Category: Personal Updates

Tenny and I saw in the New Year 12 months ago with a schoolteacher and a lawyer from London. Said professional couple are now taking a couple of days’ rest in the delightful seaside town of Batumi, Georgia, having quit their jobs and cycled the entire width of Europe and Turkey. Their story is a tangible example of how far you can come in a year if you put your mind to it. This recognisable end-of-year wind-down is a good opportunity to look back and see what we can learn before 2014 kicks in and we’re caught up in the hustle once again I’d… Continue reading →

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 my mid-twenties I took a giant leap, compromising my personal freedom as a bicycle-mounted vagabond in the hope of something better: I got married. Some supposed this meant I would become a responsible adult and get a real job too. But the career, mortgage and fixed… 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 I will not cast myself as a very close relative, Claire was still my cousin, and it is impossible to put into words the kind of pain that this side of my family has gone through. These events, now a headline story in the national… 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 it stands out as one of my favourite experiences of all time. The blog story picked up interest, and by the end of the month, thousands of readers — more than ever before — were vicariously enjoying the adventure. 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 a dyed-in-the-wool outdoorsman to ‘settle’ in an urban environment! 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 of seriously shit roads. 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 certificate. What blew me away on returning was how much I walked straight past a thousand times and never once noticed! 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 strangest thing happened. It was more like weightlessness than falling; either way, the floor was no longer there. And it seemed as if a cloud of TV static had been pumped into the hall from behind me and was quickly filling my vision; the muttering… Continue reading →