We’re midway into my ten ways to break the ice with strangers when you’re travelling – and now it’s time to play the fool.
Posts under ‘Travels: Where I Most Resemble Myself.’
The Big List Of Fevered Mutterings (2009-2010)
It’s been nearly a year since I accidentally deleted my blog and had to start all over again.
Here’s everything that’s happened at Fevered Mutterings (v4.0) since that glorious day of rampant stupidity for which I am rightly proud. A year’s worth: most of it original, some stolen from my archives; some of it carefully considered, [...]
Olympus
I’m leant against the car, gasping, giggling, sucker-punched by the cold. Around me, the landscape is motionless and brittle. The tops of trees have exploded as the wind tried to bend them. Overhead, dirty clouds boil past like timelapse photography. The rock-strewn ground is so hard you expect it to ring. Take the trees and [...]
Cobweb 2.0: How Spiders Catch The Rain
So that’s how.
Image: Mike Sowden.
Breaking The Ice With Strangers: Hook
The road is a lonely place.
Everyone’s a stranger. You long to connect with someone, anyone, but the odds are stacked against you. You’re in too much of a hurry to engage in social bonding rituals like feasting and hanging out. There’s the natural coolness in the air. And hey, you’re not your normal self right [...]
How To Make Athens Punch You In The Stomach
It’s easy.
Simply climb that hill on the right.
How To See Airports (And Other Bad Places)
If you were traversing Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow last August, you may have seen a writerly-looking chap sat tapping on a computer, his words being displayed on a large plasma screen over his head. This was the temporary Writer In Residence, Alain de Botton, and he was writing a book about what airports really [...]
Hornsea, Askance
Hi. I’m a 38 year old man, living at home with his mum.
(Until she’s recovered from her recent surgery. Probably returning to York this time next week).
Walking through town last night, I squinted until everything was blurry – until it was 1998 again, the last time I lived here. I listened to someone explaining the [...]
But A Wisp of the Dales
In 2007, I went walking with 2 good friends in the Yorkshire Dales around Ingleborough.
The air was heavy with rain that never quite broke, shot through with sunshine that never really came out to play, and just the right temperature to keep you walking at a mile-devouring trot.
We walked up hill and down valley, up [...]
