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…

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 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…

My secret — There’s a cut of meat I always look for in the supermarket. Not a big roast, nothing showy, not unless I’m having a dining room full of guests and that’s vanishingly rare in these pandemic days. Oyster blade. My local often has it packaged up with a crust of spices…

Dave Chappelle and Hate Speech — This morning — Australian time — two articles crossed my desk at ILLUMINATION within a few minutes of each other. Both dealt with a topic that had not until that moment entertained my attention: the recent remarks of comedian Dave Chappelle on a Netflix special. …