Football Museum and the two Manchester clubs before attending a game at Goodison Park in Liverpool.

Couple of final points.

The best thing I overheard in a Manchester pub over the New Year was while waiting at a bar, and a man said to his lady, “I look on life as a comedy which is my tragedy, you look on life as a tragedy which is your tragedy.” It sounded Wildean and profound, although I’m not sure it is profound at all. I'm still trying to sort out its meaning but it had fine ring to it.

Meanwhile there was a pleasant tweet from Allied London about the long derelict London Road Fire Station. This was posted on New Year’s Eve. It read '2017: Planning Permission obtained, a year of historic tours with @JonathSchofield and a special collaboration with @wallpapermag #WallpaperComposed - featuring a enchanting performance from @JescaHoop here's to an historic 2018 #HouseOfLondonRoad.'

​Truly, taking those tours around that venerable space incorporating the living memories of people who had lived and worked, there were some of my favourite moments of the past two years.

So in a few days I will have completed my first of sixteen walks for Manchester International Festival. These sold out second quickest after Bjork apparently. That's 480 people I'll be taking around. 

It just shows that publicity is everything. The brochure and website of this incredibly well-regarded festival has worked its magic on my tours. I can't wait to start. There will be a few surprises for people but then on a tour called Rabbit holes, Radicals and Pioneers, there'd have to be.  

A curious incident happened on a Haunted Underworld tour. There was one young woman who from beginning to end had her fingers in her ears and her eyes tight shut and was being guided round by her friend. 

When the terrors of the underground had been negotiated and the screams had faded I asked the woman whether she'd enjoyed it. 

"Yes," she said in the fresh air above ground, "tremendously."

"But you didn't see any of it or hear any of it?" I said. 

"I know I was too frightened to look but I still thought it was brilliant," she said. 

Saturday 7 March 2015 and I had two tours, a full to bursting Haunted Underworld tour and a more modestly proportioned Tour of Uninteresting Objects. 

The backdrop was less delightful. A small number – maybe 300 or so – EDL were bothering the city centre. The tiny, ridiculous yet noisy EDL - the so-called English Defence League; not my England, not my defence league so how dare they adopt England’s name. There were police everywhere, fences to corral them and a helicopter overhead. Mostly the EDL seemed interested in occupying Walkabout sports bar and drinking gassy alcohol based on Continental lagers.

As a tour guide the main practical problem was the helicopter. Jeez those things are hard to project over even with a foghorn for a voice - as I'm proud to possess.

The two groups were very diverse, the EDL would have hated them. The Haunted Underworld tour included people from across Manchester but also Aberdeen, the Isle of Man, Romania, Spain and Turkey. The two Spaniards, both women, had settled in Manchester and were respectively an architect and a civil engineer.  They were skilled workers doing their bit, enjoying life in Manchester, although they felt Manchester was needlessly demolishing old buildings.

This confused me a little as this isn’t happening so much at present. Century House was the one the Spaniards mentioned but we disagreed about this, after all the adjacent buildings were pigsties, the worst of the eighties. Still the council and the planning department does have to be closely monitored over its ideas about the city centre, it needs to be watched with a beady eye in case expedience is allowed to destroy heritage.

Latest sketchy plans for the area between Bootle Street and Jackson’s Row appear to not include the Sir Ralph Abercromby pub, a two hundred and some year old pub, one of two surviving structures from the time of the Peterloo Massacre in the location where it happened.

The EDL meatheads were bothersome on the second tour. There was an anxious moment as a group, or to use the correct collective noun for EDL a lump, of them loped past the tour party at St John’s Gardens. It was a curious day all round for the Tour of Uninteresting Objects. As I talked close to the Commercial Hotel on Liverpool Road, one of the oldest, and probably the very oldest, railway hotel in the world, a drinker, about eight pints in, came over the road to listen. He swayed slightly and squinted a bit but didn’t interrupt. He fell off the kerb at one point. Maybe it was my delivery.

There was a Chilean couple on the tour with a baby. The man worked at the University I think, or it may have been the hospital, the woman was studying at the University, and they’d been here eighteen months. 

“We love Manchester,” the woman had said. 

“There's so much to do, it’s a great city to live in,” the man said. 

“Our little girl,” said the woman looking down at the baby strapped to her chest, ”was born here. I’m so proud to say she is a Mancunian.”

It was said with such evident pride it made me smile and wonder. Here were recent immigrants who had a clear sense of identity already. Here were two ‘foreigners’ settled in Manchester with a young native in their arms who will share two cultures as she grows. 

Meanwhile the streets of the city had been bothered by ‘natives’ of my Britain, people who seem lost and marooned, who seem stuck out-of-time, impotent. The EDL men and women (mainly men) I saw seemed blind to the advantages and opportunities an open and pluralistic society offers them. They’ve turned inwards, turned ‘the other’ into a problem and in the process turned themselves into a greater problem. 

The urbane Chileans and Spaniards on my tours appeared to embody what I would consider my British values better than would-be nationalists of my own country. In limited numbers fortunately the EDL moved through Manchester’s Saturday streets, trapped in narrow hatreds, their faces angry, their hands balled in fists, just a mere misplaced stare away from violence.

But they were a hornet on a buffalo's back. An irritant, a distraction. They and that helicopter. Manchester's city centre is back to normal now as colourful and diverse as ever. 

I did a public speaking engagement in Fumo Restaurant recently. I was sat opposite two fine Hungarian chaps who were attending a conference in the city. 

One was a huge Manchester United fan. There were three hotels that delegates were staying in and as fate would have it he'd been allocated Hotel Football - the new hotel opposite Old Trafford stadium owned my past Manchester United stars such as Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville. 

"Do you want a Quays or a Stadium view?" the receptionist had asked when he'd checked in. In his charming accent and imaginative English our lovely visitor said, "I couldn't bloody believe my lucky stars, I fell to my knees and thanked God for this privilege, and shouted so very loudly, "You are an Angel sent from Heaven, please the Stadium view!" I leave the curtains open so the big red neon sign of Manchester United can sleep with me."

IT was late 2001.

He looked like some sort of cleverly put together puppet of a softly spoken young middle-class southern lad. In fact he was probably described in ‘the counties’, as upper-middle class, a nuance which is impossible in the North of England.

He was called Damian, I think, and was impeccably neat with a slight frame and a voice that seemed trained from the cot for Radio 4.

“What’s your idea?” I said.

“I’m concerned about the demise of Polynesian peoples on low-lying islands,” he said enunciating every syllable.

“Should global warming involve an increase in sea levels then whole cultures may disappear,” he said with the look of a man riven by personal tragedy.

“Sounds serious,” I said. “So where will you go?”

“I’m going to the island of Fukayu-up. I’m going to record the experiences and lives of the women – the mothers - and how they are facing the possible extinction of their society. And you? I can tell you have a North Country accent.”

North Country? Bless him, the decayed description of a retired vicar in a Jane Austen novel. (By the way I may have made up that island name).

But I had to admire his cunning. Dying cultures – good one, ticked lots of boxes. I’d have to watch Damian.

You see, we were at war.

We were the last men standing in Radio 4’s ‘Journey of a Lifetime’ competition. Several thousand people had entered the annual comp giving details of why their dream journey should be selected.

The prize for the sole winner was a fully financed BBC trip to their destination. On return home, weather-worn and heroic, their travellers tales would be broadcast on Radio 4.

After two interviews already, in the home of co-sponsors the Royal Geographical Society close to Hyde Park, it had come down to this, me and Damian. There was no second prize.

“I want to go to Manchester.”


My rival looked puzzled.

“ I have an old Times Atlas of the World,” I said. “One day I found tucked away in the Bolivian rainforest, on an Amazon tributary, another Manchester. It’s the oddest, most inaccessible British city namesake in the world. The nearest road appears to be at least two hundred miles away, the only access is down a river called Rio Manuripi. I want to find out why it’s there and if the place still exists. The last record seems to be a decades old Bolivian airforce survey.”

He was getting it now.

“And of course, next year there’s the Commonwealth Games in Manchester , and that fits as well,” he said. “Are you going at this from an ecological angle or an anthropological one?”

“Neither. Timing's perfect with the Commonwealth Games and it should be a lot of fun,” I said. “I’ll take United and City footy shirts, bottles of Vimto and gallons of Holt’s beer. Me and the villagers will have a great time. Just getting there will make great radio.”

The panel consisted of Richard Bannerman, Editor of Documentaries at the BBC, a man I forget from the Royal Geographic Society, and Benedict Allen, the broadcaster and explorer who had an accent that made Damian’s look common.

When it was my turn I gave everything. I sold my dream hard. I described how I would deliver pure, bloody, broadcast magic to drip mellifluously into the ear of the charmed Radio 4 listener.

Then towards the end, on the spur of the moment, I came up with an idea. On my return I would aim to organise an exhibition in a museum in Manchester with the photographs and memorabilia I’d taken. Good one, I thought to myself.

After the interview, Damian and I sat around awkwardly for a while, until I was called back in.

“Is your time frame of three weeks long enough?” the panel asked. “Have you fully understood the perils of rainforest travel, the disorientation, the loneliness, the potential health hazards and wildlife dangers? Do you know what equipment will be needed?”

“I've already bought a hat,” I said weakly. "With a little mosquito net."

“Damian’s got it,” they said.

He went to his atoll. On radio he delivered a sober account of life on the low reef, although he didn’t seem to be concentrating on the women anymore, the cheat.

I got a couple of letters after the interview. One was from Bannerman saying ‘sorry’ but ‘the nature of your journey made it the more unpredictable of the two ideas’. Benedict Allen wrote to say he’d been rooting for me and hinted he'd been outvoted. He’d loved the exploring for exploring sake and doing it for fun – don’t give up on it, he wrote.

I'm thinking maybe next week. Anybody coming?

HERE are people on the Anthony Burgess and Literary Tour of Manchester on 11 October. They're in the Burgess Foundation archive room and one of the guests is holding up Burgess's own copy of Clockwork Orange, the cover of which Burgess defaced. 

Will Carr, manager of the Foundation, is far right. He had some funny stories. Apparently Burgess was asked to write a Bond screenplay for The Spy Who Loved Me. None of his script was used apart from giving the villain an undersea base. 

Carr said: "I think the main problem was Burgess replaced the traditional shoot-em-up scene at the climax of the movie with a food-eating contest between Bond and the evil Karl Stromberg." 

He had a wicked sense of humour Mr Burgess and he still got his writer's fee.

A GROUP of art and architecture lovers from a month ago.

A VIENNESE group I took out a couple of weeks ago. They were city officials looking at how Manchester had rejuvenated some of its inner areas. Of course, many of the schemes wound down after the 2007/8 doldrums when the money for example in Urban Splash's New Islington development simply ran out. “In our case,” said the boss of the Viennese group dolefully, "we have another problem. As a city we have too much money. It's been a problem for decades.” The others nodded sagely and I wondered what on earth he could mean.

VAST sixty plus group of British and French exchange kids in Albert Square. Somewhere in there is Tony Alston from Urmston Grammar who booked the tour. The people close to the Town Hall entrance are a wedding group and not my guests, in case people think I was taking the whole of Manchester out. 

NOT sure which tour this was two or three weeks ago: maybe the Haunted Underworld or the Tour of Uninteresting Objects or the Best Cobblestones of Manchester - maybe not the last one.

THE INCREDIBLE INTERIORS tour reaches the four days re-opened Gaskell House. John Williams, not shown, did a splendid job here, including the mad story of how the dippy friend of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte hid behind the Drawing Room curtain when guests came to visit. Here's an article I wrote about Gaskell House - it's a very lovely place. 

INSIDE the Ukranian Catholic Church during the Cheetham Hill Faith Heritage Tour. I am not a man of religion but I find this a moving tour, one I do every September.

We also visited a Sikh temple, a mosque, a synagogue and a CofE church. There were fifty people from all communities on a coach and we were welcomed everywhere in an exchange of ideas and cultures that made everybody – it seemed to me – more comfortable in our bones about each other and about this tolerant country we live within. 

There were humorous moments. 

Danny who works at the synagogue in a non-religious capacity was asked by a lady with a cut-glass accent, “Do Jewish boys have to be circumscribed?” “Nobody asked me,” deadpanned Danny.

In the Sikh temple, a lad in a United top and turban was helping out. One of the tour group, an older person said, “You speak very good English." “I hope so,” he said, “I was born round the corner, I’m British.”

This was a generational thing - amusing for that. But one thing is sure. It’s only through exposure – in the best possible sense of the word – to each other that cultures can connect. 


As stated we do the coach tour every year. We should do it every week. Every school should do it. If we lose the fear of 'the other', the fear they may steal our jobs, beliefs, culture, then we enrich ourselves, become broader minded: essentially we become more intelligent.

TWO men in dog-collars approached me at the first of two public tours on Saturday 19 July.

"Are you vicars in town for a holy convention of some sort?" I said thinking should two gentlemen of the cloth be coming on a Haunted Underworld tour given its devilish destination under the city?

"We're not vicars we're Roman Catholic priests," said one of them with a smile.

"Oh ok," I said, deciding this didn't need an apology. After all you can't actually see a vow of celibacy. 

Not that I need have worried. It turned out they were part of a stag party with a Father Ted theme. This was a relief, the chosen theme meant they'd decided to forego the obligatory inflated doll or fake breasts.

Nearby an older lady was making notes as I introduced the tour.

"It's pitch dark down there. You're more than welcome to write down what I say but it might be difficult to make sense of the words afterwards," I said. 

"Perhaps her pen is illuminous," suggested a guest as Spiderman wandered past.

It was a strange day in the city, not least because it was the Comic Con event at Manchester Central which attracts a multitude of people dressed up as Comic book action heroes.

Spiderman was being accompanied by an arachnid with a sword. I'm not sure which story that appears in but the costume was very good.

I posted a tweet picture of the Haunted Underworld tour later and @SteMangini replied, 'I wouldn't like a right hook off her in the front. She looks well pissed off and very handy.'

He was talking about the lady in the picture at the top of this page with the blue shirt over the red t-shirt. 

@ForzaFerrariK8 (for it is she) tweeted back, 'I am very handy. I wasn't pissed off, just being in character as a professional demon hunter and ghost killer.'

I've never taken a professional demon  hunter around before. Very pleasing. 

Earlier in the week there was a women from Kazakhstan and that was good too because she represented the 99th nationality I've taken around Manchester since I started guiding in 1996. 

Who will be my 100th? 

Where are all the Madagascans when you need them? 

Immediately after the Haunted Underworld it was straight on to one of my favourites, the Incredible Interiors tour. I'd made a recruit from the first tour too, a brainy Russian lady who lives in Audenshaw with her British husband. 

A group of over twenty people joined me. 

We went to the Royal Exchange, the Portico Library, Room Restaurant, Rates Hall in the Town Hall Extension, Central Library and finished in Albert Hall. Along for the ride came my brother Charles and my first cousin once removed (I had to look that up, she's my grandfather's brother's daughter), Georgina. 

Actually we didn't finish in Albert Hall. We finished in the oldest building of the day, although it might not look it, the Abercrombie pub. This probably predates the 1806 Portico Library by a couple of years or so. In the Abercrombie we didn't look at the architecture we drank beer and talked.

At some point in the tour, I think in Central Library, I'd pointed out one of the guests, Beth Knowles, as an elected city centre councillor. I think I was being complimentary about the council's work in Central Library but condemning the council for the mess of the Library Walk 'intrusion' - background here.

On the tour were another of our Eastern friends, this time a Russian couple who lives in the city centre. 

"Should I call you Lady, it's very grand being a councillor, no?" asked one of them, Daniel, to Beth Knowles. I'm sure he was being tongue in cheek. Then he complained about the litter provision in the city centre. It's a councillor's lot.

The couple were from Tolyatti in Russia which is a version of the Italian name Togliatti and is a hangover from the Soviet Union. Palmiro Togliatti was the longest serving leader of the Italian Communist Party. 

We were a polite group and nobody mentioned current day controversies involving Vladimir Putin and Russia. Maybe after a couple of more beers we might have. I regret that. It would have been interesting to hear the opinions of Russians settled here.  

Special thanks to Emma Marigliano, the Head Librarian of the Portico and Joel Wilkinson of the Trof group. The latter operates Albert Hall along with standout Manchester venues such as The Deaf Institute (a gig venue and bar), Gorilla and the Trof bars.

Both these lovely people were very gracious in opening up their respective venues for the group during their own time. They were also excellent in catching guests' jaws as they dropped, both the Portico and Albert Hall are spectacular in their own ways. 

Room Restaurant, another private space, should be mentioned for letting me interrupt their guests and diners by talking in a loud voice as I explained the importance of the old Reform Club it occupies. 

One of the best lines came from the self-deprecating Emma Marigliano who began with, "Welcome to the Portico which has been here since 1806 just like me."

As I left to go home three Power Rangers, a fairy and some sort of Witch-queen with a toy semi-automatic gun sauntered by. 

It all felt somehow very right.

I hired a bike on my press trip to the Faroes - or rather the tourist authorities did. You see I thought I'd do a bit of self-guiding round the islands, which would make it easier for them as they wouldn't have to plan anything. And I'd have free time.

The bike shop was owned by a man called Daniel. Or maybe the shop was called Danyul. 

"This is perhaps unique," I remember saying casting my eyes around the place. 

"Why?" said the owner of the shop who may or may not have been called Daniel.

"Because I've never seen seen a shop that sells fully fitted kitchens and bicycles and nothing else. I especially like how you've stacked the bikes between the kitchen units."

"I was worried I wasn't making enough money from the bikes so I went for the kitchens as well. It seems to work." 

"With the limited marketplace presented by a small population I suppose it pays to be flexible," I said. 

In the Faroes the roads are empty of traffic but filled by the wind. 

On the four mile hill out of Torshavn I was determined and beat a force 8 gale into submission. I was rewarded with a two and a half mile down hill to the most historic spot on the islands which turned out to be a medieval ruin with an ugly cap to save it from further ruin. I think I would prefer it ruined. The name of village was Kirkjubour.

The ruin was a church, apparently the first stone building the islanders had ever built dating from the late 1200s. This seemed a tad late and maybe even lazy. 

Since there are very few trees on the islands and the whole place is filled with rock - albeit tough basalt - then building houses from driftwood and deliveries of timber from Norway seemed somehow avoiding the obvious building material - stone - all around.

Better by far than the scruffy ruin of the oldest stone building was the trad house next door which the owners had left open for visitors to investigate.

This was a delightful essay in the plastic nature of wood. It was a lovely place, a liveable place, warm. There were odd touches too, three stools were composed of whale vertebrae. 

Outside I sat on a wall and ate a sandwich as the ocean slapped on the rocks. To the south west islands dipped in and out of cloud. On one island a village of twenty houses only reachable by boat looked like the last place on earth. How strange to live in such isolation.

The healthy stink of seaweed dankly perfumed the air. 

It was beautiful.

I followed the west coast of Streymoy north past a village called Unpronounceable to the village called Howthehelldotheysaythat with three houses which made hamlets look tiny. 

In the first village was a school with a playground with the best sea view in the world. There was an abandoned football there that was either all the joy of youth yet to be bittered by experience or a small plastic sphere somebody had carelessly forgotten. The Faroese landscape makes you think epic thoughts, you can't help yourself.

There seems to be a department in the Faroese government which artfully leaves kids toys about in villages, footballs, kids sit-on tractors and so on. You never see kids, you never see anybody in these villages, but you see toys and signs of life as though people have just left or are just about to arrive. It's unsettling.

I cycled on. After a preposterous gorge, as though somebody had hit the coast with an axe, I continued up a very steep hill and disappeared into mist. This didn't bother me. The good thing about mist in June on the Faroes is that you don't have to worry about it getting dark. 

I'd seen on the map that four miles up the coast road there was a path which took me east back, over a single mountain to Torshavn. It was a wonderful short cut and armed with a mountain bike, I was looking forward to it. 

Unfortunately the map was a liar, the cartographer a clown.

The map said a path followed a stream up to the ridge. I couldn't see the ridge because although I had come down out of the mist it was still covering the higher ground. 

Sod it, let's go I thought. Push the bike up and then ride down the other side. 

A third of mile up the non-path marked by the map-making liar I hit a snag. The grass path that was merely the same grass as elsewhere with oyster catchers, curlews, flocks of geese and ravens for company, hit the mist line. I stared at the fibbing map again and the path that wasn't there. It said the path followed the stream and I was following the stream so I must be on the right non-track I decided.

Another ten minutes of toiling the mist cleared for 120 seconds. I couldn't believe what I saw. There was still no path but there was a seventy foot cliff with a waterfall. I looked back at how far I'd dragged the bike. I really didn't want to return that way and have to cycle all those miles and hills back to Torshavn.

I looked at the cliff again before the view disappeared. 

There were a couple of possible routes.

It took me half an hour but I managed it although the bike and I reversed our relationship. It rode me. Or rather I carried it, which is the same thing. 

It was a heavy bike but by edging on ledges I got there, frequently going ahead to find a way and leaving the bike behind like an injured companion - one you weren't friends with any more because they are no help at all. Fortunately the mist was so thick I didn't know how far there was to fall. Ignorance can be an advantage. 

On the other side, buoyed by my derring-do, I started riding down the mountain. 

Idiot. 

The front wheel got stuck in a hollow and I flew over the handle bars but because the ground was so steep I landed on my feet. I landed at a speed just shy of Usain Bolt's PB and careened down the hill in the style of a comedy villain in a Buster Keaton movie.

When I stopped, by throwing myself to my left onto some turf, I looked back. That arrogant machine had wedged itself in the hollow as though it were in a bike rack. I was on my arse and it was still standing. I hated it.

I'd also been whacked on the knee by my camera swinging round. Jeez that hurt. I scrambled for the map. It was a least another mile and half of rough terrain until I hit a road. 

I had to go back for the bike. Then I hobbled, my knee in agony, out of the mist line carrying the bloody thing. I yelped and limped to a road and then freewheeled down into Torshavn.

The hotel receptionist looked up as I entered the hotel with my lazy and murderous machine and placed it in the safe room. 

"What happened?" he said looking at my mud spattered clothes, worrying about his carpets.

"I fell off the bike on the mountain," I said.

"Were you wearing a helmet?" he asked.

"Not on my bloody knee," I said hopping to the lift. 

"That bike hates humans," I shouted over my shoulder. 

THE flight is incredible into the Faroe Islands.

The main airport is on Vagar, a separate island from Streymoy which holds the capital Torshavn. The picture above was taken at about 10.30pm on the June week I visited last year. It's light late in summer in the North. The Faroes are 200 miles north of mainland Scotland, 280 miles south east of Iceland and 480 miles west of Norway.

In World War II its strategic position controlling access into the North Atlantic led to its occupation by the British. 

The airport you land at on Vagar island was was built by British forces. 

It's sited between mountains over the largest fresh water lake in the island which almost - as if imagined by Tolkien - runs right up to a cliff above the sea and then melodramatically overflows over the edge in a waterfall. 

It's a good introduction - as you fly past the lake and the waterfall - to the unhinged landscape of the Faroes and its Maritime Subartic climate. 

At the airport there was a taxi driver waiting to whisk me to my hotel. 

The driver was a bull of man, proud of being Faroese, who was so big he found it hard to fit in his seat - let's call him John because I've forgotten his name. 

We were sharing the cab with a Scots couple in their sixties. Nice people. They'd come for the bird-watching. The Faroes is grand for that. Birds love the islands like sun worshippers love Balearics. And where the birds go people with binoculars aren't far behind. A harmless and peaceful bunch those twitchers.

John the taxi-driver was the same as taxi-drivers the world over: direct to the point of bluntness but still an insight into how a nation and a people work. 

As we drove away from the airport we passed the lake pictured above and John said as we passed a turn off, "This is where people park before heading to jump off the rocks at the end of the lake above the sea. Problem is it's not so far down the cliff so they sometime miss killing themselves. You can see them now and then dragging themselves back up here to drive home again."

John paused and with a smile said, "A bit wiser, maybe." And then another laugh. "Then they go home and have dinner with their families, say it was a quiet day. Who knows?"

Later as we passed some sheep, I asked, "Do you eat a lot of local lamb and fish?"

"No we export it mainly. It's easier to import the food from Denmark."  The Faroes are a self-governing country under the sovereignty of the Danish crown. So much for local sourcing in the 21st century.

We careened over bridges and through tunnels amidst a bare almost primeval landscape of huge sounds between islands and mountains with rocky caps.

John and I talked demographics. I wondered about the claim in the tourist brochure that over 20 languages are spoken in the Faroe Islands. Since this is a very remote North Atlantic archipelago with a population of 49,000, many of whom live in Torshavn (18,000) I found it hard to credit. 

"My wife is Kenyan," said John.

"Really, did you meet her because she came for work?" I said.

John turned from the wheel and looked at me, seemingly driving for half a mile along a cliff edge without looking at the road.

"Now why would a black woman from Africa be working here?" he laughed. "It's not easy to get to as you've found."

"So how did you meet?" I asked.

"I met her on an internet dating site and invited her over. That's one of the reasons there are so many languages now. Lot's of internet brides and girlfriends. Perhaps there's only one person speaking that language but I suppose it counts when the tourist people write their things."

Later on the trip I would see a couple of Thai ladies, the odd Vietnamese, a Nigerian woman. In fact there were numbers of women from across the world. 

Now within the legislature of the laws of unforeseen outcomes who'd have thought the digital age would lead to demographic revolution. Within a tiny population such as the Faroes these internet brides and girlfriends, who all seem to have kids, are changing the mono-culture of the islands. 

Give it a few years and these lonely rocks in the North Atlantic might have one of the most diverse populations around, all because the internet opens a communication bridge between a windswept hillside in Streymoy and the packed suburbs of Nairobi.

As we got to Torshavn, John laid down another slab of dry wit.

"This is Main Street," he said. "One, two, three, four, five, now it's finished. It's a five second street for driving along." 

Torshavn was tiny, unspectacularly pretty, especially close to the harbour. The hotel was efficient but old fashioned. Over dinner I kept smiling at the taxi-driver's words. Tour guides, informal or formal, come in many guises and sometimes their unstudied insights into locations are worth several tons of official tourist literature. 

I stopped smiling and giggling to myself when I realised as I was on a press trip solo. Other people in the restaurant were wondering whether I was an axe-killer taking his final meal before taking terrible revenge on the innocent for his perceived grievances.

Or maybe they thought I was a bird-watcher who'd spotted that day the rare albino puffin and was feeling smug.