It’s been a long time coming. Now that my days are worn thin with worry and the heavy passage of time, it is clear that I am, sadly, driven by ideas. With increasing fascination and detached consternation, I find myself endlessly cogitating, formulating, dissecting, until it is too late. But there is hope, for even [...]
This reference comes up at a good time; railways and distant destinations have always reminded me of a time when there was every reason to travel but never any need to stop. This, and the Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (Theroux! That is an essay for later in life), and I don’t even know [...]
Time is running out; 1 day, eked out from the madness, and spent among columns of pale beige, alternating with creeping diagonals of light. This is familiar, the quiet intensity; the falling of one’s gaze guiding the flow of the day. In a collection of essays on travel writing, aptly titled Writes of Passage, Joanne [...]
Having passed through London, Oxford, and finally arriving in Paris, all in the space of 24 hours, I am almost halfway through my week in a gorgeous, bracing, half-familiar city; so many have come before me that I have almost vicariously lived here, but it is made anew. Words, dreams, ideas, hopes all swim [...]
Last December, somewhere north:
Departure, No signboard, packing was excruciating. Xtorrent surfaced, time went by, the Budget Terminal. Lovely plain flight, extra long trip to Kamon, sleepy, miniminally commercialised town. Jazz festival.
Pleasantly simple. Westerners and straight perfect beaches. Buzzed at noon and Inside Enderby. Retirement for outcasts. Leaving it all behind and being intellectual.
Afternoons in languor; [...]