My mission takes me deep into the covered market. I pass though its outer quadrangular layer of dried fish – pungent but not unpleasantly so – and lethal ironmongery, into the penumbral heart where more banal items are sold by … Read More »
On a bicycle with “up yours Germaine!” emblazoned on its belly, it could not look more incongruous. Insinuating its all-things-considered remarkably graceful path across the tarmac to my feet, the eighteen inch Mekong Catfish dodges tyre and sandaled foot alike … Read More »
I see friends shaking hands, saying ‘how do you do?’ They’re really saying, ‘I love you’. I don’t suppose I’ll live to be a thousand but it’s scarcely less likely that, if I did, I’d see anything more beautiful than … Read More »
In my highly acclaimed Motorbiking I – written last year, also from Vietnam – I told of fishing boats and traffic chaos, towering Buddhas and downing beers, curving alleyways and writhing sea snakes. I’ll return to snakes another time; this … Read More »
Not every email this trip will be on the war. I’ll write a good few of the kind l’ve been sending for years to convey some of the colour of where I am and what befalls. But my infatuation with … Read More »
An hour by air to the north west of Ho Chi Minh City gets you to Pleiku (“play-koo”) in the coffee growing Central Highlands. Untouristed and unloved, it has to be a contender for ugliest city in Vietnam. Razed by … Read More »
photo essay here
So. Labour, emboldened by Falciani on HSBC and enraged by Signor Pessina on how Britons should vote, has tax avoidance in its sights. Predictably the Mail responded with headlines like that of three days ago: Red Ed the Tax Avoider. … Read More »
Listen here. Gorecki’s choral 3rd, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, could hardly be less typical of a Polish composer outspokenly avant garde; a Stockhausen admirer whose declared mission was “not to entertain but to educate”. Symphony No 3, piercing in its … Read More »
The medium is the message, said Marshall McLuhan. Silly to judge screenplay by ‘fidelity’ to book. The latter may be as well crafted (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), better crafted (Bridget Jones) or just ill advised (Gormenghast) but fidelity … Read More »