Kevin Jordan says he was asleep when his world caved in. Then he corrects himself: “I wasn’t asleep. I can’t sleep, when there’s a storm blowing…”
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While Vladimir Putin rains death on Ukraine, the former Armageddon factory of Orford Ness has been reinvented in favour of life.
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it’s a big lump of rock and it’s very English (old-fashioned cafes and lots of weather) without quite being England. A place to blow a trumpet to your heart’s content and see life from a wry angle.
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On the A35 just east of Bridport in Dorset the hubcap of a Skoda marked the spot where the future King Charles almost lost the plot. On the run, with a price on his head, he decided on the spur of the moment to hang a left up a road called Lee Lane. Good move …
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This outpost of England – shrinking, shapeshifting – is eerie and beautiful, with vivid green fields unrolling to frangible cliffs and empty beaches. Not to everyone’s taste maybe, but its otherworldliness casts a spell on some.
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Some detectorists will tell you that the holy grail of metal detecting is a hoard of Roman coins or Anglo-Saxon jewellery. Others will point out – borrowing a line from the TV series Detectorists – that actually the holy grail of metal detecting is the Holy Grail…
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Russell “Rusty” Waughman is 98 years old and describes himself as “just an ordinary bloke”. For 27 years he worked for a packaging company near Kettering and he still lives in the house he bought for “£1,650 with all the extras” in 1956. But for a period of seven months in 1943 and 1944 he inhabited a parallel universe as the pilot and skipper of an Avro Lancaster…
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It’s low tide on the Thames in London. At Rotherhithe on the south bank I descend rickety wooden stairs to a foreshore littered with iron nails and rivets – from the time when the dock here was a site of boatbuilding then of boat breaking.
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Something is missing in the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel – George. That’s the name of a shrunken head from Peru which I remember seeing in the Smoke Room a decade ago. It’s just as well it’s gone – such a grisly trophy had surely outlived its shock value – but it’s also a surprise. To quote the Talking Heads song the PyG is a Heaven “where nothing/Nothing ever happens.”
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A while ago an article I wrote for the Telegraph was teed up with a standfirst – written by some youthful editor on the desk – that described me pointedly as a “veteran travel writer”. I read this over breakfast. And after scooping the Gentlemen’s Relish back on to my toast I finally faced an uncomfortable truth.
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Pitcairn Island, the South Seas refuge of the most famous renegades in British history, did not ask to be called a paradise. ‘Hollywood romanticised the whole Mutiny on the Bounty thing,’ said Pawl Warren, the first Pitcairner I met on my recent voyage there, 'but they never followed up what happened afterwards. It became quite bloody, brutal.'
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Beale St in Memphis, Tennessee is the musical heart of America, a neon gulch of juke joints and music halls where Delta blues found Elvis and rock 'n' roll resulted. But for the city of Memphis this beautiful accident is overshadowed by a darker legacy.
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The rhino is targeted by a posse of pick-ups. The lead vehicle accelerates across the grassland, the driver slews to a halt and, standing in the back, I watch as a silver gun barrel pokes through the open window on the passenger side.
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When Lord Byron described the horror novel, Frankenstein, as 'a wonderful work for a girl' he wasn't being patronising, just stating a fact. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was 18 years old when she came to Lake Geneva and gave life to her 'filthy daemon'.
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Looking trim, exuding cool, 81-year-old Buddy Guy dips his head to the microphone. 'They don't play this kinda blues on the radio no more,' he growls. The audience in his eponymous bar in downtown Chicago whoops in anticipation.
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In the badlands of northern New Mexico, deep in America's Southwest, you stock up when you can. An hour north of Santa Fe on US Highway 84 there's a filling station, general store and diner called Bode's that sells everything from raccoon traps to pickling jars…
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The elephant urinated in a firehose gush and his mahout (driver/keeper) cheered. ‘See?’ he said in Lao, pointing at the torrent of water darkening the red-earth road. ‘It’s clear!’ The relief was infectious.
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A lurch and a swish, a sudden sense of space beneath my feet - and I plunge headlong into one of the most eyeball-bending views in the world. The Andes mountains in widescreen, inverted cones of streets, shimmers of colour through the high, thin air.
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Preservation Hall, in the French Quarter of New Orleans, is a lowlit capsule of whirring ceiling fans and crumbling walls - cosily monochrome save for the Exit signs in red neon. At the front (there is no stage) Shannon Powell, 'the King of Treme'…
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La Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic of Venice, is agitated. It's a sunny day in late October - the squares are full of pavement lunchers, the motoscafo drivers are wearing sunglasses and look like Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita…
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