My final major publication for the year, exploring the role of Leipzig in the fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago this month. Clicking on the image will take you to the City AM website, where you can read the entire piece. Continue reading
The past weeks (and actually, months) have raced by like the pages of a flipbook. Taking my freelance status to heart, it means I’ve had my fingers in a variety of different pies, and have been able to explore a little of the Balkans – a part of Europe missing… Continue reading
When everything is open to you: opening hours, displays, shelving even, where do you start? Not with a rhetorical question, according to one of my old English teachers. The name of Wigtown may not trip off the tongue in the same way as Hay-on-Wye, but since 1997 the former county… Continue reading
I turn from Oxford Street onto a narrowing side road back to the heart of the city. Shoppers pass me in the opposite direction, mostly empty handed, fists clenched inside coat pockets against the frozen December air. Travelling across the long northern European winter’s night gives me only the slightest… Continue reading
Cologne is not much without its cathedral, save maybe a history of scent, with eau de cologne coming from the city. This is odd given that the gothic edifice was only completed, and its soaring towers topped out, several years after the rail lines that wind beside it over the… Continue reading
After Cambridge, the road barely changes in height, with no noticeable rises or dips. As the landscape makes its slow conversion into water-saturated farmland, the only height amid the fertile arable land comes from stacks of hay climbing high on Ministry of Defence land. Driving through the landscape, with water… Continue reading
Since the First World War almost one hundred years ago, Birmingham has generally been considered Britain’s second city, though in recent years it has looked at risk of losing the unofficial title. The childhood home of Tolkien itself took the title from Liverpool – the ‘second city of Empire’, and… Continue reading
There’s nothing quite like making a foreign city a home, if only for a few days. The discovery of the best patisserie in town, entirely absent of other tourists and staffed by men and women only speaking the local tongue, for instance. I take special pleasure in being able to… Continue reading
Heading back to Britain recently from a small regional airport in southern France brought to mind what is perceived in the collective consciousness as ‘the kindness of strangers’, and what often in reality means ‘the kindness of foreigners’ (or even ‘the kindness of people we can’t understand’). I had just… Continue reading
There seems to be a publishing equivalent of waiting for buses: I wait weeks for a bit of my work to move from the ‘accepted’ pile, only for two pieces to make it to the ‘published’ pile in a week. However long it takes, it’s great to see my name… Continue reading
