While Vladimir Putin rains death on Ukraine, the former Armageddon factory of Orford Ness has been reinvented in favour of life.
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it’s a big lump of rock and it’s very English (old-fashioned cafes and lots of weather) without quite being England. A place to blow a trumpet to your heart’s content and see life from a wry angle.
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It’s low tide on the Thames in London. At Rotherhithe on the south bank I descend rickety wooden stairs to a foreshore littered with iron nails and rivets – from the time when the dock here was a site of boatbuilding then of boat breaking.
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Something is missing in the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel – George. That’s the name of a shrunken head from Peru which I remember seeing in the Smoke Room a decade ago. It’s just as well it’s gone – such a grisly trophy had surely outlived its shock value – but it’s also a surprise. To quote the Talking Heads song the PyG is a Heaven “where nothing/Nothing ever happens.”
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A while ago an article I wrote for the Telegraph was teed up with a standfirst – written by some youthful editor on the desk – that described me pointedly as a “veteran travel writer”. I read this over breakfast. And after scooping the Gentlemen’s Relish back on to my toast I finally faced an uncomfortable truth.
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Pitcairn Island, the South Seas refuge of the most famous renegades in British history, did not ask to be called a paradise. ‘Hollywood romanticised the whole Mutiny on the Bounty thing,’ said Pawl Warren, the first Pitcairner I met on my recent voyage there, 'but they never followed up what happened afterwards. It became quite bloody, brutal.'
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When Lord Byron described the horror novel, Frankenstein, as 'a wonderful work for a girl' he wasn't being patronising, just stating a fact. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was 18 years old when she came to Lake Geneva and gave life to her 'filthy daemon'.
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In the badlands of northern New Mexico, deep in America's Southwest, you stock up when you can. An hour north of Santa Fe on US Highway 84 there's a filling station, general store and diner called Bode's that sells everything from raccoon traps to pickling jars…
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With its façade of new brick and tinted glass the five-storey building in the west of downtown Baltimore could be the HQ of an asset management company or an executive recruitment agency. In fact it is dedicated to the study of human death and its causes.
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Sunderland in May. The sun was trying, and failing, to get out and the ruffled grey sea was what people sometimes describe as pewter. In the bar of the Marriott Hotel I sat where Laurence Stephen Lowry used to sit half a century ago.
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Big storm over the Mississippi River. Right-thinking folks is indoors, minding their secret hoard of lickrish pieces and pinch-bug beetles, but we ain't no right-thinking folks. 'Let's go to the cemetery and cure some warts!' says the juvenile pariah sitting across from me.
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