I was watching Michael Palin on TV last night. The BBC are repeating his program, Sahara, and last night he was in Senegal and Mali, two countries I have never visited but would dearly love to. About half way through the show he caught a train from Dakar to Bamako and it took everything in [...]

For the past five years I’ve been writing a light-hearted column about travel for TNT magazine in Australia. They didn’t pay me much – it’s a magazine aimed at backpackers after all. And I’m not sure that it raised my profile amongst fellow travellers like they said it would. But it was a lot of [...]

The Saturday edition of The Times here in London comes with a magazine called The Knowledge, a collection of stories, reviews and listings of what is happening in entertainment in the capital. Last weekend’s issue, for example, carried an interview with Daryl Hannah claiming that she thinks she’s normal, a list of the Top 50 [...]

I went to see Sigur Ros on Sunday night. They played in the courtyard of Somerset House on a balmy summer night and it was one of those gigs that captured the mood of post-terrorist London perfectly – fragile, bruised but upliftingly defiant. The contingent of gay Norwegian bikers up front seemed to like it [...]

After the terrible terrorist attacks in London yesterday I just wanted send my best wishes and condolences to any of my British readers who may have been caught up in the brouhaha. It’s a shocking state of affairs but I’m glad to say that the British have been coping with that usual mix of stoicism [...]