My blog features some of my more personal writing, including tales from my travels across the world and my general impressions on life.
“It’s flat up there,” Matt’s high school friend, Richard, says to us when we meet him for lunch in Windhoek on day four of our trip across Namibia. “Etosha, man, it’s flat flat flat — it’s flat forever.” The cicadas were screeching in the midday heat when we got to the entrance. We got out and smiled at each other...
In this place, at this time of day, you are the anomaly. Everything around you is dry, dry as dry can be, dry as deadpan humour, dry as a dead pan. But you — you are wet. Your forehead is wet and your armpits. The backs of your knees. It’s running down your temples and making your arms shimmer.
From above, Johannesburg in January was green. Greener than I’ve ever seen it. I stared out the window as we descended, watching as farmland gave way to villages, small towns. Wait, one more farm. Another town. The city builds from the outside in. In me, a familiar feeling built, too.
London rises. It emerges from the treetops and chimney pots as I gaze out of my window-seat view on the train. Steel and glass and past and present climbing skywards. Its angles catch the afternoon light, reflecting summer blues and patches of cloud.
"I’ll make some tea now, love,” I say to Matt. “I just want to rinse the shower gel out of the mugs first.” Stretched-out adult arms can reach opposing sides of our bathroom. In the sink, I pick up the mugs and rinse them of the shower gel we’ve been using to clean them. We have nothing else.
I wake in the early hours, expecting to hear rain on the roof of the quirky, quaint and full-of-personality cottage we’re staying in. But it is quiet. I can’t hear anything at all. The forecast, which warned us of heavy rain all the way from Barrydale to Cape Town...
Matt gets back in the Triumph, laughing. “What did your dad say?” I ask. “He says not to worry about the rev counter,” he replies. “Apparently it only starts working once the car’s warmed up.” We drive out of the Willowmore Old Jail and pull over almost immediately.
In a year where all plans were scrapped, the stars aligned to make this one happen. Matt first mentioned it to me sometime in the middle of 2019: “When my parents move from Kenton to Cape Town,” he said, “I’m hoping to help my dad move his cars.” A 1934 Austin 10 and a 1964 Triumph Spitfire.
Dear Laszlo, I revamped my website. When I started, the folder on my laptop housing early copy revisions and new images was called “Website revamp: April 2020”. It’s now September. I don’t know what happened to the time. Actually, I do. Covid happened. And I lost the person who started it in the first place: you.
“You want to go upstairs, don’t you?” His eyes glint with amusement and prophecy. He knows we won’t stay here long, down here where it is warm and dry, where we are protected from the bitter winds that run the length of the loch, picking up droplets from the clouds above and the waters below and turning them to needles as they strike our faces.
I don’t know how to write about this. I don’t even know if I should. But I don’t know what else to do with my body today, and with the emotions and thoughts that rage within it like bees trapped inside a glass jar. Instinctively, I open a blank page and stare at its blinking cursor.
There’s an unmistakeable moment – just one – that completely captures solo travel for me. It is the instant, relieved of my bags and assured of a place to sleep for the night, that I step out onto a foreign street in well-worn (but usually impractical) shoes
Voices mumble and a guitar starts up, a gentle melody to which Steve soon starts singing in French. “No no no, wait, please stop,” I hear my 19-year-old voice say more than once. “Please. Start again
The first time I tried to read The English Patient, it took me seven months and I laboured through every word. I endured it because it was a gift and I felt obliged, but I absorbed nothing. Two years later, I was obliged again when it found its way onto
Imagine skin stripped from flesh. Imagine only the muscles and tendons and fascia beneath, sinewy and strong, revealing and raw. For a couple of metres from her roots up, that’s what she reminds me of: a body exposed to its essentials
September marks seven months of freelance. Seven months of buying groceries with the pensioners at 11am on a Wednesday, of riding the waves of desperate anxiety and joyous I-got-a-gig relief
“Put this on,” he says. “You’re going to need it.” “What for?” “We’re going out.” “You can’t be serious. It’s snowing.” “Which is why you’re going to need my coat. Put it on.”
When I was living in Toronto, I learnt why the Canadians call it fall. It’s not because of the leaves that descend; instead, it’s the invisible fire in the sky. My sense is that it’s always there, the fire. I imagine it gaining in strength during the summer months
He’s writing about storytelling, about nostalgia, about the passing of time, about families. Personal things edged with poignancy. But it’s not until I read the defining line that I realise the relevance
The road before me was slick with mud and steeply cambered on either side. I turned off the radio, suddenly too loud; tightened my grip on the steering wheel, suddenly too smooth; and licked my lips, suddenly too dry.
Seventeen-oh-two. Seventeen-oh-two-twenty-seventeen. Ones and sevens and zeros and twos. Numbers I’m familiar with: they’ve designated my birthday for 31 years. 17 February 2017. I woke up early this morning at home with Almond cat
