Category Archives: travel

Late evening at the Seven Olives. Mesfin and I eat chickpea stew with Ethiopia’s ubiquitous injera. Mesfin – below, with Daniel and my tripod on his right – casts a baleful eye over a table on the far side of … Read More »

Thoughts now, on my last day in this wonderful, maddening, deeply civilised country. I’ve just seen (not for the first time) a grinning young man, buff naked and hugely endowed, walk down the busy Addis street outside the internet shop … Read More »

When Sisay was six his family abandoned their mountain hut and headed down to Lalibela and a better life. There in the holy town they scratched an existence on the streets until, after a year of zero progress, Sisay’s parents … Read More »

Some though not all of the content of this post is also in the photo-essay, Out of Abyssinia Imagine a day’s fell walking in the English Lake District. Setting off from Butter­mere’s Fish Hotel you tread the lake’s western bank … Read More »

With a cranial capacity of four hundred cc, a third of yours, she’d neither bore you with incessant chatter nor go in for morbid introspection. But she walked upright on two legs, all three foot six inches of her. And … Read More »