There’s nothing like visiting a monastery for a good day out. At least, that’s what they think in Lebanon, where mountain-top monasteries are a popular visitor attraction. Go to one of the big, Maronite institutions, and you’ll find families and coach parties circulating between the various chapels and shrines, making votive offerings to saints and […]
Back in the day, about a hundred years ago, I went to Glastonbury Festival. Soon after arriving, my boyfriend and I broke up and I tramped across miles of tent-crammed fields looking for my other friends. It was boiling by day and freezing by night, and there were far too many people in one place, […]
Last summer, I decided to visit Glastonbury for the first time. The place, as the heart of the county bordering on my native Gloucestershire, had long intrigued me. And, as somewhere that claimed to be a special spiritual place, I wanted to get under its skin, to take a kind of experiential snapshot. According to […]
Travel writing is in crisis, for at least a couple of reasons. Firstly, it reflects – perhaps even amplifies – the wider crisis afflicting journalism: failing media outlets, derisory writing fees and an editorial culture that favours puff pieces over independent reportage. ‘The dream is over and the quickening plunge into poverty is unsettling,’ explains […]
This week sees two of the most worthwhile events of my year – Dying Matters Awareness Week and the Eurovision Song Contest. An incongruous coupling, I know; I’ll try to explain. I came across the campaigning organisation Dying Matters a few years ago in the wake of the death of both my parents and an […]
In my third and final blog on public libraries before the election, I want to deal with an obvious yet overlooked aspect of the library and why we still need it: Libraries are places, housing physical books and sheltering people of flesh and blood. It is this truth, until recently accepted as an unquestionable good, that […]
The measure of a society is how it treats its libraries. ‘It just strikes me as something a nation can boast about – we lend people books for free,’ says James Brown in a swelte little anthology I’ve been reading called The Library Book, borrowed from my local, threatened Upper Norwood Library. Library services have […]
Is there still a place for travel writing in the 21st century? In age of mass travel, it’s inevitable that the raison d’etre of travel writing should be questioned. Even today’s armchair travellers have a mass of images and information about the most distant places available at the touch of a screen. But I’d like […]