13th April 2017 Vienna, Austria
His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales and Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cornwall enter a room in Vienna’s magnificent Hofburg Palace as guests of the President of Austria, Dr Alexander Van der Bellen and the First Lady, Mrs Doris Schmidauer Around 70 journalists are present to record the event. A flurry of camera […]
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11th April 2017 Vienna, Austria
I will be writing a blog soon about the recent visit of Their Royal Highnesses The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall. It was a privilege to welcome them to Vienna; and wonderful to witness the warm welcome they received. During their visit, Their Royal Highnesses met a host of people from all […]
4th April 2017 Vienna, Austria
I began my current posting to Austria on the platform at Salzburg station (Hauptbahnhof) at around midnight on 1 August 2016. My plan was to spend four weeks polishing my German at a top language school in the city and to reacquaint myself with all things Austrian after an absence of 29 years. I got […]
28th March 2017 Vienna, Austria
What do Project NEPTUNE and New Zealand have in common? Both are working to tackle the problem of New Psychoactive Substances (NPS), also known as legal highs. I recently opened an expert panel in Vienna, organised by the UK and New Zealand with the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, on tackling NPS. The New […]
16th March 2017 Vienna, Austria
Which is the most important economic powerhouse in Austria? Amongst the nine Austrian provinces, Vienna has the largest population, followed by Lower Austria and Upper Austria. But more international exports come from Upper Austria than from any other Austrian province. So when I visited Upper Austria recently, my first stop was at Europe’s biggest motor […]
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8th March 2017 Vienna, Austria
When I was in Kyiv, some Ukrainian colleagues used to express scepticism about International Women’s Day. They saw it as tokenism; a relic of the bad old days when Soviet authorities gave lip-service to women’s rights while men dominated positions of power. One result was that although I wrote several blogs to mark International Women’s […]
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28th February 2017 Vienna, Austria
What has been the most unexpected hit video I have put on Twitter during my time as Ambassador in Vienna? The answer is, indeed, not what you would expect. I recently visited the most westernmost province of Austria, Vorarlberg. Lying on Lake Constance (known in German as the Bodensee), and bordering Germany, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, […]
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21st February 2017 Vienna, Austria
My introductory video from last September noted the importance of visiting all parts of Austria; and of the dialects spoken in different regions. You can watch me attempting to learn the wonderful and challenging Tyrolean dialect in the video above. Clearly it’s easier in a snowstorm; up a mountain; in the cable-car going down; or, […]
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16th February 2017 Vienna, Austria
The wind is whistling at the top of the Hungerbergbahn. But my teacher is encouraging. ‘It’s bärig,’ she says. ‘Innsbruck ist bärig’ (‘Innsbruck is terrific’). I repeat; and repeat; and repeat again. I’ve written before about the variety of Austria. A country dissected by great mountains and steep valleys has developed, over centuries, a patchwork of […]
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7th February 2017 Vienna, Austria
I wrote in my blog about modern slavery last month that “modern slavery is happening throughout the world, including in Europe, on a large scale”. So what are we doing about it? More than 200 years ago William Wilberforce led Britain in the fight against slavery – opening the eyes of the world to the […]
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