Work needed someone to cover the Champions League final in Munich, and so naturally, as a non-German-speaker who hates football, I was chosen for the job. It was a long, grinding day yesterday - up at half-five for a flight and working till about three o'clock this morning.

I have never been to Bavaria before, and my impression of it from driving ( Read more... )

I am down in Provence with Hannah on what is apparently called, by certain subeditors and those who frequent certain prenatal messageboards, a babymoon. I was kind of worried that January would just be cold and wet down here, but actually, although we have to wrap up quite well, the skies are clear blue and the landscape is just as enticing as ever ( Read more... )

A drive southeast of Tripoli is like a trip to a completely different country. The traffic thins out and the suburbs give way to scrubland. Everything is ochre under a hot blue sky. Rebel checkpoints end about half an hour south of the city; after that, who knows what could happen. The worst-case scenario is a fake checkpoint run by loyalist forces ( Read more... )

It was strange coming back through Ben Guerdane, but this time just en route. I waited to recognize that dusty curve of main road, the central town mosque, the little pizzeria. But our driver must have bypassed the centre of town because I didn't recognize anything, and soon we were on that long stretch of highway leading up to the border. On the ( Read more... )

I'm in Bruges. I am hungover.

Last night ended a few hours ago with some kind of magnolia-coloured vanilla spirit which according to two girls I was out with had the ‘look and consistency but sadly not the taste’ of semen (whether that means semen should taste more vanilla-y or spirits should taste more seminal I'm not quite sure, well no, I am), ( Read more... )

Went down south yesterday into the outskirts of the desert, tracing the Libyan border down towards the dunes and through a lot of small ochre towns nestled in among the low rocky hills. One of them was Tataouine (the two Ts are different - تطاوين), and it was just outside town here that much of Star Wars was shot, the Tunisian landscape being ( Read more... )

 
Yesterday a chance came up to cross the border, but the circumstances were a bit unpropitious. The situation at the crossing is quite difficult - there are several different gates between Tunisia proper and Libya proper, for various passport or administrative checks, and men with guns at all of them. So what happens is that me and Elodie, my ( Read more... )

So I'm here on the Libyan border. Tiny Tunisian town called Ben Guerdane, dusty roads, donkeys pulling carts, beat-up old pickups and men in djellabas, bronzed foreign correspondents posing at terrace cafes, photographers scanning through pictures by their satellite transmitters. Beautiful musical call to prayer round these parts, quite different ( Read more... )

I am sitting in the travellers lounge of Hong Kong International, where the lights are permanently dimmed and everyone staggers around staring into space, seeing magic-eye 3D pictures in the carpet pattern or zoning out meditatively in front of the king-size Toblerones. I love this airport and I love this city - it's just a shame I'm always passing ( Read more... )

Here is that meme of first-lines-of-the-month, in my case a staggeringly boring selection - apologies:

Random memories of the honeymoon, in no order: Stopping at a tiny railroad town in southern Tennessee and going to a proper old soda fountain, where the waitress thought we were French because we said we lived in Paris ( Read more... )