art & travel for the curious
I stepped off the train and into the golden light of Autumn, armed with a book and a single change of clothes. Vienna in October has a bright glow to it, as if the city were recovering from summer's blaze. Weaving through the platform crowd I was reminded of a film that begins here, in [...]
Sitting around the dinner table a little while ago, dogs at my feet and a family of eyes on me, I was asked what I thought of Marin. I found myself struggling to answer. Not because I didn't have anything to say about it - quite the opposite. I hadn't yet been able to fathom what this [...]
We got out of the car on Park Street, a steep hill in the centre of Bristol lined with shops from top to bottom. Park Street had shrunk since I was last there, which tends to happen when you spend considerable time away from a place you grew up visiting. What had been a mountain [...]
‘Journeys,’ the writer Alain de Botton has said, ‘are the midwives of thought.’ Having spent two years in solid work mode, the idea of having a thought independent of work was attractive. So I thought I’d take a journey. Tickets were bought. I set my alarm 3:10am (three hours’ time). There was no chance I [...]
There are a great many people in their twenties who are feeling very lost right now. It’s no accident this feeling coincides with a major shift in the way we approach our work. More young people than ever before are trading job security and wealth for risk and uncertainty. We are seeing a rejection of [...]
When it comes to predicting the future, most of what we read skews apocalyptic. If we somehow escape natural disaster then we’ll inevitably do the deed ourselves - whether it's nuclear war or wayward artificial intelligence. So the narrative goes. These predictions strike me as naive, not because they lack the serious consideration they deserve, [...]
My family recently moved out of the house I grew up in. When I first heard my mother was selling the house I was mortified. I couldn’t understand how she could she just pack up and move so easily away from a place with such history for our small family. But I quickly found myself [...]
