[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 25.04.2011] I can deny it no longer, you have to know this: I am in love with you. My heart aches with the all-consuming fire that you are burning inside me. I love you, I really do. I am dizzy with happiness for discovering you, but equally with sadness, as I know I …
[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 23.06.2010] It is 00:30am and I am proudly congratulating myself for my superbly mature but completely out of character decision to have an early night: at the wise old age of 35, two nights out in a row present the same challenge as the construction of seven medium-sized pyramids in one working week …
[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 17.01.2010] PLING I wince and look down at the damp bath towel in my hands to see it shimmering weakly in the artificial bathroom light, this golden hair of mine. Another departed friend, gone, never to return. Although I am still several months shy of being mistaken for an abandoned ostrich egg, the …
[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 03.09.2009] ‘No nay, no no,’ said the White Rabbit, ‘don’t drink the potion! It will make you shrink in size. Follow me, hee hee, follow me this way, it’s much more fun. Let me take you to this amazing place, follow me. Follow me!’ Alice hesitated, but quickly gave in and followed the …
[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 13.11.2008] It is 8:29am, I have a suitcase and laptop case and I am catching the train to Waterloo, the opposite direction to my usual routine. This is new territory for me. No longer the fresh salmon leaping freely against the flow of this raging commuters’ torrent, I am now a common sardine …
[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 21.10.2008] It all started this morning, at precisely 10:34am. The sound came from the other side of the building, possibly from one of those footloose and fancy-free creative types in the Design Department, or likelier still, from the devious stock-pinching rascals in UK Sales. It wasn’t loud, but there was no mistaking its …
[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 02.07.2008] 3:30am – two gunshots echo. I am lying on the floor of a hotel room, flattening myself against the wall beneath the window in order to offer as small a target as possible to the psychopath shooting at me from a nearby rooftop. There is glass everywhere and I realise distractedly that …
[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 24.06.2008] I want to write. My hands hover impatiently and my fingers are anxious to type, yet they remain cruelly suspended in mid-air, frozen in a barren wasteland of uncertainty four inches above the black keyboard that is rapidly becoming a symbol of my failure. After a raft of recent ponderings from the …
[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 31.05.2008] At precisely 01:23am on 26 April 1986, Reactor #4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the former Soviet Union exploded, causing the worst nuclear disaster in the history of the world. Large areas of current-day Ukraine, Russia and Belarus were severely contaminated by the intense radiation and nuclear fallout, leading to …
[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 04.03.2008] I really did not know what to expect of my first tentative steps in the world of CouchSurfing. What I was hoping for was to meet a few people, be they locals or foreigners, with whom to share a few beers and rediscover Vilnius. So what did I get out of it? …