Thanks for reading. This blog is an opportunity for me to capture some of the diversity of my writing interests. My muse tend to appear on my shoulder as I board an international flight although not all of my writing is inspired by travel and foreign places. These blogs have been the basis of a novel (Flowers of Baghdad) but there are a few other writing projects in progress besides. Please feel free to leave a comment. Or two.
Well if you have to continue in Hillary’s steps (I use the word ‘continue’ with considerable license – I was in Nepal earlier in the year, Ed’s second home) then this is the place to come. He practiced on a regular basis from the Ball Hut and that’s where we got going from today. We…
Well here I am again. No, don’t get up, two visits in less than two years is not that unusual. Okay, I did commit to coming back earlier though, so forgive me my tardiness. I ran down here this morning from Tekapo and have arrived to a gorgeous clear day, though there is a forecast…
There has to be a better title than that but that pretty much sums it up. Sir Ed allegedly got the climbing bug when he climbed up to the Mueller Hut located in the Mount Cook National Park – or whatever it was then. So Steve and I thought we would have a crack at…
It’s short, but in praise… Malik is an Iraqi shirt salesman determined to believe in his country despite the violence tearing it apart. Aadil is a former army offi cer driven by poverty and anger to build electronic detonators for a group of insurgents he hopes is using his devices to fight the Americans, rather…
There is a whole lot of nonsense out there about Tough Mudder. Is it tough? Really tough? No. Not really. 20km, or 19km or whatever the actual distance is, is 19km or 20km. If you are ready for it you are ready for it. Is there anything here not done before? In this case no.…
Every day in another culture offers the frisson of adventure, even if it is merely based on the fact that I am out of my own. Every day there are such a host of peculiar and unusual things going on the heart and mind are continually refreshed with that sense of wonder we too easily…
Dahl baht and rice looks pretty much the same at either end of the digestive tract. It’s delivered on a silver tray in some sort of order. Delivery at the other end is another matter altogether. At Saugauli Junction train station it seems to me that the vast majority of everyone’s Dahl baht is sprayed…
It’s finally more than a cover concept and more than a pile of draft manuscripts that stand more than 30cm high. What do I think of that? I suspect I might be like a father who is indifferent to the birth of his child – there is something unnatural about that and not to be…
(not an exhaustive list by any measure) Spoken to those two Russian women on that bridge in Paris. Who were they really and who did they actually work for? But, my goodness, they were gorgeous.