I didnt hear the gunshots. I was dancing, chatting and drinking with an assortment of party people and local folk wearing fluffy red and white santa hats. The music went dead. The crowds evaporated away. A light rain was falling as mist in the night. The party was over. Three young boys were shot on the beach on Phi Phi on Christmas day. The passengers on the well-worn route through the islands of Thailand know the route even if they haven't taken it before. It has its own history, literature, fashions, gossip and rumours. Sitting on a ferry, or on a [View Full Entry]

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The magnificent villas of the past are still standing, sleeping and unbreathing. Dustily uncared for. These villas were the homes of traders who came here in the 1700's and 1800's and found their fortunes - Georgetown, the capital of Penang, has always been a masala of people and business - Indian traders, Armenian Jews, Sultans, Portugese, Dutch, English. Raffles spent much of his time here while trying to establish Singapore and the Chinese had a unique ethnic community here for over 500 hundred years. They all came, made money and proudly built homes, schools and temples. There is money here now [View Full Entry]

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''Maybe this basement was bricked up in the War'' I suggested. The backstage area of the Social Club in the Montmartre is a odd-shaped, angled-walled, tiny basement that would have been a useless place to store anything. Upstairs, the club was pounding its stylish house music and downstairs, escaping with me was American Benjamin with his thick, art-student glasses and the two girls from East Berlin and Austria. They all give me odd stares at my basement comment and I remember the old phrase... 'don't mention the war' Paris, the capital of France has attracted foreigners and invaders in all its [View Full Entry]

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England is a strangely backward place, where people say ''Nice Day'' even if it is raining. The English invented the rules for every major sport, yet rarely win any international awards - football, tennis, even cricket. We despise foreign places even though we had an empire that circled the globe - today, the most popular dish is an Indian invention of Chicken Tikka Masala. The English never say what they mean, preferring to say the opposite as a joke and hope you will understand - they will be overpolite to people they dont like and rude to the people they love. [View Full Entry]

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I don't have a crystal ball. But in ten years time, I bet we won't be racing the world around on cheap flights. Lets all cross our fingers and hope that the price of oil goes back up and keeps going skyward. For the good of the world and our kids, lets hope 'Budget Flights' are just a silly passing fad. 'Pay peanuts and you'll get monkeys' is the old saying - I paid peanuts for my flight, and monkeys now are boarding the plane to Valencia. Clambering aboard, pushing and jumping over the seats. Howling and shrieking as their child-chimps [View Full Entry]

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Alcohol aids appreciation of art . We queued for 3 hours with a couple of cans of local cider - it seemed appropriate as Bristol is the home of scrumpy and Bristol is the home of everyones favourite street artist, Banksy. In the queue, his name was in the air like tropical mosquitos- 'Banksy...buzzbuzzbuzz... Banksy...buzzbuzz... Banksy' The waiting crowd - teenage students with backpacks, little kids in raincoats, mums and dads on day-trips - were all hissing the name and asking who he was, chatting about what the images meant, relaying what they had read in the paper about Him. His [View Full Entry]

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50 pence just bought me a copy of 'South East Asia on a Shoestring' by Tony Wheeler. (Its not the original guide but a 1981 update) The first thing that is striking is the limits of the book - we're not going to Cambodia, Vietnam or Laos - these countries were all fighting at this time and were seriously off-limits. And Communist China? No chance! In Tony's words: ''If you want to carry on towards Europe...Chiang Mai is effectively the end of the road'' The Cold War was blowing through this part of the world in 1980 and the borders that [View Full Entry]

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NoHo, SoHo, Tribeca, NoLita - New Yorkers love their geographical acronyms - NoHo - north of Houston, SoHo - south of Houston, Tribeca - the triangle below Canal Street , NoLita - north of Little Italy... Maybe it's because the rest of their city is boringly street-named (we were staying on the corner of 1st Avenue and 1st Street... I mean, come on! Think of something more original!) So the little streets and blocks develop personalities and identities that make living in this mad metropolis easier to handle - they even call parts of it a 'Village'. So when our friend [View Full Entry]

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I live in a country where if you drive in a straight line for 3 hours, chances are you'll end up in the sea. England is a small island and we're not used long journeys, in fact Brits are pretty suspicious of large distances - because we don't have any! The looks on people faces when i told them we were going to the Alps on a coach veered from a stare that said 'That will hurt, you absolute fools' to a frown that said 'Thats not possible , you absolute fools'. But the deal was there - £199, coach, hotel [View Full Entry]

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Londons Burning! Rioters close down the City! Mob Smashes Bank! This i had to see, so I strolled up to the front of a line of riot police and asked the copper how i could get the 149 bus to London Bridge. Breaking through the angry mob wasn't hard, a straggling line of scruffy students, trendy looking folk and the odd out-of-town hippie with dirty dreads and dull combat trousers. All standing around, trying to crane their necks to see over each over to look down the front. Across Bishopsgate there was a line of policemen, shoulder to shoulder, glowing brightly [View Full Entry]

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