Berlin I can never quite decide whether I like Berlin. My father and sister live there, so I visit quite often , and I have got to know it quite well over the last 10 years. It has changed quite a lot in that time, becoming increasingly like every other German city, but with much ruder... Continue Reading →
The loneliness of Iran
Travel writing is the description of a different reality. For this reason, I have always found it almost impossible to write anything interesting about my travels, mainly because I become so instantly absorbed within this new reality that I fail to write down unusual impressions - once you've been in Delhi for a few hours,... Continue Reading →
The fear of change
As ever, when anything changes in my life, I descend into introspection. For no particular reason, I start to find my gilded existence tragic, and turn into a navel-gazing drama queen, nervously necking champagne at a wedding and sloping off home in tears because they’re playing Oasis and I have just drunkenly stepped on my own... Continue Reading →
Caravans – why?
This weekend, I went to a wedding in Cambridge. Having failed to look for a room in a hotel until three days beforehand, I not surprisingly found that the only available rooms were either £200 a night (steep for two, astronomic on my own), or were bed & breakfasts that had rather curious Tripadvisor reviews... Continue Reading →
Between a rock and a play
I have been terribly remiss in writing anything recently - not even my own paper diary (which contains even more endless chatter than this blog). There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that I went on a rock climbing holiday to Spain, in Gandia near Valencia. I have been climbing indoors... Continue Reading →
Running away
I seem to have spent most of the last year taking every possible opportunity to be away from London. It seemed like the only way to enjoy living here, in small doses, with regular breaks from the long, long tube journeys, the crowds and the terrible air quality. In fact it just made me mildly... Continue Reading →
The Rothschilds
My bank holiday treat was a two-day cycling trip to try out my new bike. It is a Specialized Tricross, and although largely a road bike, it is by all accounts supposed to be strong enough to handle off-roading. Perhaps what the manufacturers and reviewers define as off-roading is just a bone-dry, unsealed track on... Continue Reading →
New Year’s gratitude
6th Jan 2010 Yesterday I put together a large raft of resolutions, and then set to thinking about what they meant. Since the ones that really matter (i.e. not the “eat less chocolate” one) are ones relating to some aspect of my behaviour or thought patterns, I suppose that is one step towards fulfilling them.... Continue Reading →
Bond Street
Writing one of these blogs in 2010 probably has about the same resonance as writing a few notes on a piece of paper, and sticking them in a drain somewhere on Gray's Inn Road. There is a vague possibility that someone will at some point read it, but it's fairly slim, and limited to people... Continue Reading →
The resting writer 