September 2026

How losing my blood-pressure medication in Cornwall turned my trip into a three-day Doc Martin story across England and Wales — except there was no Doc Martin when I needed one.Everything that follows is true. It is also why I now travel with two sets of my regular medication, packed in two different places.At the time, however, I was still innocen

Tampere in winter gave me a flipped classroom, one very long walk, 95°C — and a hole in the ice.I had prepared for Finland more seriously than I do for most destinations, and not only intellectually. Our hosts had stressed the importance of proper winter clothing often enough for me to treat it as an assignment: thermal underwear, thick socks, an e

Seven Sisters at 5:51 — grey skies, indifferent cows and the Coastguard Cottages I had travelled to see.I almost always go somewhere for my birthday, and more often than not I end up in London. In 2022, though, things were a little different. London was still part of the trip, but one of the main reasons for the trip lay south of the city, on the E

How I plan a trip to London around theatre, flights, hotels and transport — without treating the plan as sacred.Last time, Ncuti Gatwa and Edward Bluemel were to blame. I knew Gatwa as Eric from Sex Education and the Doctor from Doctor Who, and Bluemel from Killing Eve and My Lady Jane. In Born With Teeth, they were going to play Christopher Marlow

What Stockholm in two days taught me about Swedish precision, open-fire dining and the danger of overplanning a city.Stortorget, the colourful heart of Stockholm’s Gamla Stan.The bus from Stockholm Skavsta Airport refused to leave. The engine was running, everyone was on board, and a fairly long drive to Stockholm lay ahead. Yet the driver wouldn’t

Nine years, seven hotels in Lisbon, and everything that happened between them.Some cities I remember through their streets, others through people, and still others through a single evening or one particular view. Lisbon, apparently, I remember through hotels.I first arrived in 2015 and stayed in a hotel recommended by the conference I was attending

Belgium in One Day: Five Cities, Three Waffles, and One Very Long Free DayIt was a morning in Luxembourg in late December 2025, and it was seriously cold outside. For breakfast, as I almost always do when I eat at a hotel, I ordered Eggs Benedict and then went back to my room.In front of the large window stood a modern sofa with organic curves, pos

Queen Margrethe’s breakfast room, diamond signatures, royal gardens and a quiet walk to Lake Esrum — a summer afternoon inside Fredensborg Palace, Danish royal home still in use.The local train from Helsingør took about half an hour to reach Fredensborg, and the moment I stepped off I checked whether I had made a mistake. The station seemed almost

Exploring Catania on foot through its palaces, churches and fish market, with Bellini along the way, pasta alla Norma at dinner and rather too many reasons to miss my train.When Venus and Mars make love, Vulcan rages in the depths of Etna, spewing his pain into the sky. Fire rains down on Catania, but Liotru, the mighty black elephant, takes the go

Lost photographs from a 2007 trip to Bulgaria bring back Plovdiv, Bachkovo, a global conference and a suitcase misrouted to Tirana.In 2026, while looking for photographs for a completely different blog, I found an old compact camera. I had assumed that whatever remained on it had disappeared from my life years ago, yet its memory card still contain

Amsterdam 20 Years Later: Same Tracks, Tired Windows, Stronger Weed — and the Suspicion That the Party Moved to BerlinIn 2004, Amsterdam ended for me with a daytime train to Cologne. Twenty years later, Cologne was where Amsterdam began again. I was returning along the same railway corridor to a city I remembered well enough to miss, but perhaps no

Fifteen stops, one phone, years of Prague experience — let the hunt for the best Prague photograph begin.I have been to Prague enough times for another round of classic sightseeing to make very little sense. I know the major landmarks, I have photographed most of them before, and I certainly do not need another picture proving that Charles Bridge i