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 […]
Brexit and the 48%
It seemed so unlikely, this Brexit nonsense. Something that sounded like a cereal and was promoted by the likes of Nigel ‘I’m-not-racist-but’ Farage and Boris ‘I’m-stuck-on-a-zip-line’ Johnson was surely a bit of a joke. This whole idea about pulling the UK out of the European Union; they couldn’t be serious, could they? I’m certain it was only a small percentage of […]
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 somehow was. Bowie had died of a cancer he had never announced. Lying in the dark, at 6am on a Monday morning, pitch black and […]
Tents, Tea & Sea: Surfing in Devon
I’m not sure where my love for camping first came from. Mine was not a camping family, so it was only in adulthood that I discovered great bliss in huddling under canvas, everything you need stuffed into a rucksack and the sense of satisfaction of, well, building your own house for the night. Sure, the […]
Joshua Tree National Park
I have this thing for deserts. Something to do with the emptiness of them – my life feels so cluttered most of the time, and in the desert I relish the space and clarity. Here, we’re reminded that in the big scheme of things we are a mere speck. You’d think there’s little life in […]
Ten Years a Londoner
On 29 April 2005, when I was 22, I landed in London. Fresh off the boat from New Zealand I had little more than a secondhand backpack, a new A-Z and a couple of hundred quid in the bank. Not even enough for a deposit on a room (I think a part of me was driven by […]
24 Hour Paris Cake Tour
Paris is always a good idea. So is cake. The first time my cake-fancying father went to Paris was in 2011 – his debut to Europe, in fact. That was a cold, bleak December, when the city was stripped bare of any colour. The Christmas markets sparkled and we spent almost all our money in […]