#photography

Rabat was supposed to be nothing more than a place to spend the night on my way to Marrakech. A few hours later, I was standing in the blue-and-white lanes of the kasbah, looking out towards the Atlantic, and realising I’d found my own little pearl of Morocco.Had anyone asked me before that trip which three Moroccan cities I most wanted to see, Rab

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

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

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

Travelling to Fes can easily feel like travelling into the past. Pass through one of the monumental gates of its medina and the first question is almost inevitable: are we really still in the twenty-first century?There are sensible ways to visit Fes for the first time, and hiring a local guide is certainly one of them. Fes el-Bali is not the kind o

Seven years after my first visit, I returned to discover what Oxford keeps behind its gates Had apparition been allowed inside Hogwarts, I could have travelled directly from the Gloucester Cathedral cloister where Mrs Norris was found petrified to the hospital wing in Oxford’s Divinity School. Unfortunately, it was not. So I had to take a train.

One perfect reflection, two mountain transport systems and a ridiculously expensive day above Zermatt. There is a photograph of the Matterhorn on the wall of my office. The mountain rises almost perfectly above Riffelsee, while its reflection points downward into water so still that Switzerland appears to have arranged itself specifically for my