Exploration

Where the snapping stops

In Naples I saw my first Maserati hearse. It was making its way slowly down a narrow cobbled street, mourners following slowly, solemnly in procession. I am always ready to be a respectful cortege onlooker. For one thing there’s the jolt, the reminder, as you’re going about your

A life in colour

What counts as history? Anything and everything. It can be Big Bang and MAGA, it can be Einstein and Eric Trump. It can be an object lesson, it can be a chastening truth. What counts as history? What even is it? It can be, according to your mechanic, your gasket.

No going back

The one who left

Making the most of it

Brace position

Climbing out of the hamster wheel

A sales pitch for the circus in your mind

The decades just fly by

Keep it in your pocket

Lovely piece of Turkey

A friend in uncertain times

Oh Vienna

Strangers and others

Fairness and generosity

A privilege

You take nicer pictures when you’re not drunk

Life at 20 kilometres an hour

Fission by the river

Road trance

maBaguette

Going some place and there's no going back

Days in the life

We returned last week from England to London. Two different worlds. A quarter of an hour before dropping off our car, we came to a complete stop on the M25. Just moments before, there had been six lanes of hurtling cars and lorries. Now, everything was at a standstill as

More road

Early evening, April 30

Sunday reading

A land without pier

The land around Lyme Regis, where Meryl Streep once stood, in a hood, on the Cobb, is falling into the sea. The land around Lyme Regis, around the Cobb that made it rich, has always been falling slowly but surely into the sea. The more we have at stake, the

Road photos

Have a story to share about St Paul’s, but today just pictures Popular novels written at this desk by a young man who managed to bootstrap himself out of father’s imprisonment and his own young life in a workhouse Beloved daughter has birthday bbq with friends. Even on

Photos from the road

Photo # 1 I am a huge fan of Singapore’s approach to housing, as described here two years ago by copying and pasting from The Conversation What Singapore has that Australia does not is a public housing developer, the Housing Development Board, which puts new dwellings on public and reclaimed

Just trying to stay upright

Newsletter from the road

Down the river

Your face is blue

A lifetime of driving flashes before you

Bliss before sunrise

Newsletter on the move

Fixing your mistakes

Into the wild

Easter bulletin

Pandemic-era material deprivation blues

Not knowing you’re leaving for the last time

Sunday column

Go there before they burn it down

Newsletter on holiday

Southern report

Sunday column