If you’re going to write about home then perhaps the best time to do this is after a prolonged absence. This will likely be the last year I spend any real time here. The squat little whitewashed 1920’s bungalow perched on the hill that I grew up in is being sold and my parents are […]
I’m home. A year and half has passed. Going from winter to summer in 24 hours landed me in the humid air of Heathrow. Body clock shot, seasonally confused. I had forgotten the feel of England in summer and I have spent the subsequent week revelling in it. Lush and verdant. Despite the depressive homogeneity […]
The South Island is diffferent. Apparent from the moment the large, comfortable Interislander ferry, escaping the rolling oceanic swells of the Cook Straits, glided into Marlborough Sounds at dusk. A world away from the busy industry of the Wellington ports and the relative bustle of the North. It is immediately quieter, calmer but wilder and […]
Nine months in Taupo. Restless. I suppose we are all inclined to self-criticism; I should have done this or seen that, should have saved more money, should have spoken to that person but in the end I guess that we do what we do. The spring came through the winter and we were stir crazy. […]
So I have settled, for the time being at least, in a ramshackle but charming hostel on the shore of Lake Taupo. New Zealand is an expensive country to travel about in and winter employment was in order. The town of Taupo (toe-paw, not t-ow-po) is fine, occupying an inlet at the north end of […]
It seems I have traded the North Atlantic for the South Pacific, a world apart. This ocean is different; bluer, warmer, stronger. I have always longed to see the Pacfic ocean. I can now say I have swum in three of the worlds oceans, the others – the Southern and Arctic – are not quite […]
When we started to drive with teenage abandon around the lanes that connect Polgooth, Sticker and St. Ewe, a story started to trickle down into our hot-boxed Peugeot 106. In between St. Ewe, Polgooth and Pengrugla there is a little triangle of woods, a copse really, that the road dog-legs around, which we called Nunnery […]
A few days ago I was reading of Norilsk, an unimaginably oppressive, filthy, cold, dank industrial city high in the Arctic Circle. Once known for its Soviet Gulag labour camps (in which tens of thousands of prisoners died), it is now a hub of mineral mining. Nickel primarily but also palladium, cobalt, arsenic and coal. […]
Time moves on and we get used to it. As our accustomed minds gradually and continually fill up with life find ourselves shocked when we take note to see an hour or a week has passed with not much to show other than an underlying sense of non-achievement. The terminal feeling of helplessness at the […]
Just off the south side of the arterial A30 that cuts the Moor in two one can find Temple. A collection of farm houses and out of the way cottages, there is not much other than the small community that dwell here. Temple Church is the prime attraction. You see, if you blunder across anywhere […]
