The leopard skin shirt was a sign. The aviators covering the eyes and the jaw that moved left to right, right to left were also signs. You didn’t get men like him in China, but then again this was not really China. We needed to...
Category - Travel
Picture the scene Etta – you’ve seen it before of course, you were there, but it’s doubtful that you remember it now: you are in your dining room at the table, your big eyes are looking out as you sit in your high...
My dad turned seventy this week. There have been several points over the last twelve months when we didn’t think he’d make it: an extremely aggressive form of prostate cancer the principal reason. Towards the end of...
There are moments in life when we get to experience freedom. They are rare and fleeting. When they happen, you know. This is because you occupy the instant so completely that everything else disappears. All that you know, all...
It smells of buxom, boisterous women: bosoms tumbling from man-made fabric folds, galloping towards a finish line somewhere far beyond the dawn. Cigarettes and Cinzano; short chubby fingers climbing an inner thigh, a sharp song...
The thing is, I am in heaven right now. Well, I am not in heaven yet, but at the gates about to cross over. Looking in, I see records. Thousands upon thousands of records. In crates stacked on top of each other, six deep, ceiling...
Would you be able to beat a monkey with a stick? I mean really beat it. Hit it more than once, repeatedly in fact. Disable it. More than one monkey too. A handful. A gang. An army of monkeys? These were the questions I had been...
We have been lost on the island of Gulangyu for hours in the dark, humid night. … It did not occur to us that this island would actually be free from all transport. It was something nice to write in the guidebooks and...
You had to climb up over two hundred stairs to reach the room where I lived in Hanoi. There was no bathroom, no toilet or sink on the top floor – just my little room with its narrow bed and a single window overlooking the...
