26 Oct

About fifteen years ago, in Nanjing, I was in a taxi and in genuine fear of my life. I was being taken to the airport by someone who had obviously been taught to drive on an Atari video game: accelerating and braking forcefully and abruptly, changing lanes with carefree abandon, weaving through the multi-lane highway […]

13 Oct

Walking Down From Bloomsbury to High Holborn, Dressed For Dinner It was a long time since I had gone to a black-tie dinner. Many years ago, in Piraeus, I had used the excuse of a Christmas party to put it on for novelty’s sake, and it was indeed novel. This time it was London, formal […]

05 Oct

Everyday life can be a confusing place to inhabit, especially when you can’t read the signals properly. Every culture has its own markers, gestures and signifiers that differentiate it from others. I don’t just mean what people say, or how they talk to each other, but how they do things amongst each other, how they […]

28 Sep

Nature abhors a vacuum, and it is not alone. Humans don’t like emptiness either and strive to fill it with meaning – or meaninglessness – depending on their mood. When I was still on Instagram and Facebook, I was puzzled by the constant advertisements for computer games that had Unique Selling Points with taglines like: […]

21 Sep

I was in my usual favourite place: drinking coffee, reading a book, with a packet of cigarettes to hand on the aft deck of a ferry sailing east. The sun was beginning to set behind us as we approached the southwestern tip of Ikaria. The effects of the ever-present meltemi, blowing steadily from the north, […]