Most of my long trips begin with a red-eye out of Montreal, and a fair number of those red-eyes put me down at Schiphol with hours to spend before the next leg. …
Hello, fellow adventurers! Some places feel important the moment you arrive. Not because they overwhelm you, but because they carry weight – quietly, steadily, and with purpose. Parliament Hill in Ottawa is …
I came out of the Willem-Alexander Pavilion with a vague piece of information and no map sense whatsoever. Somebody had mentioned an orchid exhibition. I had no idea where it was, so …
A few steps below the pavements of Whitehall, behind a plain door near Downing Street, there is a basement where Britain ran the Second World War. The Churchill War Rooms are not …
You smell Winter Wonderland before you see it: roasted nuts, mulled wine, fried dough on the cold air. Then you come through the gate and the lights hit you, a tunnel of …
You see Stonehenge from a distance before you reach it, a grey cluster of stones alone on open grassland, and the first thing it does is stop you. I had seen it …
We came to Street Pizza straight from St Paul’s Cathedral, which turns out to be exactly the right order of events. You spend an hour craning your neck up at a dome, …
There is a figure on the upper floor of the British Museum that stops people in a way the labels never quite explain. It stands about two and a half metres tall, …
There is one room in the British Museum where wonder and unease sit side by side. Room 18 is a long, top-lit hall lined with marble, and the carving in it is …
The British Museum in London holds one of the largest collections of Egyptian material anywhere outside Cairo, and you meet it on two floors. The monumental stone sits downstairs in the long …
I have now been to the British Museum in London twice, in 2019 and again on a cold afternoon last November, and I still have not seen all of it. That is …
Harrods in December is a different kind of crowded. Not the steady busy of a Saturday afternoon at a busy department store, where people are moving through with purpose. This is slow …
I have stayed at Sea Containers London twice. Once in 2019, when it was still in its first design era. Again this past December, just before Christmas. Both stays were in a …
I had not planned to stop here. After Trafalgar Square, the plan was to find a cab back to the hotel and call it a day. Then I crossed the Strand, looked …
Trafalgar Square in December is a different place than Trafalgar Square in July. The Christmas tree is lit. The carol singers are gathered around its base. The lions at the foot of …
