It’s the middle of April in Quebec City, the sun is high and the sky is a cool, clear blue. Not that you’d know it was Spring. The city is frozen: framed in snow drifts, carpeted in ice. As I walked around in the early morning, I have to tred carefully, minding each step doesn’t land me on my […]
Feeling A Connection In Canadian Coffee Shops
In a New Zealand-inspired coffeeshop in central Toronto, the young, hip Canadian barista is making me a dirty chai – that’s a chai latte with an all-important shot of espresso: possibly the greatest crossover of all time – while we discuss The State of Things. “The world feels so crazy right now,” says the barista, with […]
Life’s too short not to drink Campari in the street in Paris on a Monday
I was probably feeling a little too pleased with myself. That must have been it. A Monday morning, up before the dawn, I had – swaddled in my faux fur coat, my comfy trainers on and coffee held jauntily aloft – sailed through all the usual scans and checks to take my seat on a Eurostar. It was a day trip to Paris; a […]
On The Edge: A Trip To The Seven Sisters Cliffs
“Today I will be happier than a seagull with a stolen chip.” So declared the sign in the pub, where seven of us filled up on fish-finger sandwiches and pints of ale ahead of a blustery walk across the Seven Sisters. I can’t believe I’d not been to Eastbourne before – especially as I actually grew up in another Eastbourne, in Wellington, New Zealand. […]
Solitude in the Scottish Borders
I couldn’t tell you exactly when I became an introvert, but somewhere between the constant craving for company in my early twenties and the sudden delight at cancelled plans in my early thirties, I turned into one. Time on my own is as necessary to my ability to function as physical exercise. Or coffee. And while introverts […]
A Narrowboat Escape
Messing about on boats is one of those innate New Zealand pastimes that come with the territory of a Kiwi upbringing. (Ironically, this upbringing included many a warning that one should never actually “mess about” on a boat. ‘Have fun in the water but do what you oughta’, right kids?) Growing up, my dad would take my brothers […]
In Search of the Sólheimasandur DC-3
The plane has been there since 1973. To look at the thing now – the torso of an aircraft, riddled with bullets, left to erode on a black beach in southern Iceland – you’d imagine something sinister happened. A tragic crash, a plane shot down in battle, a Bermuda-triangle-style missing airliner. The eeriness of this rusting wreck is its greatest allure. If you’d prefer to keep it […]
The Money Makers of Paris
How often do you think about money? Currency, I mean. Those coins in your pocket. What’s their story? The first time I went to Europe, the Euro had been in place about a year. On my debut visit to Paris, half of the menus were still in francs, yet francs themselves were proving increasingly harder to come by. At the time I feigned relief […]
Right Foot Forward
Funny, isn’t it, the things you get self-conscious about. My whole life I quietly resented little quirks of my features – my nose, my teeth, the usual things people fret about, worrying how they look to the rest of the world, despite the fact that all anyone else thinks is that it’s just your FACE. […]
David Bowie: The Babe With The Power
Today in the moments after waking I discovered two things: 1) that David Bowie wasn’t an immortal being, and 2) that all this time I had actually believed that he was. But Bowie had died. Cancer. One he had never announced. Lying in the dark, at 6am on a Monday morning, pitch black and rain […]