There are places everybody’s heard of, so everybody goes to, and others that you discover just by accident. Recently, without ever really having planned it, I found myself spending a week in Écija. Where is Écija? It’s in the middle of the dusty plains of Andalusia, roughly halfway between Seville and Córdoba. Mention it to […]
In ancient mythology the Strait of Messina between Sicily and mainland Italy was the home of Scylla and Charybdis, two fearsome monsters of the kind the Greeks loved to come up with – both were female, and both, at least in several versions of their story, had previously been renowned beauties, who were turned into scabrous horrors […]
One in particular stands out among several unusual instructions given to new arrivals renting cars at Iceland’s Keflavik airport. ‘Please, always park your car facing the wind’, says the impeccably charming, smiling woman behind the desk, ‘never with your back to it’. Apparently, they have a significant problem with tourists who ignore this request, park […]
Morecambe is a fading, or probably now better to say faded, old seaside town on the Lancashire coast of northwest England – it seems required to say this to start off with, because even in the south of England a town like this is probably more remote than Machu Picchu or Marrakesh, or maybe just […]
Deserts are giant sculptures. In the arid world stripped of normal fertility, moisture and softness, the comfortable shapes of more habitable landscapes give way to an extraordinary range of abstract forms and textures, stripped of any covering to make them more amenable to human touch. This is one of the things that give deserts […]
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