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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
‘You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?’ ‘No. What do you say Harrison Starr?’ ‘I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book?’’ What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. […]
‘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”, […]
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 promoting 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 […]