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.
Corey – blond, skinny, cam jacketed and of the yellow glasses fame – has gotten plenty of press and has polarised our communities. And not just here but around the world as this link to the Times Online in the UK attests. But…
Eons ago I started a series on beasts that live in our backyard. It is tempting to imagine that in a city of 4million fauna is sparse. But the truth is we have plenty of fauna to distract us.
I jumped a cab in the city yesterday to rush back to a meeting and found myself sitting next to a tall (that was apparent even though he was sitting down) young man in a salwar kameez.
Well, a satellite anyway. A US spy satellite at that. Landing possibly near you in February or March – forecasting their return is as precarious as forecasting their launches.
Tom Hanks has a very explicit house rule for his new boofhead dog of a pet (Hooch) when he instructs him most sternly that there is to be no drinking from the toilet. The good folks of Orange County (CA) are turning a deaf ear to mother’s advice and are going to be doing just…
Battlefields have a strange attraction. Gettysburg had an impact on me which was all the more powerful for being so thoroughly unexpected. The humanity of it all was perversely rammed home by understanding the sheer scale of the slaughter. In the case of Gettysburg the preservation of the slaughter-yard otherwise called a battlefield adds to…
Heck of a way to do it but thanks for driving our greedy self absorption, reflected in the stock market headlines, off the front pages of the papers and reminding us all of what is really important in this all too brief run we have.
That is what her name means in Pashto, the language of the Pashtuns. It is a more poetic and uplifting post title than the more dramatic one I was concocting. Here she is, her face staring down from a poster twenty feet high in the Forbidden Palace, Beijing.
There is something that resonates deep within us when we read about Oetzi, or are mesmerised by a mummified corpse of the Andes or Nile. We connect somehow with bodies preserved in peat, having a sense that, though long dead, they can somehow still speak to us. We will them to open their eyes, especially…
If you have ever had a video camera fixed to your eye at an airshow, or at the car race track you will understand what I mean by the camera trap – so fixated are you on capturing the moment (to be stored forgotten in your camera) that you miss the real experience. When filming…