Purgatory in Paradise Cove They say that the best travel stories are the ones that go supremely wrong. The train that leaves the station with all your stuff aboard while you get a gelato on the platform. All you have left is a handful of kopecks and a mango ripple cone. The toxic tummy…

Stand up and cheer the real hero — “The Slap”. Everyone saw it — it was the lead item in the news bulletins and breaking news flashes, after all — and everyone has an opinion. Well, think about it. Every person sitting in that auditorium walked up a red carpet lined with high-priced photographers feeding their images to…

How a backwoods preacher became the creator of the cosmos — As a student of philosophy I’m always interested in how people perceive the cosmos in an organised way. A shared view of how the universe works relies on a certain amount of faith. If someone says that lightning is made by a thunder god, and they say it convincingly enough…

Take your seats, please — All must go. Closing down. Outta here. Goin’ fishin’ Barber shop on Main Street. The mall’s cut the customers, chopped the butcher, the baker makes no dough. Chairs x 2 Old school. Leather, iron and chrome. A pretty penny at the antique mart, I’ll bet. Door tinkles as I turn…

Are you the one in a thousand who does this thing? — We all have different ways of taking in information. Medium assumes that for most people it’s reading slabs of text on a screen.

Come with me on a voyage of the imagination — I’ve had enough of Covid and lockdowns, vaccinations and masks and tests. Haven’t you? Like the rest of the world as November turned into December and 2021 looked like it might end without taking the whole world with it, I was anticipating a return to normality. The twice-postponed Japanese trek…

The independent traveller who refused to let Covid push him off the road — One naturally expects a travel book written in the last year to come out as something more exciting than a routine tale of airports, museums, and hotels progressing in a predictable order but oh my god, there are reasons why tourism took a nosedive during the pandemic and this book…