I’ve been travelling a lot recently. 122 journeys in the last ten days. And I don’t mean down to the local shops – I’ve been to Cyprus, Kenya, Poland, the USA, India, Greece… Outer space…
Though no longer an expat, at least not in Mayotte, I still get email alerts of new threads on the expat blog’s Mayotte forum. (Actually, Mayotte being French, ‘expat’ is something of a misnomer, but…
You can never be too careful who you write about. In One Green Bottle there’s a passage which I thought quite inoffensive, where a couple of young boys ‘borrow’ their uncle’s rifle and go out to…
I haven’t been up to much lately. Maybe due to the weather. We’re in Cambridge right now – one day bright and freezing, the next day mild and wet. Both of which induce me to hibernate. There…
Tiki and Percy were friends. It hadn’t always been so. When Tiki arrived, Percy had been there a dozen years. ‘Where on earth’, he wondered, ‘has this grotesque lump of wood come from?’ Tiki was equally…
Last week I was in Lyon for the Jéco, which stands for Journées de l’Economie. Now economics isn’t really my field – I was accompanying Mrs. B, who knows far more about it than I…
I suppose you could create a fictional character who was xenophobic, misogynistic, grotesque and despicable. And for good measure, you could give him a ridiculous hairpiece and have him run for President. But what would…
Sorting photos is tricky. Do you do it thematically? Chronologically? By location? Time and space being fairly constant during our Mayotte interval, I went for thematic, but the categories are fuzzy. For example I’ve got…
GD’s discussion of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite on the Writers’ Co-op got me thinking, in a roundabout sort of way, about naked torsos. Actually, his post isn’t about the whole meteorite, just a bit of it…
I sometimes say that all you need to write is a notebook and a pen. Airport departure lounge, dentist’s waiting room, park bench, Starbucks – just plonk yourself down and write. Virginia Woolf added a…