I’m no longer blogging here, on my own website, but you can find my current writing – essays on our times and pieces on place – on Substack at Ways of Seeing. The blogs published between 2014-2020 on topics largely related to nature, spirituality and our relationship to place, remain here as an archive.
Midwinter in Lisbon. Even with much of its tourism and nightlife stifled by the pandemic, this cosmopolitan city has a gentle buzz, and its eighteenth-century streets are flooded with the light of southern Europe and the surrounding sea. Set on an estuary flowing into the Atlantic, it feels, climatically and culturally, both warm and cool. […]
“We are going to get back to our ‘art de vivre’ and recover our taste for liberty,” President Macron told France on June 14. A month later, I took the train-under-the-water from London and found that, indeed, the Parisians are resuming their usual pleasures. Masks are worn widely on public transport and in shops, but a sense of […]
The weeks and months following Brexit are taking those of us who would have preferred the UK to stay in the EU into strange new territory. While politicians and technocrats get on with working out the practicalities of the UK’s relationship with Europe, the question for us ordinary Europhiles is: how to remain European? On […]
I’ve been a library user all my life, going regularly to my local library to borrow and return books since the age of eight. But as a 21st century adult, my need for a public library has evolved into a need for something other than a source of free books, shifting into a longing for […]
Tallinn! Baltic tiger, pioneering digital society, birthplace of Skype! Few places have made such a successful transition from Soviet communism to European prosperity as the capital of Estonia. The contrast with my second city, Tirana, could not be greater. I’m hoping, in this final research trip for A Tale of Three Cities, to get a sense […]
Next week, I’m leaving Britain to spend a month in the second of my three cities – Tirana, the capital of Albania. As with the other cities I’ve chosen for my research into a state-of-Europe book, it will be my first time there – something which will help me to see the place with the […]
Last month a group of thirty European thinkers published a manifesto in several British newspapers calling for the urgent need to defend “the idea of Europe” against the rising populism sweeping the continent. Clicking through from the Guardian article to the manifesto itself, it struck me forcibly how little it will resonate with a British […]
This month, just after the darkest point of the year and at what is still the darkest moment in British politics of my lifetime, I’m setting out in search of light. I’m going to Cadiz on Spain’s Costa de Luz – the Coast of Light. In one sense, I’m indulging a typical northern European longing […]
In the interesting times that have been unfolding since the EU referendum, Britain is seeing the emergence of a new identity. A new cultural-political identity is being forged by British Europeans who feel a strong affiliation with the continent by virtue of background or cultural affinity. It’s an identity that’s growing out of a sense […]