The Lie I Told to Become a Lawyer
Picture the scene: aged 24, I am – nervously, sweating in a cheap suit – sitting in front of a panel of four imposing male equity partners, in a spacious [...]
Dodging Landmines in Nagorno-Karabakh
In the spring of 2005, to gather ideas for my second unfinished book The Anti-Guidebook, I travelled, solo, to Armenia. Why Armenia? Because, I had “done” South-East Asia and [...]
Thinking
A few months ago, at breakfast in my hotel in The Canaries, I asked the waiter: “Perdon, Senor. Tienes el pan sin gluten, para dos personas, por favor?”. (Excuse me, [...]
Getting Colder
North Yorkshire’s sudden slide into winter destroys my mood like nothing else. Turning the heating on today - when just a few days ago it was sunbathing weather - [...]
El Dueno (the owner) and Strangeways
It’s 8pm - vino-o-clock! – here in Puerto De La Cruz, Tenerife. I’m doing something most un-Spanish: dining solo. Sitting here on the veranda of a locals’ restaurant, near to [...]
Genes and dogs
Slowly, step by step, I am walking up Casterton Fell in North Yorkshire. My son is somewhere ahead of me. My wife and daughter are – surprisingly – somewhere behind. [...]
Ich bin ein Berliner
I’m in Berlin. Rather, we – the family Gray - are here, in Berlin, at the end of our six-day holiday. We chose Germany because both sides of our family [...]
Buying a Language School in Spain
It’s 8:30pm, on Sunday 21 May 2023. I’m sitting, alone, on a bench in Puerto De La Cruz, North Tenerife. The photo above is my current view. I landed just [...]
Fiction: Anywhere But Bangkok
Disclaimer What follows is pure fiction, written by me twenty years ago when I was running a backpacking NGO, Voices for Burma, and after completing a travel writing course at [...]
The Sick Man of Europe
(Written during take-off from Tenerife South, Airport) Travelling on a rickety bus in rural Thailand, back in 2000, I had my only epiphany. The vast distance from home - [...]
