An email this morning from Lonely Planet woke me from the blog-paralysis I’ve been suffering for the past few weeks. Sometimes it’s hard to stay motivated: is anyone out there actually reading these posts, apart from my three best friends and a couple of loyal supporters? (You know who you are. Thank you.) Anyway, I …
This is the story of a sound. While travelling around Switzerland with a group of writers in 2016 I had an encounter with a sound as wonderful as any sight we saw in that spectacular country. We were in the charming small town of Oberhofen, on the edge of Lake Thun (one of the two …
When I visit a country for the first time, I try to read a novel written or set there. For my Philippines trip last month, I chose Noli Me Tangere by José Rizal. I knew nothing about it except that the title kept coming up in Google searches for ‘novels set in the Philippines’. I downloaded …
Sitting across the aisle from a little girl of about five or six years old, I was privileged to overhear her commentary on the excitement of taking off in a plane. As soon as we became airborne, the little girl looked gleefully at her mother and even smaller sister, and past them out …
