Category: travel
-
Ostrava: In the Shadow of History – Geographical
On the edge of Ostrava there’s a sharp-sided hill. If you stood on it, you’d have a view over the old city, and you’d marvel at the number of smokestacks you saw. They’re all shapes and sizes and surround the old town centre like widely-spaced fence posts. If it was wintertime, you’d also marvel at…
-
In Flight: Philadelphia, World Cup Final night
The security in Philadelphia is so slow and so badly organised and so repetitive that despite having 90 minutes to make my transfer to Washington I miss it. Now some people reserve their especial opprobrium for American security. That, I can understand. Others pick out American bacon. Or American exceptionalism. Or the infiltration of the…
-
In Flight: London, 5 a.m.
Streets bare of anything but the orange glow of emergency lighting. Stretched black shadows of key workers (coffee shops, fast food joints) waiting thin and angular at bus-stops. Miles of normally pounded pavement getting a brief respite save for the endlessly-walking homeless and solitary drunks, wearing spirals and curlicues into its surface. London at 5…
-
Charlie Was My Darling
Charlie. Maria named everything we owned. I’d have to see the objects again to recall their specific pet names, but the one that mattered to me was when she named my car Charlie. I’d started learning to drive when I was 21 and looking for a job as a journalist. I thought it would give…
-
In Flight: Cloud Palaces
And a puff of cloud beneath, and the world is gone. London, rigid in its rows of suburban houses, grey and brown like a tired corpse, vanishes with a sigh. I look down at the passing clouds and I imagine them opening again, to reveal: flocks of dragons drifting beneath, mammalian muscles rippling beneath scaled…
{funambulism} 