Backpacking in India: avoid farting

Budget travel brings an unavoidable level of intimacy. Oversharing in extremis. De-briefings requested and given after each visit to the toilet.

Backpacking in India: a cautionary tale about farting

Budget travel brings an unavoidable level of intimacy. Oversharing in extremis. De-briefings requested and given after each visit to the toilet.

Visiting Syria: Damascus, Aleppo, Palmyra

As I turned the corner I came nose-to-nose with a decapitated camel.

My Syria Experience: Damascus, Aleppo, Palmyra

I turned the corner to come nose-to-nose with a decapitated camel, hanging grimly outside a butcher’s shop. A hook through the underside of its jaw.

Life with a Brachial Plexus Injury: protecting your good arm

You’re unaware your arm is resting up against a boiling kettle. The skin is burning but you can’t feel it. When and how do you realise? When you smell your skin crisping up like pork crackling?

Reincarnated as a Dung Beetle

It’s a Sunday evening in January 2011. I’m sitting with 6 strangers in a house in Paddington. There’s an uneasy silence. We’re waiting to get started.

Was this real or a scam?

It’s a Sunday evening in January 2011. I’m sitting with 6 strangers in a house in Paddington. There’s an uneasy silence. We’re waiting to get started…

A Life Well Lived

My tour was interrupted by an old lady who seemed to know everyone. She took my and warmly between hers. Not letting go.

My Tacoma Bridge Moment

We ‘upgraded’ to the suburbs when I was 7 years old. The school I left behind was an austere Victorian building with separate entrances for boys and girls.

Concussed

When I woke I touched the side of my head gently. Dried blood. The pain was intense. Like a visit by the mother of all hangovers.

Concussed in Damascus

When I woke I touched the side of my head gently. Dried blood. The pain was intense. Like a visit by the mother of all hangovers.

Part 12: Against The Graine.

It felt like my eyeballs had swollen to the size of cricket balls, being pushed out of their sockets from the inside.

Part 9: Shifted Reality.

Wearing only a paper gown tied at the back, I climbed onto the cold radiography table. I rolled onto my side into the foetal position as instructed.

Part 8: Guilty pleasure.

‘Must feel good to be going home?’ The ambulance driver chatted cheerfully as he wheeled me out through the sliding doors of the hospital.

Part 7: ‘What do you want for your first meal at home?’

A man with the demeanour (and the tape measure) of an undertaker appeared at my bedside. After 3 months I’d finally be getting out of my hospital bed.

Part 5: ‘Do you want to see my scars?’

I was part-way through my secondary school exams. The culmination of 2 years of study. My future academic and employment prospects would be determined by the result. That was all gone now.

Do you live here now?

‘There was a beautiful white Azalea in this garden. Where has it gone? Do you live here?’ An elderly, smartly dressed, woman has stopped me. Outside my house on Alice Street.