Category Archives: Travel notes

There is a juicy scandalette in Sweden where two journalists on one of the big tabloids (Aftonbladet) have been caught with child porn this week. All this naturally reported in full on the rival Expressen, to which of the accused … Continue reading → Continue reading →

This is the way the world ends: in the small shelf devoted to Popular Science, at the bookshop in Terminal 3 at Heathrow, the Bible Code was shelved above Richard Dawkins’ latest, and the Celestine Prophecy below it. Otherwise some … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I went over to Stockholm for the weekend, and was effectively offline, since the hotel had no wifi, only a public terminal. It was extremely disconcerting to see how much more standard European the city had become. I found the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

My son Felix, who is half Swedish, speaks three regional dialects of English fluently — RP, or BBC English, which is what we speak at home; Essex/Estuary, which is what the aboriginals of Saffron Walden spoke when he worked in … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The Arundell Arms in Lifton is the best country hotel in Britain. It has one imperfection: the shower in our room was psychotic, cycling unnervingly between freezing and scalding. But I like even that: if the showers had been perfect … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I was reading a rather lucid prediction of disaster for America when the oil supply gets tighter and discovered that one measure of the apocalypse was that you might find it cost $50 to fill your car. I don’t know … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Abut a week ago today I climbed off a plane in Philadelphia, and took the little train to 30th street station where I was going to catch a larger train to New York. Somewhere in 30th Station I passed a … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I will be in New York on Monday (profiling Oliver Sacks at very short notice). Any readers there want to make themselves known? I have a lot of books to read before Tuesday morning, but it’s always nice to meet … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Is there any Swedish online bookshop that will ship its products outside Scandinavia? I can’t find one and I don’t know anywhere in this country that sells a wide range of Swedish books. As a side-note, IKEA, when it first … Continue reading → Continue reading →

“I heard of this kind of thing in mortuary school” said the investigating detective. This is a completely pointless but strangely charming story of a woman who decided to help her alcoholic husband out after he became unable to drink. … Continue reading → Continue reading →