Category Archives: Travel notes

Returning to England makes me understand what the Count felt every morning: I have been feeding, flying and wandering in my proper estate; now I must climb back into a coffin fulled with clay, sand and flints and tug the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

yesterday, on the train from Stansted to London, a teenage girl describing to another an experience on holiday: “I was like – I wasn’t like – I was just like oh my god”. There’s a theologian struggling to get out … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Thanks to Danny O’Brien, I have lost a whole morning looking at ancient maps. This is a truly fantastic site, though regrettably biased towards the USA. If you download the Java viewer, you can examine and save maps from most … Continue reading → Continue reading →

This was the wormseye I wrote off the back of various comments on an earlier post. Thanks to Quinn and Billmon for facts and ideas. If there was one thing which everyone knows, it is that Americans have grown richer … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I bet you’re all so sunk in republican depravity that you didn’t even know Albania — like Narnia — had a Queen Susan. You should read the Daily Telegraph more. Queen Susan was an Australian drover’s daughter, who pitched up … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Or, why I find myself taking cloudscapes: Continue reading →

I’m writing up a big piece for G2 about creationists and their attempts, helped by the government, to get a foothold in the British educational system. What makes it possible is the appalling state of many comprehensive schools: the one … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Whether it is a mark of decadence or of advancing civilisation, we find it harder and harder to credit how the English middle classes treated their children. This is from the obit of a 90-year-old judge in the Telegraph today: … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Both of the FWB’s grannies were born in India and when they are together, they grow nostalgic. Last night they were discussing the nursery servants, whom they loved; one of them remembered that it had been her ayah’s job, at … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I was trying to discover whether I had ever written about ID cards for the Guardian and this fell out of the filing system. Notes made on a train out of Liverpool Street, some night last year. Across the aisle … Continue reading → Continue reading →