Mopping his face, the painter accepts vodka, pickles, speckled sausage. Climbs the stairs to prop his easel in four windowfuls of light, where he sits, paint sluggish on palette, drugged by syrup slip of birdsong, watching nurse maids shoosh prams like black sows up and down the road. This man in smock and scarlet cravat […]

“Nobody wants any more poems about foreign cities…” – quoted by Charles Tomlinson as epigraph to More Foreign Cities … and then there was Kilpisjärvi, mentioned by few poets, and visited by even fewer heads of state, ambassadors to the U.N. and other assorted foreign dignitaries whose dignity is legendary in Kilpisjärvi. Where sometimes the […]

Travel books are always out of date. Even if the time lag wasn’t inherent. the writer’s Rome, Paris, Sydney, wouldn’t be yours, your snapshots would never match the glossy illusions anchoring the book’s version of Abroad Once your Student Guide To Wherever, your Rough Guide or Lonely Planet, is over five years old, or you […]

In the dead hours before dinner she lies inert, waiting to retie her shoes and stumble back into the city in search of food. She has cricked her neck to gaze at Gaudi’s curves followed the guide book, chapter and verse, lit candles for saints, sent cards and whiled away minutes in corner cafés, watching […]

Whether it is the slap-slap of sandalled feet of women who bear baskets of dragon fruit, or the creak of bicycles carrying bundles of greens and limes to market, the road outside my window never sleeps. Pale apricot sun diffuses morning mist as motor cycles weave through blaring horns, laden with chickens or pigs, dried […]

It’s not a place I know – deterred by imaginings: extravagant right-angles, outsize sticklebrick landscapes, fretworks of fire-escapes departing a maddening iron-clad maze, lives compressed at the bottom of deep, dark siren-tidal streets… I could go on but it is possible I have things out of proportion. So, is it also possible that such gigantic […]