Dear Penelope, Recently I have spent a week staying with my hospitable cousin and his wife in the Scottish Borders,…
Dead People
When Eurydice’s musician husband Orpheus jumps (or did he?) from a pleasure boat into Sydney Harbour and drowns, her first…
About a cat…
This is Ludo. If you’re wondering, the location is HIS decision. My daughter (who’s always alert for cats) noticed him…
Storm dragons
After a hundred days of sunshine in southern Europe – it rained today! I never thought I’d be glad to…
I wanna go hooooome!!
Being sick, alone, abroad, is shit. Sometimes literally (my daughter got fearfully sick when we arrived in Thessaloniki on a…
Chasing the Minotaur
I went to Crete because of a book and a puzzle. The book was Mary Renault’s The King Must Die/The…
Manchester in a g-string?
Old bodies. Naxos has got me thinking about them because, well, they’re all over the place. Back in Oz, older…
Circling back
Two stories. In 1982 a thin, brown, scantily dressed Australian girl stands by the roadside in Delphi, her thumb out…
Forget charming and exotic…who’s winning?
Why is it always sunny in travel photos? Why – I call this the Instagram Effect – is it necessary…
Ancient ghosts, irksome kids and changing (no) religion
Suppose you went to Belsun, two thousand five hundred years after World War 2. What would you expect? Would the…
butimbeautiful 