Category: Personal Updates

I did not escape the rat race. I didn’t even make it to the start. The odds had been stacked against me since birth. Always the outsider at school. Rubbish at teamwork as a student. Ditched by my cycling partner a few months into a round-the-world bicycle trip (which incidentally kicked off this blog 7 years ago). In […] Continue reading →

British readers may have heard the sad news of Claire Squires, who collapsed and died on the final bend of last weekend’s London Marathon. She was running for two reasons — publicly, to raise money for the Samaritans, her favourite charity; and personally, in memory of her brother, who died 10 years ago under tragic circumstances. While […] Continue reading →

2011 kicked off with a spur-of-the-moment winter adventure. I threw my bike and kit on a bus to Oslo and set off on an ill-advised thousand-mile bike trip through northern Scandinavia to the Arctic Circle. Running a daily blog from my tent added generously to the challenge. Temperatures dropped to ‑33°C. People thought I was nuts. But […] Continue reading →

A suitcase and a bicycle were the extent of my luggage for my recent ‘move’ to London (what — no panniers?!). The suitcase contained more camping gear than clothes. And the clothes were mainly of the breathable / waterproof / thermal / quick-drying variety. I’ve already bivvied inside Zone One. Such is the attempt of […] Continue reading →

When a little crack began to appear in the frame of my trusty old Kona Explosif, I wasn’t too surprised. The thing had been dragged fully-loaded more than ten thousand miles across large swathes of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, including more than a couple of rather large deserts, and along thousands of miles […] Continue reading →

It wasn’t that anything had changed much. A few shops had changed hands, and a couple of new shiny buildings had popped up in the place of old dilapidated ones. But the amiable backwater of Exeter still exuded precisely the same understated, sleepy essence it did when I departed six years ago clutching a degree […] Continue reading →

I sat in the middle of the dim, wood-panelled corridor. Lined up along each wall stood a handful of people I vaguely recognised from some previous occasion. I wondered why nobody else had decided to sit down while we waited outside the closed door. Then, as the assembled men and women muttered amongst themselves, the […] Continue reading →