Could you be a little more specific?

“The Matses are a 2,500-strong tribe, and they live in the tropical rainforest along the Javari river, a tributary of the Amazon. Their language, which was recently described by the linguist David Fleck, compels them to make distinctions of mind-blowing subtlety whenever they report events. To start with, there are three degrees of pastness in [...]

Old haunts

When travelling from one country to another I much prefer taking the train to flying.  The plane has its own pleasures, but travelling by rail, apart from offering (slightly) more legroom, also gives me the time to acclimatise to my destination. Passing through a country, rather than over it, you see the gradual changes in landscape, [...]

Keeping track

I like to plan ahead. I don’t mean that I want every minute of every day for the next twelve months mapped out, leaving no room for serendipity, chance, or mood swings. It’s more about the fact that I have a terrible memory so I need to write down upcoming events in order to keep track [...]

Time is money

When I took my youngest daughter to school this morning she stopped in the communal toilets to relieve herself. The room is open plan, with three tiny WCs in a row. On one of the other seats was a small boy with his trousers around his ankles, looking up at his mother with big sad [...]

Don’t be a stranger

Recently I found a couple of people through Facebook with whom I hadn’t been in touch for over a decade. I’m not the kind of person who feels the need to “friend” everyone with whom I’ve ever exchanged three words, but these two were people I’d spent time with, got drunk with, laughed with, and then [...]

Gulliver’s Travels

Going back to the UK is always a weird, dislocating experience, and becomes moreso as the years go by. While I stay in contact with the motherland to a certain extent via the media, and still have friends living there, there’s no substitute for being immersed in the culture full-time, and the occasional few days [...]

Shelf life

For a while the appeal of box sets of tv shows escaped me entirely. My attitude was that it was only worth buying something if you were confident that you’d get your money’s worth by watching it several times over, exploring all the special features, and so forth. Even then, I found it hard to [...]

TGI Friday!

A recent change in my responsibilities at work means that Friday is now the busiest day of my week. I think that this is probably a good thing. If I’m going to have an empty afternoon stretching out in front of me, when I sit idly refreshing my inbox and rss feeds in hope of [...]

I vant to be alone

I was always a fairly solitary child. Despite having two elder siblings and a smattering of close friends, my preferred company was always my own. Once, at a birthday party, I retreated upstairs with the book I’d received as a present (Spiderman, if memory serves), leaving my friends downstairs to party on without me. While my [...]

The thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to

I can’t remember the last time I physically injured myself. I’m not talking about breaking a nail or banging my head – I mean something that resulted in real bleeding, a large bruise, a break. As a child I never needed to go to hospital – I’ve never broken a bone (although I did manage [...]