A certain slant of light

My goodness me, it’s been nine whole months since I flew back to London from Japan. This was not my plan. I was supposed to be in Mexico by now. But as you’ll probably have noticed, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, my life quite frequently deviates from the plans I make for it. Over the last two years I’ve become more and more firmly convinced that I don’t really need to plan anything at all (beyond visas and meals), because most of my richest experiences and fondest memories are the ones I didn’t script in advance.

Unfortunately, the last few months of my life have been rather short on rich experiences and fond memories. You’ll have been wondering, I’m sure, why I haven’t been blogging so diligently since I got home, and what the story was with this mysterious ‘health condition’ that’s kept me grounded for so long. The answer is, I’ve been depressed. Perhaps I should have just told everyone from the outset, but it’s rather a difficult thing to admit to. No one gives you ‘get well’ cards when you’re depressed.

Depression, in its several forms, is actually a fairly common aftermath to a journey like mine, and explorers are starting to relax their stiff upper lips and to be more frank about this hidden sting in the tale. Rob Lilwall writes that he feared falling into despair in the months after finishing his ride home from Siberia. Juliana Buhring admits to suffering from depression after her record-breaking circumnavigation last year. Several other people I’ve spoken to, on and off the record, tell me they’ve had similar experiences.

Somehow though, being in such illustrious company doesn’t make it any easier. The last few months have been extremely difficult, in ways that I still find it hard to explain or even articulate. Now that the tide’s finally going out, I look back at the way I’ve felt and behaved and I barely understand it myself. It’s what Emily Dickinson describes as “the Distance / On the look of Death” – the sense of something so awful (in all senses of the word) that it can only be understood when in the midst of it, yet only articulated from a safe distance.

But I don’t want to talk too much about all the details and symptoms of depression – partly because my recovery is still ongoing, and I want it to be a private rather than a public process; partly because there’s actually an awful lot to be said about depression, and I want to limit (or at least pace) myself, otherwise I’ll end up writing too much (you’ll have noticed I do that, when I get my teeth into an idea), and turning this into a mental health blog (and there wouldn’t necessarily be anything wrong with that, but I wanted to be a travel writer). I think one of the many reasons that I haven’t been able to write for the past few months has been my unwillingness to make this depression part of my story by talking about it. You’ll know, from previous posts, how eager I am always to tell a good story, and also how inherently suspicious I am of ‘good’ stories, and how I like to pull them apart in search of more interesting ones.

But there’s more to writing than just recording and reiterating. Writing doesn’t just document reality – it also changes it. Consider this beautiful passage:

Writing is alchemy. Dross becomes gold. Experience is transformed. Pain is changed. Suffering may become song. The ordinary or horrible is pushed by the will of the writer into grace or redemption, a prophetic wail, a screed for justice, an elegy of sadness or sorrow. It is the lone and lonesome human voice, naked, raw, crying out, but hidden too, muted, twisted and turned, knotted or fractured, by the writer’s love of form, or formal beauty: the aesthetic dimension, which is not necessarily familiar or friendly. Nor does form necessarily tame or simplify experience. There is always a tension between experience and the thing that finally carries it forward, bears its weight, holds it in.

(It was written by Andrea Dworkin, but I didn’t want to tell you that before you read it, because people are so often put off by her reputation.)

I was suspicious of trying to turn the raw and ugly horror of depression into prose, of combing it out into its constituent thoughts, of arranging it into polished sentences, coupling them neatly together with commas and semi-colons and garnishing my efforts with an aphorism or two – in short, of writing a redemption and a resolution that I couldn’t yet feel. Depression is a monster and a nightmare, and it can’t be tamed with words – or anything else for that matter. I was also, for a long time, simply unable to step far enough back from my depression to be able to look at it critically, and think about how I might express it. Some of that suspicion remains. After all, no one ever really solves depression – they just find a way out of it. I can’t make sense of it by writing about it.

Language has its limits – I know that now. But, as Dworkin observes, it also holds phenomenal transformative power. I discovered this three years ago, when I started telling people I was planning to leave on September the 1st to cycle round the world, and suddenly it became reality; a thing that was going to happen, rather than a daydream. So despite my scepticism that I could write my way out of this hole, and my deep reluctance to talk to the whole world about what’s been going on in my head, words are probably the way forward. I worry that writing about my depression will make it more real – will inscribe it as a part of myself and my story that I’d rather censor or ignore – but I’m also now sure that writing about something is my surest way of changing it, of turning suffering into song, of exploiting that very productive tension that Dworkin describes between experience and aesthetic form, of growing, of pushing and pulling myself forward, of becoming better.

You’ll know though, if you’ve experienced depression yourself (and a lot of people do these days) the deep ambivalence one feels in sharing it with the world. You know, somehow, that honesty is the best policy, but you’re also terrified of what people might think when you tell them. Afraid that they’ll consider you weak; that they’ll reject you; that they’ll tell you you should just cheer up (as if you hadn’t thought of that). This fear can be one of the major barriers to recovery.

I’m reading a book called Depressive Illness: The curse of the strong. (Written by psychiatrist Dr Tim Cantopher; it’s short, and designed to be readable even by people who are seriously ill. If you’d like to borrow it, and live anywhere in or near London, drop me a line, and I’ll deliver it in person.) It’s proving helpful in many ways, but its main argument, as you’ll have guessed from the title, is that depression is an illness that afflicts the strong, not the weak, and arises from the body’s limbic system (which normally regulates mood, among other things) breaking down as a result of repeated stress – and the stronger the person, the more stress they’ll take on, and the less willing they’ll be to back down and take a break when things get hard.

I refused to believe I was depressed for a very long time (most of the  past year), and even once I’d admitted it (someone sent me a checklist of symptoms, and I had all but one of them), I still foolishly thought that if I just kept going with everything, and refused to give it any attention, eventually I could conquer my depression through sheer strength of will, and make it go away. This didn’t work. I’m reminded of words I wrote myself, almost a year ago, and which apparently I still have yet to take fully to heart: “There are enough stories of triumph and bravery, and I’m disinclined to write another one. Let this one be a tale of failure and cowardice if it needs to.” Yes indeed.

Of course, there is a middle ground between triumph and failure, bravery and cowardice, and that’s where I am now. I am better – ‘better’ being a relative term: not as ill as I was; not as well as I will be, but moving steadily along from the former towards the latter.

So where now? Well, I’ll be staying in the UK for the next year or so, taking advantage of some opportunities that have come up here, and trying to take care of myself a bit better than I have been. I still plan to cycle the Americas – in fact, I really can’t wait – and I still have over half of the funds I started with (for some reason it’s very important to me that people don’t think I quit because of financial mismanagement), so that looks certain to happen, as soon as the moment’s right.

In the meantime, I have a lot of regrouping to do. Around the time I flew back from Japan I broke my nose, a tooth, my camera, my kindle, my headtorch and various other expensive, hard-to-replace things, and a few months later (deep breath), I crashed in London and wrote off my touring bike (proving my oft-repeated argument that couriering is more detrimental to bikes and kit than any other wheel-based activity). At the time, I felt dolefully as if the literal falling-apart of my life was mirroring what was going on psychologically. But now I’m almost back to normal, and remember that starting from scratch is something I’ve done before, and am unafraid of, and by now pretty good at. It’ll be fun putting it all back together again.

So, I’m back. I’ll start blogging again. (Now I’ve got this difficult post out of the way, I’ll hopefully find I have a lot to say again, and if nothing else, I don’t want this sitting on the front page for too long.) If you’ve sent me an email over the last few months, you can now expect a response in the not-too-distant future (sorry about that). And if you were wondering where I was – I was here all along.

October 21, 2013
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We, the disposable

Eleven months ago I was standing on the Khunjerab Pass between Pakistan and China – the highest international border crossing in the world. It was bright and sunny, but bitterly cold, and within minutes Michael and I had lost the warm glow we’d earned on the way up and were shivering helplessly. So we truncated the lengthy photo-session and celebratory picnic we’d both secretly been anticipating (I didn’t even remember to get a shot of me on my own up there, but I guess it’s not really important) and headed back down the hill to Koksil, where the border police were waiting to welcome us with chicken curry and smuggled beer.

There wasn’t much up there anyway. Just snow, wind, blue sky, a gigantic, incongruous border gate (with one miserable border guard, who followed us back into Pakistan on his motorbike once he’d established we weren’t going to sneak into China) and a large plaque eulogizing (in English and at some length) the bravery and resilience of the Pakistani soldiers who’d braved “the bone chilling winds, lack of oxygen and sudden drop of temperatures” to build the Karakorum Highway.

We are proud of you. Your sons and grandsons will remember you. You have done the most wonderful job in the history of the army.

What the plaque doesn’t mention is that almost 1,000 workers died building the Highway – over 800 of them Pakistani. That’s roughly one Pakistani death for every mile of the road. They were killed by landslides and industrial accidents – and, judging from the condition of the remaining road-building camps I passed on my way north, a few of them were probably also despatched by disease, and the -30°C temperatures of which the Khunjerab plaque boasts.

When these deaths are mentioned, the tone is more of respect than of regret. Sometimes there’s even a hint of boastfulness. It would be easy enough to recast and mourn these men as victims of slave labour and, to reimagine the KKH as a lesser Road Of Bones. But instead we’re more inclined to think of it as a symbol of Pakistan’s ever-tightening commercial and political alignment with China, or simply a testament to the ingenuity, tenacity and sacrifice of human beings, and their desire both to overcome and to celebrate the landscape they live in. Perhaps it is a bit of both, or all three. I, for one, have been inspired and fascinated by this road ever since I first heard of it, and this admiration has never been entirely effaced by the knowledge that so many human lives were sacrificed in building it.

But in loving the KKH despite its bloodiness, I am admitting not only that there are other aspects to the road than the human lives it’s swallowed, but broaching the uneasy suggestion that perhaps this monument of human endeavour might actually be worth all the deaths it caused – that sometimes we focus on what has been achieved rather than what has been lost. I can’t decide whether to consider this appalling or inevitable. For now I’m settling on ‘uncomfortable’.

This has been running through my mind over the last few weeks, as I repeatedly cycle past the junction of Victoria Street and Palace Street, where cyclist Dr Katharine Giles was killed by a left-turning construction lorry on the 8th of April. Since I left in 2011 the area north of Victoria Street has become a massive building site, and what used to be a generous few metres of pavement on this corner has been temporarily reduced to just a couple of feet, hemmed in by scaffolding and site barriers, with pedestrians obliged to shuffle through in polite single file, barely able to pass each other. Wilting bouquets with faded dedications from Giles’ family, friends and colleagues are tied to the scaffolding and stuck into the traffic cones, against the backdrop of a hoarding informing us that ‘our’ new Waitrose is on its way. It’s a rather horrible juxtaposition, when you think about it too hard.

Victoria is undergoing “an unprecedented and long overdue transformation“, according to a 2011 Evening Standard article probably copied from Land Securities’ press release. The corner where Giles died will eventually (by 2015) be overlooked by the Zig Zag Building, which will feature “one hundred luxury apartments, studios and penthouses” along with “amenities and retail offerings [including the long-awaited Waitrose] on the ground and first floors”.

A mile away, on the Southbank, skaters are up in arms over plans to take over the undercroft skate park hailed as the birthplace of British skateboarding, and turn it into retail units. The Southbank Centre’s director of partnership and policy describes the site as “pivotal both physically and financially” and “the most valuable financial part of the site”. A passionate campaign has been launched to save the skatepark, but despite a pacifying consultation and an online petition with over 30,000 signatures to date, one senses that the developers will end up going ahead as they had planned all along. The site will be closed for construction for two and a half years from autumn 2014, during which time there will be no skateboarding at all, and, I’m willing to bet, at least one cyclist will die under the wheels of a construction lorry.

In Dhaka, bodies are still being found in the wreckage of the Rana Plaza factory that killed over 1,000 people when it collapsed last month. The workers had been producing garments for Western retailers like Primark, Matalan and Mango. Some of these might one day have been sold in the Zig Zag Building, had one edifice not ended before the other began.

In Pakistan, men are probably still dying on the permanent construction site that is the Karakorum Highway, and more will die as local workers are recruited to build the expected pipeline down to Gwadar port in Balochistan, which Pakistan has recently sold to China, giving the Chinese strategic access to the Persian Gulf.

Yesterday my brother was passing through London on his way home to Leeds. I escorted him from the underground to Victoria Coach Station and we wheeled my bicycle and his suitcase around the block, looking for a cheap cafe to sit in while we waited for his coach.

“I’m not sure if we’ll find anywhere”, I warned him, as we passed yet another bijou restaurant, cutlery and glassware lined up on thick white tablecloths, waiting for the early evening influx of hedge fund managers, and those clients that nearby Google deems worthy of better fare than its famous free cafeteria has to offer. “As you’ll have spotted, it’s a bit posh round here.”

As I said that we noticed two figures curled up in grimy sleeping bags in a narrow doorway, their feet sticking out onto the pavement. They seemed to be fast asleep, or intent on getting there, even though it was only mid afternoon. Could they be drunk, or on drugs, I wondered? Or perhaps it’s still too cold to sleep rough at night, so they have to make up for it during the day. How different their world must be from that of the hedge fund managers, the construction workers up the road, my brother, heading back up north to his houseshare and his job in marketing. And yet how close they all were. Once again it seemed obscene that such an appalling discrepancy could exist in just a few square metres of London.

But I can’t condemn this wholly, not without seeming a hypocrite. After all, at other times I’ve waxed lyrical about the diversity of London, its contrasts and all of its overlapping people and presences. I love the way the city grows and changes, and I’m deeply complicit in its machinations. And it stands to reason that a place this diverse will have its horrors alongside its joys. More cyclists will die this year – of this we can be sure – and some of them will be killed by the trucks that are ferrying rubble and concrete to and from the sites of tomorrow’s buildings. Colette O’Shea, who’s overseeing the Zig Zag project for Land Securities, claims that, once the building work is done, “Victoria will be a place where people actually want to walk”, and that pedestrians will feel safer. Maybe in the end this is all for the best, and a few lives and livelihoods lost along the way are necessary sacrifices. But I don’t want to think that. And I don’t want to be part of a world where individual people’s lives are disregarded in the pursuit of profit, of progress, and of some unspecified future good.

It’s not only the injustice of it that bothers me. It’s our helplessness.

Creative, the courier company I currently work for, does a lot of work in Soho, and in between jobs the couriers habitually congregate on the corner of Broadwick Street and Poland Street, next to the pump to which the 1854 outbreak of cholera was traced by Dr John Snow, after whom the nearby pub is named. Once or twice a day a walking tour group will stop at the pump, and they’ll look curiously at us as their guide tells them the story of Dr Snow, and we’ll look indifferently back at them. It’s our corner – Creative Corner, or just ‘The Corner’ as it’s known in the business. For years couriers have sat there, eating, smoking (or trying not to), snoozing, gossiping, flirting, ranting, checking out passing talent, judging passing hipsters, complaining about the lack of work, reminiscing about the Good Old Days, or just gazing into the distance. Like any subculture, or any family, we have our own mythology, with all its larger-than-life characters, all its in-jokes, all its endlessly repeated anecdotes.

A current denizen of The Corner is soon-to-be-Dr Jon Day, who wrote this piece a few years ago, pointing out just how much of what appears to be public space is in fact privately owned, meaning that undesirables (like, for example, couriers, skateboarders, rough sleepers, hazardously parked bicycles) can be moved on at a whim. I don’t know who owns Creative Corner, or the building that abuts it. They seem not to mind having a few sweaty couriers sitting around, but there’s no saying that that won’t change at some point. For all we know, next week a policeman or security guard will come around and, politely or otherwise, inform us that our presence is no longer welcome, and please can we find somewhere else to sit. And that would be it. End of an era. Just like when they closed The Foundry.

We’re disposable, it seems. Just like the workers at the Rana Plaza in Bangladesh (nothing will change, really – there will still be factories, and Primark will continue to sell cheap knickers). Just like the scruffy, emaciated Pakistani road workers I cycled past on my way up the KKH, who didn’t have any other jobs to choose from, and the scruffy, emaciated vagrants sleeping in doorways in London’s wealthiest postcodes. Just like the cyclists crushed under the wheels of the construction industry, and the skaters displaced because someone decided their skatepark was ‘financially pivotal’.

My brother and I managed to find one of the few remaining cheap cafes in Victoria, and spent an hour or so ranting about some of the above, catching up on family gossip and speculating optimistically about our future careers; his in film-making, mine in writing. And then I waved him off from the coach station, marvelling, as I always do, at how grubby and down-at-heel it is, with its stray pigeons, plastic seating, kiosks selling cheap samosas and signs warning that ‘pickpockets operate in this area’ – a little haven of non-affluence amongst the mansions of SW1; of people who can’t afford to fly or travel by train, who are carrying packed lunches and won’t be stopping at Starbucks. Fewer business suits; more tracksuits. How has it survived this long? Sure enough, further research reveals that this area too is soon up for regeneration – it will be transformed into an “active city quarter” (whatever that means), and the coach station will be removed “to a more appropriate location”.

Where will it go? Where will we go? And where will we ever be welcome?

May 10, 2013
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Observations

I still haven’t stopped smiling. The two days of work I was promised this week turned into four, and when anyone asks me how it’s going, all I can do is grin.

I can’t really explain why couriering makes me so happy, any more than I could tell you why I want to cycle round the world (my current response to this question is ‘I don’t know either – I’m doing it in order to find out!’). It’s actually a terrible job in most ways. On Friday afternoon, within the space of a few minutes in Soho, I spoke to three different couriers about how little money they’re making, how far behind they are on their rent, how much they owe all their friends, how they can’t afford to fix their bikes, and how exploited they feel by the industry and the system. Then we all set off towards Mayfair and Knightsbridge, to deliver bags of designer shoes, cosmetics and jewellery, each cargo probably worth more than we’d earn that day, passing people in business suits downing £3 cups of coffee like it’s nothing. One of the couriers I spoke to commented on how hard it is to keep yourself to a weekly budget of £10, or whatever it is, when you spend 50 hours a week in central London, surrounded by shops and cafes and food stalls and special offers, and constantly struggling with hunger, boredom and the need for caffeine.

I used to marvel somewhat idly at all the differences and discrepancies I witnessed as I rode through the city. Now they make me angry.

I’ve also lost some of the tolerance I’d built up for the bad habits of drivers and pedestrians. Most of the time, when someone’s deliberately cut you up with an inch to spare, or stepped out into your path without even bothering to look, then shouted at you for riding too fast, the only thing to do is to let go of it, and plough your annoyance back into your cycling – otherwise you’d spend the entire day seething with road rage.  But, after the occasionally reckless but generally courteous drivers of most of Asia, I’m now continually aghast by the frequency with which Londoners jump lights, left-turn or U-turn without indicating, speed, ignore one-way systems, and willfully bully and intimidate vulnerable cyclists and pedestrians. But continual aghastment is not a comfortably tenable state, so I’ll build up my tolerance again – much as you’ll build up the rough skin on your palms or heels, with perhaps a few blisters and open sores along the way.

Another unsettling thing about this job is my sudden ubiquity. When you’re out in the streets all day you meet a great number of people. On my first day on the road I ran into three different (non-cycling) friends, who just happened to be going about their daily business as I rode past. I’d braced myself to be patronized by the more recent additions to the courier circuit, who’d assume I was the new one, but instead several of them have pulled up next to me at the traffic lights, asked whether I’m (that) Emily Chappell and admitted to reading one or other of my blogs. Stuff like this is surreal, but also rather wonderful.

What’s less wonderful is all the people I’d rather didn’t see me. An Addison Lee driver chatted me up on Vigo Street on Thursday, and said he’d spotted me in three separate locations just that day. It reminded me of the cabbie who verbally attacked me on Charlotte Street back in 2011, and then happened to walk past me on Montagu Place the very next day, and took the opportunity to continue the attack. It wasn’t so much his aggression that disturbed me, as the fact that he’d run into me by chance less than 24 hours later. The following day a different driver threatened me with a weapon in Cavendish Square, and rather than shaking it off, as I normally would, I rode as fast as I could to the nearest police station, and spent the next half hour sobbing uncontrollably while a very kind policewoman handed me tissues, and sympathized expertly with the challenges of toughing it out in a man’s world. I never saw that van driver again, but for my remaining months on the road I was haunted by the possibility – in fact, the likelihood – that I might run into him, that he might recognize me, or even hunt me down. I finally spotted him last Friday. He’s still on the road, still in the same van, and had only (apparently) managed to get as far as New Oxford Street in two years. The traffic was terrible, and I slipped past him easily and invisibly, and was probably in Hoxton before he’d even crossed Holborn.

I’m not afraid any more. It would be excessively paranoid to assume people are out to get me, and the several years I’ve already spent on the road have shown me that I am generally most at risk from my own stupidity. (Did I tell you about the time I fell off on my last day in Tokyo, and broke my nose? Hilarious.) I doubt very much that driver remembers me, and even if he does, what’s he going to do?

Rather than fear, this is a more nebulous sense of unease – of being constantly, helplessly visible; noticed, noted, remembered, observed, watched. When I was cycling through Iran I was obliged (by the freezing cold weather as well as the laws of the land) to keep everything covered except my hands and my face. Most of the male travellers I encountered objected frequently and vocally to this dress code, either because of the appalling oppression it was supposed to represent or because they felt entitled to see more of women and their bodies than was currently on display. I, on the other hand, found it unexpectedly restful to have so much of myself covered, not necessarily through any sense of prudishness or modesty, but because, despite the male curiosity that followed me wherever I went, I felt safe, hidden, and private. Their curiosity (along with their other, more corporeal impulses) remained mostly unsatisfied. My body – the contours of my skin; the colour of my hair – remained exclusively my own, and couldn’t be co-opted into someone else’s fantasy or narrative. (Or, even if it still was, they had very little to go on, so would be largely making it up.) I enjoyed being inscrutable; being none of their business.

One afternoon last week, at the junction of Goswell and Clerkenwell, I spotted a young man taking a photo of me. When I told him he should have asked my permission, he just looked at me blankly, and then the lights changed and we both rode off. Goodness knows what he’ll use the photo for. Probably nothing, but still. If someone sees me in the street and wants to take my image into his camera or his imagination, and then use it for whatever creative, scurrilous or prurient purpose he sees fit, there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.

My visibility cuts both ways though. I remember a gaggle of teenage girls staring at me as they crossed the road in front of me, initially feeling intimidated (because I have found teenage girls intimidating ever since I was one), and then realizing that, rather than sneering at the loser on the bike, some of them might well have been thinking ‘wow – I wish I could be like that!’, just as I did when I saw my first cycle courier. Now that’s a narrative I wouldn’t  mind being co-opted into. A nice young man introduced himself at some traffic lights recently and told me that my blog was the reason he became a cycle courier. This was flattering, but also vindicating. By doing what I truly love, and by rambling self-indulgently about it for several years, I’ve influenced the course of someone else’s life (hopefully for the better, though as I mentioned above, it is mostly a terrible job and he should definitely keep his options open). I don’t want to become a hero (how boring), but I wouldn’t mind becoming part of a conversation about how the world works and how it might be changed.

But I’ll never completely get over my squeamishness about displaying myself and my lifestyle, both in the streets and on the internet. Which is why I’m so grateful for the other side of the job – along with the constant exposure comes the permanent escape route it offers. If I need to, I can ride away so fast that only other cycle couriers could catch me, and I have corners of London to hide in that I’ve never told anyone about; where you’d never think to look for me. And in a few months’ time I’ll once again be on the road (and I use the definite article deliberately here, because no matter which road I happen to be on, it feels like the same place – that is to say, home), with the sky above me and the horizon all around, and no one will know where I am, not even myself, and all will be right with the world.

April 28, 2013
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Back in my (dis)comfort zone

And yesterday I was a courier again, and it was just as wonderful as I had remembered. It felt like arriving home, coming full-circle, and reaching my journey’s end – though, of course, I am nowhere near the ‘real’ end of my journey, and there are still several continents to go before I can start

April 18, 2013
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Revisions

There’s been a slight change of plan. I’m still in the UK, and an unexpected (but non-life-threatening) health issue needs to be resolved, meaning that I’m likely to remain here for at least the next four months. Needless to say, this was a difficult realization, but it has countless silver linings. My health will be

April 15, 2013
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All that talking

Sorry, yes, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Looks like I needed more of a holiday than I realized. I’m still here though, still looking forward to the next few (thousand) miles, and still planning to keep blogging, after just a few more  days’ rest. In the meantime, if you’re suffering from Chappell withdrawal, I’ll

February 22, 2013
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In case you’re interested…

I’ll be giving a talk about my journey so far, at Look Mum No Hands (London’s premier bike café) at 6.30pm on the 31st of January. 49 Old Street, London EC1 9HX. Come, and bring your friends. And if you’re based in Mid Wales, I’ll also be giving a talk at the Tabernacle in Machynlleth

January 21, 2013
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How to go home

On my fourth day on the road, all those months ago, I passed through London, and there was a fond farewell party on the roof of an old multi-storey carpark in Peckham. It’s a memory I often revisit as I ride through the deserts and the mountains and the vast tracts of earth where there

December 29, 2012
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Riding in cars with boys

I didn’t make it to Tazawako in the end. While I was in Akita it started to snow, and my host dolefully informed me that it probably wouldn’t stop until next March. I looked out of his window. The whole city was white, buried under snowdrifts and hard packed ice, tucked in under a blanket

December 28, 2012
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Questionable Women – We have lift-off!

It’s been a long time coming (because I am busy, and disorganized, and have a planet to cycle around), but I am very pleased to announce that the Questionable Women project is now live! What started out as a simple Q&A blog post idea is now a full web page. Click here to read it.

December 20, 2012
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