My friend Marco’s dad passed away yesterday.

Marco’s dad was Tom Bass, the famous Australian sculptor. One of his most best known works is the P&O wall fountain on Hunter Street. Oz Magazine published a photo of it being used as a urinal in 1964 with a caption that read ‘A trio of Sydney natives P&Oing in the Bass urinal.’ The editors were promptly sued and jailed for obscenity and encouraging public urination.

I went to high school with Marco. And we shared a house in our first year at university. My abiding memory of his dad was visiting him in his studio on Broadway in Sydney.

His studio was light and dusty and there always seemed to be a life model or two hanging around. To a young guy who grew up on the outskirts of Sydney it was all very exciting and bohemian.

It also planted the germ of a thought that there may be more to the world than flannelette shirts and ugh boots.

We all know where that led.

What is it about blokes and sport? You can sit us down in front of the tele and show us a sport we’ve never seen before and within minutes we’re experts, criticising the technique of someone who has just spent the last two years getting up at dawn to train.

It happened to me yesterday watching the Men’s Ski Cross finals. After observing a few of the finals in the BBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics, I can tell you exactly where Aussie Scotty Kneller blew it in his semi-final – back in Oz when he turned down the offer at his local Maccas to go large. Weight and height are the keys to success in ski cross – as well as a skull painted on the top of your helmet – and Scott was lacking in all three.

Of course, I’d have problems shoving myself out of the gates fast enough to get up the first hump. And I’d clatter into the barriers on the first bend. But that’s the fun of being an armchair expert. You don’t need to be any good to spout forth uninformed nonsense.

Like most critics, I guess.

Just wanted to say a big thanks to everyone who came along to my talks at Adventure Travel Live yesterday. It was fun talking to you all and I hope I helped inspire you all to go off and have your own amazing adventures.

A hearty thanks as well to Chris and all the guys at Escape Events for inviting me along in the first place.

A number of highlights from the day:

The parking officers trying to figure out where to put the parking ticket on the Dragoman overland truck parked out front. (There’s a pic above)

Chatting to Alastair and Stephen from Oz Bus about their plans for the company. (Keep your eye out for an info evening at Australia House very soon.)

Meeting Geoff Hann from Hinterland Travel. He runs tours to Iraq. Chatting to him shelling out £3,000 to ignore Foreign Office warnings, drive along roads the Americans avoid and skipping on travel insurance because no-one will cover you anyway suddenly makes sense.

Another thing that became abundantly clear is that if I want to get serious about this speaking thing I’ve got to get a sexy appellation to stick after my name. In the program notes and on the boards outside the theatres I was simply listed by name. Everyone else had adventurer, explorer or trailblazer tacked on the end.

And if I really want to walk in these rarefied circles I need to get myself a scarf – a sort of light weight explorer-y kind of one that looks dashing and keeps out the dust during the inevitable Saharan sandstorm that’s only seconds away, even in SW1.

Kind of like the one I saw Benedict Allen wearing when he swished past yesterday.

I got an email from Ancestry.com.au the other day. To help celebrate Australia Day they are giving people free access to over two million searchable convict and criminal related records to see if they had a crooked skeleton or two in the family closet.

The offer ends on January 31, so if you’re keen to see if you have the odd recessive racketeering gene in your DNA you’d better hurry.

Of course, it’s cool to have a convict in your past now – manacle chic, I think they call it. But it wasn’t that long ago it was a source of shame.

I recently discovered a dodgy character on my mum’s side of the family. His name was Jack Radnidge and he was shipped out on a convict ship out of Bristol in 1830. He’d robbed a guy at knife point, apparently, but after a few years out in a NSW penitentiary he was released and given a parcel of land up in the Hunter Valley.

He did well for himself, becoming a bit of a gentleman farmer from all accounts. So much so that those who followed on my mum’s side of the family glossed over his dark past until it was forgotten altogether.

My mum was a little shocked when I told her. Her grandmother, Jack Radnidge’s great-granddaughter, was regarded as quite posh.

The upshot of it all is that I have not descended from the landed gentry. Rather, I’m fifth generation mugger from Bristol.

Maybe that’s why I liked the place so much.

I popped up to Lincoln for the annual Australia Day Breakfast yesterday. It’s put on by the local council to celebrate their links with Port Lincoln in South Australia and to raise money for charity.

Sally’s parents are from Lincoln. And her mum is always encouraging us to come up for event. (Mainly so she can see her grand daughter, I suspect.)

Her sales pitch is always the same. Aussies get their breakfast for free.

The breakfast is held in the auditorium at The Lawn, a hotel up in the cathedral quarter, right near the castle walls.

The locals all put on Akubra hats and pronounce ‘G’Day’ very badly. Nearby businesses donate all the bacon, sausages, eggs and beans. And you can spot the Aussies because they’re all wearing Wallabies jerseys.

(In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that Daisy wore hers. I took the slightly more understated option of donning a scarf I picked up from a dodgy street vendor when the Socceroos played the Reggae Boys at Craven Cottage.)

After eating our breakfast the MC encouraged us and anyone else who had finished eating to vacate the auditorium so other people could use the tables.

A guy who runs the Australia Shop in Stamford lay in wait just outside the door with a stall selling stuff from back home. I dropped £3.50 on a packet of Tim Tams. And met a bunch of Aussie pilots stationed at the Waddington RAF Base, just up the road.

They’d just spent a week’s worth of wages on some Mint Slices and a packet of Twisties.

I got an email from John Sjoholm the other day. He’d bought himself a Kindle and was wondering if any of my books were available as eBooks.

The short answer is no. It seems my publishers are determined to follow the lead of the music industry and put their heads in the sand, hoping the whole digital thing will go away.

I did get a letter from Random House UK on the subject last year though. They wanted to bring out eBook versions of Swahili for the Broken-Hearted and NSITT. As long as I agreed to the contract being altered so that I got an even smaller royalty. This was to cover the cost of creating ebook versions of files they already had in electronic form. I politely declined.

It’s something they’ve got to sort out. This is a market that is only going to grow. Ebooks won’t replace printed books altogether. I think they’ll become another option in how we consume books. Kind of like the decision whether to listen to music on your iPod or on your stereo at home. Devices like the rumoured Apple Tablet will only speed things along.

Of course, that’s only the start of things. There’s decisions to be made on pricing and whether to load them with any kind of restrictive DRM. And what about ‘enhanced’ editions. Do people really want extra bells and whistles (I mean how many people bother with the special features on DVDs anymore?)

My personal feeling is that eBooks should be considerably cheaper than printed versions. The savings in printing, transport, warehousing should be passed on to either the reader or the author, preferably both. Enhanced editions? I downloaded the all-singing, all-dancing version of Nick Cave’s last novel. In the end I ignored all the extra stuff and just read the book.

Like I said, it will happen. And I think it will happen in a totally understated way where reading a book on some kind of device becomes the norm.

I’d be interested to hear what you guys think.

It always makes me laugh when I see one of those columns where they ask someone who they’d like to sit next to on a plane or at a dinner party and the person nominates Bill Bryson. I’ve sat next to (or near) Bill at two dinners and didn’t hear a peep out of him at either.

Those of you expecting him to be some kind of raconteur, holding forth with a glass of wine in his hand and having everyone rolling around on the floor laughing, would be sadly disappointed.

Having said that, I would pay good money to read something Bill wrote about either of those meals. It was obvious that he was watching everyone very closely. And I imagine he was mentally composing hilarious prose skewering each of our idiosyncrasies.

In that way, Bill is kind of like the SAS ‘Grey Man’ of travel writing – the guy who slips unnoticed and gets the job done to devastating effect.

Which brings me, in a roundabout fashion, to Simon Varwell. Simon is neither grey or silent. But he has that great writer’s knack of sitting back and observing, and picking out the little gestures and snippets of dialogue that get to the truth of the matter.

I first met Simon at a writing workshop in the Scottish Highlands where I was asked to give a ‘Masterclass.’ Each attendee was asked to present an idea for a travel book or article and as an ‘authority’ I was meant to suggest ways to shepherd the idea into becoming a reality.

I must have said something useful because Simon’s idea is about to be published as a book.

It’s called Up The Creek Without A Mullet. And I’m getting a review copy in a day or two.

I can’t wait.

I’ll write another post when I’ve read the book and give you my opinion. But I wanted to do a post specifically about Simon’s success in getting published.

It wasn’t because of a trick, a gimmick or a viral campaign. It came through hard work and quiet determination.

Like I said. It’s the quiet ones you’ve got to watch.

A big thanks to Darryn Martin at Easyspace for sorting out the problems with my slideshows.

For those of you who are technically minded, the php.ini file needed tinkering with after a server reboot.

For those of you who aren’t, the clunky Flickr solution is gone and the lovely SlideshowPro ones are back.

Thanks for all your emails alerting me to the problem – and your patience!

If you’re in London on January 31 and find yourself wandering aimlessly in the vicinity of the Royal Horticultural Pavilions please feel free to pop in and listen to either one or both of my chats.

The first one is on at 11am and sees my holding forth on the topic of using social media as a travel tool. And at 3pm I’ll be regaling those who turn up with tales of my epic journey from london to Sydney – and pointing them towards the work of Kylie Phaup-Stephens who’s in the middle of doing the same trip herself.

You’ll find all the details on my events page here.

Daisy is five now so it’s time to renew her passports. Probably a good thing. As you can see from the pic she’s changed a bit from when she was six weeks old.

It was a palaver getting the photos though. Last time Daisy could use the same photo for both passports. Now the Aussies and the Brits insist on different dimensions and different backgrounds. The Aussies like your face to fill up more of the frame with a white background. The Brits prefer a grey backdrop (insert your weather related jokes here) and for you to stand a little further back, if you don’t mind.

The Brits and the Aussies have one thing in common though. If you don’t get the photo exactly right they’ll reject it out of hand.

Which got me thinking. With the advent of biometric passports and this insistence on perfectly-lit, perfectly-fit images, is this the end of the really bad passport photo?

It wasn’t that long ago that passport offices would accept any old photo, as long as it was roughly the right size and bore a passing resemblance to the person presenting it. They were flexible on that too though, especially if it was close to lunchtime. And because people inevitably leave getting the photo done until the last moment – usually on the way to the passport office – they always looked rushed and flustered.

Badly cropped, badly lit, badly dressed – it didn’t matter. And as a result backpackers the world over enjoyed drunken nights roaring with laughter as they compared their passports. I know that my third passport, the one where I had a mullet, bought joy to all corners of the globe.

The worst passport photo I saw belonged to an English girl called Gemma. It was so overexposed that her eyes were the only part of her face clearly visible. It had been featured on the bad passport photo section of the English TV show Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush. And yet she’d just spent six months travelling throughout Asia using it.

Of course, the occasional fashion faux pas and bad haircut will still slip through. No amount of professional lighting can totally counter bad taste.

But I can’t help but think an era has passed.