I don’t like horses. Never have. This ill feeling started about 25 years ago, when the local racetrack commandeered our school’s football pitch to store horseboxes. We were banished to the playground to make way. I grew up in Ayr, home of Scotland’s largest horse-racing track, and throughout my years at..
Tag Archives: North America
Never let anyone tell you otherwise: when it comes to road trips, the US is the best country in the world. People often talk of the size of the country, leaning back on the cliché “everything’s bigger in America”, but you only get a sense of how true that is..
For many people, Route 66 is the drive of a lifetime and initially, when I set out from California, it seems right that I complete it in the car of a lifetime. At over US$400,000, the Rolls Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe is one of the most expensive, ostentatious cars on..
You could argue that Montreal is the most civilised city in the world. Well-organised, rich in history (and more generally rich), amazingly clean… A great place for walking, Montreal. In the reliable, lovely summers you can stroll in the sun, then when the biting winter arrives, head underground to the city’s..
It’s hard to quantify the enormity of a whale. A North Atlantic right whale can weigh as much as 10 African elephants. So what? Unless life has taken you down an unlikely path that requires you regularly interact with elephants, that’s a fairly meaningless comparison. Telling you that blue whale..
It’s 1991 and I am shivering on the deck of a small fishing boat, bobbing around in the Firth of Clyde. I am knee deep in mackerel, fish so stupid that they are hooked by nothing more than fluorescent tape; fish so weak that even I, an eight-year-old, can pull..
Si Si is unwell, but I’ve got little sympathy for her. We’re on board the Catch 22, bouncing across an unusually tumultuous Gulf of Mexico, south of the Florida Keys, and somehow she fell asleep. As I watch her head loll around, I know she’s made a amateurish mistake. I..
An Irishman, a Mexican and a Chinaman get on a train. They’re joined by a bickering French couple; a black man with a shock of snow-white hair; a handful of very Caucasian ravers en route to a daytime party; a woman – I’d guess Somali – in a long, flowing..
It’s disgusting, of course. I am disgusting. I think that again and again as I refill my idiotically large cup at a Burger King soda fountain, somewhere just south of Miami. If it hadn’t taken so long to get through immigration, I wouldn’t be reduced to this, but after three..
I have no cocaine, nor any mescaline. I don’t have any ether, either. The skies are mercifully bat-free, and yet, the longer I spend in Las Vegas, the more peculiar I feel. Half of the city lies abandoned or half-finished in financial crisis gloom, but like Iron Man, it still..
Latest Comments
Thanks for writing this. I'm going to echo the people above. Write a book! If you do, I'd definitely buy it <3
I'd still recommend going. Just don't eat whale when you're there – it's on plenty of menus.
Hi Trev, nah I doubt it – it's just a bit too remote and the infrastructure isn't there.