Columns and features
Some journalists narrowly specialise; I write on a range of things that interest me. I have contributed a column to the weekend Financial Times, written on social affairs and culture for publications including the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Washington Post and done a lot of travel writing (for which you can find a separate listing here). Lately I have been doing less writing and more editing, running MSN Travel day-to-day, but I still have time for the odd piece...
The new bard of the Turkish lake district
Coffee drinkers of Melbourne,
rise up!
Can you incent? Passionately Business-speak is running amok
Civilisation goes down the pan
Observations on the World Toilet Summit
One little word matters so much
The disappearance of the ‘the’
British toilet genius wasted
Localism reimagined in a Tesco-ised world
Would budget flights to the Holy Land persuade you to go?
Houseboats as the new arks
British rubbish – a mini-history
Sailing with a light conscience
Floating to Holland
Frippery-free spas
Britain’s dining perversions
Everyone is fleeing Britain
Some sandy anthropology on Sydney, where I grew up
Some tips on haggling for an
‘exotic rug’
Sun, surf and semillon sauvignon blanc
Back to the land of the birth of my teenage neuroses
‘If Friuli Venezia Giulia could feel ... but it can’t, it’s a region’
How I stopped smoking and learned to love tobacco
Nosepickers, coughers and tuneless whistlers
The workplace-irritant hitlist
Other people’s mastication
How film cops lost their boot
Will you please be quiet, please (in the cinema)?
Your seat in the workplace
Chewing gum as ‘panacea’
Don’t bother writing a family history
Anatomy of the British greasy spoon
Sex and death in the garden
Climbing Mount Moses, with
the trembling hordes
European fleamarkets I have known
In Lyon, j’adore Le Nord
Following the Moorish trail to the painted towns of Morocco
Scotland: nice landscapes, shame about the cooking
A Budapest charm offensive
Puglia, the Saudi Arabia of olive oil
Portuguese tarts: the best in Europe
An Indian merry-go-round
‘I needed a blonde, and a
once-sharp suit’ ... Marseille
How hypnotherapy failed to cure my existential dread
Acne as evolutionary contraceptive
Squatting reinvented
The serial killer film is bleeding
its last
Deconstructing cats and dogs
After being robbed at knifepoint, I seek solace in fantasies of violent revenge
Swaying fields of cannabis in the gardens of Amsterdam?
Review of Plant-Driven Design, by Scott Ogden and Lauren Springer Ogden
Cultivating ideas, not plants?
Coming to terms with conceptualism
Goodbye to the egregious lawn
Are the French as intellectual about gardens as they are about sex?
I knew I’d end up in prison one day
Review of the volume by Nigel Dunnett and Noël Kingsbury
Owning your own one
Review of Designing and Planting Small Gardens, by Peter McHoy
Against trivial trinkets in the garden
Caravans: not all sandals and tan slacks
Review of The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession, by Andrea Wulf
Welcome to the wildlife garden
Review of Treehouse Living: 50 Innovative Designs, by Alain Laurens et al
Step into my courtyard – the space within revived
My gap-toothed French peasant vigneron friends and the uneven rewards of home winemaking
The ‘Wyvenhoe penises’ lay bare tension among the topiarists
The decline of the British front garden
Pedestals for the birds
The perfumed factory of floristry
Reaping the rewards of an orcharding revival
Gardens so simple they are barely there
The garden as an orgy scented with the smoke of a funeral pyre
A sweet life in the urban hive
Beekeeping in the city, a supremely simple buzz
Sarah Raven is a fine propagandist for the kitchen garden
Urban gardeners raise their sights
Taking gardening to the rooftops
Guerrilla gardeners take the soil into their own hands
Nobody needs a treehouse, which is precisely their appeal
Hot tubs have grown up since the swinging 1970s
No gardener is an island, but some have tried to be
Fake flowers have come a long way since the eye-watering colours of the 1970s
One man’s mission to keep British sculpture alive
Hip hydroponics
Beautiful flowers; not
such a beautiful industry
What happened to the invention
of fire
How to shed problems with space Writers take to their sheds
The science of designing outside spaces for children
Get ready for a globally
warmed garden
Weaving to the source (cover story)
In search of exotic carpets
A clash of tastes on the water
Nouveau riche v rustic houseboaters in Seattle
Historicising your garden,
with the writer Andrea Wulf
The hothouse of the British Isles
The benevolent despot of Scilly
Rothko and Klimt among
the garden designers
Become a surrogate to an olive
or ‘truffle’ tree
Eroticism of the new floristry
Sit back and watch the firs fly
A dispatch from the Christmas
tree wars
A crucial component of ‘living style’
Houseplants are your friends
New life in old Dickensian
London
Cultivating oases of the spirit
On the Islamic garden
I try not to be too sarcastic
about golf
Bonsai cultural studies
‘Gardening threatened my identity’
Soil as anti-depressant
FT travel pieces
Another Europe, Beyond-the-Mountains
Looking for God in the footsteps
A crisis of atheism on Mt Sinai
The possible turtle of Hanoi
1,001 alleys of the Fez medina
Trieste, Joyce’s city of exile
‘Well preserved’ is a peculiar food recommendation but it does nicely describe Swedish cuisine
Greasy spoons are alive and well in Britain
Enduring love for a rare Portuguese beauty
Paris is heaven for oyster lovers
Getting to grips with your bivalves
French stew over Marseille soup
Fishing around in a famous Provençal recipe
‘Tripe, pig, boar – the staples of Portuguese cuisine sound like an inventory of insults’
In the heel of the Italian boot
Lyon’s share of French cuisine
The difficulty of ordering a bad meal in Lyon
London to Istanbul, by train
Sydney v Melbourne: the cities weighed up on a drive inbetween
Wired: touring the mean streets of Baltimore
I get an insider's guide to the setting of a legendarily gritty crime series, then settle down for a scoop of hot fudge sundae
Do the popes live in a palace?
I find splendour papal, artistic and otherwise on a tour of the lesser known south of France
Revolutionary dreams and a barehanded cayman-catcher
I visit the country that inspired my youthful political passions - so what am I doing staying in a luxury eco-lodge?
Gunpowder, sauerkraut and mouse pee?
I get systematic about my love of wine in the celebrated vine-growing regions of Bordeaux and Madiran
A safari gone wild
I dwell on, well, not quite the beauty of nature in Kruger national park
People smugglers, misplaced Speedos and ravenous carp
I finds plenty of moving stories, and moments of bizarre comedy, on a challenging Asian gap year break
Gypsy tinkers, Faust on wheels and onion pies in Romania
In the old Saxon town of Sibiu, I find an exuberance that's consigning grim images of dictatorship to the history books
Hidden people, hidden wonders
I’m thrilled by the otherworldly landscapes of northern Iceland
Go on, explore
I visit Svalbard, where adventurous travellers can follow in the footsteps - or sledge tracks - of early 20th century polar heroes
World’s best airlines?
Oh no, I hear you saying: not another dubious, commercially motivated travel survey with only a small bus stop's worth of respondents?
Nice revolution, shame about the tourism
Tunisians are beginning to worry about the fate of one of their biggest industries - us
God’s own country?
I travel to the Caucasus to find an ancient Christian nation where the biblical past still throbs with life
Sailing solo about the canals around Amsterdam, I learn to pilot a boat the hard way
I visit the Middle East's city of the future and find a fascinating old settlement still poking up from the sand
On not talking about Nessie
I have monster fun exploring Loch Ness by canoe
Spicy calypso
I get right into the rhythm of a mellow little Caribbean island, but why does he keep getting called ‘boy’?
On the trail of Madonna
It isn't only ageing pop stars who should get to know poor but beautiful Malawi
Bells to men
I wonder whether I’ve stumbled upon a bunch of Spanish rural transvestites or a fascinating ancient rite
Strange fruit
I board the sleeper train from London for some jokes in (and about) Scotland's rough-edged second city
Scotch missed
A memorable kind of magic oozes from the ground on the long-peopled Scottish island of Arran
When adventure travel was real: the tale of Percy Fawcett
The thrilling and tragic Amazon adventures of one of the last great British explorers
Another Ibiza
On the receiving end of a 45-minute foot massage, I discover what happened to the Ibizan hippies who didn't found all those enormous, pulsating clubs
Maltese delights
In search of the diver's nirvana - neutral buoyancy - off the ancient island home of the Knights Hospitaller
So (according to Jacques Chirac) the Finns can't cook? Wait until you tuck into a reindeer steak 170km north of the Arctic Circle
Who needs Tuscany when you can have another sunny haven of rustic food at half the price
Fierce national pride and a love of all things folk are among the ingredients that make up modern Lithuania
In pictures: one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on Earth
An astonishing new film captures birth, life and death among a million-strong flamingo flock
There’s life in the British pub yet, say the editors of the Good Pub Guide 2010
Very strange, and sometimes shocking, things taken by ordinary travellers around the globe
Discovering Jersey
Strange currents and currency in the remote Faroe Islands
How hedonistic Tel Aviv defies all the Israeli cliches
How the British used to holiday
Why you should never make the A-OK sign to a Greek
It’s one of travel’s biggest quandaries: where and when to tip
Why we’re still not the most sophisticated travellers
The unluckiest places in Britain
Where the rain god lurks...
Britain’s best chippies
In which I describe my misanthropic preference for solo travelling
Mmm! The French oyster season opens
Otherworldly Iceland is finally affordable
