A return to travel writing
When the plague hit, I was in Øvre Dividal National Park in northern Norway, tramping between mountain huts in the powdery snow and learning the hard way that there is…
Hidden wartime remains and the language of wild beauty
The latest issue of Ernest Journal hit doormats last week, including quite a few bits and bobs by me. Along with quite a few smaller items, I’ve got a couple…
The intricacies of bee etiquette
Fine news. Another edition of Ernest Journal is out. Featuring lots of grand stuff including pieces on Romanian bison, cocktail bitters, American shanty boats, death trees and paranoid French castaways.…
Mead fit for a king
‘Turbulent old time, the 17th century. It was the age of characters like Cardinal Richelieu and the Duke of Buckingham; of Oliver Cromwell, Galileo and Guy Fawkes; of civil war,…
The Sherlock Holmes Book
Sometimes the perfect job falls into your lap. As a 13 year-old picking my GCSE options, I quite fancied taking chemistry. Until further consideration revealed that I was abysmal at…
Contributor to The Great Outdoors
Could anything be more pleasing than getting paid to go on strolls and write about them? Or to work for magazines that you read anyway? The Great Outdoors very kindly…
The motivational lessons of James Bond novels
There’s a tendency to underrate the perceptive capacities of thriller writers. You get so bound up in the pace and action of a plot that observations that would give you…
Employment and elevation
Our lifts at work are a hundred shades of shite. There are supposed to be six of them, but this number is reduced to at most four, and frequently three.…
Inky catharsis
No doubt psychiatrists and medication have their place in life, but as an outlet for a whole range of mildly negative emotions (frustration and boredom being chief among them), I…
Before sunset
I was obliged to move desks last week. My new desk is about two thirds the size of my old one, but I don’t mind at all. Because it is…
