What are you scared of? My top three fears are snakes, heights and being trapped for more than 5 seconds inside a very small space. Today I have survived being enclosed in a tiny cable car, hanging on a thin wire hundreds of meters above the ground. It wasn’t comfortable, especially the jolt every 50…
Category: Being Human
Sleepless at 3.45am
I’ve been awake for a while, although I am trying very hard to be in denial. It’s impossible to calibrate time when you are in that indeterminate fuzzy zone between awake and asleep, floating between reality and dreamland. I try to drift casually back into sleep. It’s like I am lying in a rowing boat…
To Drink non-Disorderly
7th January – and no alcohol has passed my lips for the whole of this year. People are asking me whether I am doing a “dry January”. To which I reply, “I’m not. I’m just taking a break from drinking”. I’m not alone. Many resolve to take a break from alcohol after the excesses of…
A second chance in Amsterdam.
I was in the middle of Amsterdam for one night only. I had to get out and run. So at 6.30am I was stepping out of the hotel into the icy morning air. It felt more like the middle of the night. The cold water of the IJ lay black and and foreboding in front…
The Auckland Taxi Mystery
I was checking out of the last hotel on the final day of a week dashing around some islands in the Southern Hemisphere. Three of them to be precise. Australia, South NZ and now North NZ. My colleagues had left at midday, leaving me with a fee afternoon to walk around Auckland. I’d been up…
To fly, perchance to sleep
Counting time between proper sleeps – it was 48 hours. From waking up in my own bed in England (8am Saturday morning) to falling asleep in a hotel room in Melbourne (10pm Monday evening). We can argue about the definition of a day. The number of hours between these two times is theoretically 62 hours.…
Half a world away
The most confusing thing about international travel is working out what time it is. Even the one hour difference can trip you up – you can easily find yourself arriving somewhere an hour early or an hour late. On this trip, the difference will be variously 4, 8, 11 and 13 hours. I’ve decided to…
Swimming in another fish tank
Living in another person’s house is a bit like wearing someone else’s clothes. It’s an interesting journey of discovery – but after a while you just want your own comfortable jumper back. We have just enjoyed our first week of “airbnb”, living in someone else’s world in Vienna. We arrived at street level after a quick…
The Ups and (ouch) Downs of Life
What goes up, must come down. And I came down with quite a bump. An extremely painful bump. Some days we just feel better than others. This afternoon I was happy, and not for any particular reason. My wife and I had enjoyed a very nice weekend, including a fabulous time at the company ball,…
The Results Recount
The results of the biopsy were inconclusive. Of the 12 samples taken, two had a shade of prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia and one had a touch of atypical small acinar proliferation.. The consultant told me this, as if I should know what this meant. Or rather that I shouldn’t – because this would have made me as clever…
Unwrapping The World 