Teediously

By the time I launched Hooked on the Horizon in 2021, Raynor Winn’s bestselling book The Salt Path was into its fourth year of print, had sold millions of copies, and been translated into some 20 languages. It was enjoying an almost unfathomable level of success by any book’s standards, let alone one that operates in the nature memoir genre, the genre which I had just joined.

As such, when a reader left a five-star review for Hooked on the Horizon pronouncing it was “probably the next Salt...

Of the many fascinating tidbits found on the information boards along the Wey & Arun Canal, the one that caught my attention above all others was that the last recorded boat to travel from the Thames to the English Channel did so in 1872. These information boards tell the dramatic story of the rise, fall, and future hope for this waterway, bringing a wonderful element of history to the West Sussex and Surrey countrysides. It was in reading this particular tidbit in May 2025 that I...

When the world’s getting you down, you can’t go far wrong in picking up a Bill Bryson book. I did as much recently, and whilst Down Under swept my mind firmly away from war in Europe to the relative peace of Australia, I was dismayed to find it brought about quite a different problem. That is: knowing what we know now about the climate in 2022, is it still possible to read and enjoy travel books bursting with the ignorance that helped get the climate into...

On the 28th September 1973 Peter Matthiessen set off with famed zoologist and friend George Schaller, headed deep into the Himalayan mountains. We can be sure of the date they left because Matthiessen’s award-winning travel memoir The Snow Leopard comes to us in diary form, with one entry for every day they trek to and from the Crystal Monastery, tucked away in the icy peaks of Nepal.

The linear format of his book and the outward journey it depicts...

There is a well-known analogy about an elephant that gets trotted out quite often. In its original form, The Blind Men And An Elephant was a parable where four blind men approach and touch this great mammal, and the point of it was to demonstrate that each man would come away with a very different perspective of what an elephant was. In this manner, the parable defied the idea that there could be such a thing as truth: each man’s truth was dependent on the bit of the animal that they were...

I have experienced a quarantine of sorts before. During our circumnavigation, James and I underwent several self-inflicted phases of social distancing as we traversed oceans. The Atlantic Ocean: 19 days. The Pacific Ocean: 24 days. The Indian Ocean: 28 days. We must now all prepare for at least this amount of time in the company of ourselves, and with those who we live.

One of the best things about those days of confinement at sea was the opportunity to read books. It was made easier by the...

Please note: This blog was written some weeks before the world turned upside down. Nonetheless, I still stand by most of what follows.

One can forgive Kurt Vonnegut for these...

‘On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?’

– Thomas Macaulay

On what principle is it, when we hear the sound of sirens, we long for the sound of silence? Heads will drop and mouths will mutter an “Oh no”, as flashing lights career by, and we wish we had not witnessed the desperation of the scene. So much noise and so much rush just to perpetuate all this fragility. A solemn, microcosmic reminder that for...

Dear Reader,

I write to you to introduce my new website. The painful and elongated process of creating this website is chiefly in aid of selling a book, which will concern the circumnavigation of the world that I recently undertook with my friend James. You might know about that already though – and in any case, as it stands, there isn’t much more to say on that topic – so I shall focus instead on introducing you to my blog, which fills the otherwise empty space of my author’s website. I have...