Freelance Writer
The view of active volcano Mt. Yotei from Rusutsu’s Mt. Isola. Bluebird views in Hokkaido are pretty unique in the skiing world. The mountains around here are pretty tasty too. Here’s a resort guide for Hokkaido. If you want a general overview of what to expect from skiing in Japan, check here. Hokkaido is the…
Tsutenkaku, Osaka, Japan Photo by Chilam Siu on Unsplash My first sight of Kyoto is the McDonald’s at Kyoto Station. I’ve been dropped off a sleepless night bus at 5am and it’s the first place to open. There’s a queue of 40 people waiting for the shutters to open at 5:30. I don’t know if they’re travelling, on…
Photo by Conor Luddy on Unsplash The Forty Foot, January 12th 2020 The weather has been pretty amazing so far in 2020. A stormy Saturday brought rain of the kind I hadn’t seen in a few months, but today was calm as we eagerly anticipate Storm Brendan roaring in on Monday morning. And what a calm it was.
Do I’ve any regrets from living in Asia for three years? Anything I left behind, anything I should have done more of, any opportunities I passed up, any more places I should have gone, any interests I should have explored further, any way I would have spent my time differently? Anything I shouldn’t have done?…
Photo by Alfons Morales on Unsplash There’s more value in the books you haven’t read than in the ones you have, or so Nassim Taleb tells us about Umberto Eco’s anti-library: despite having over thirty thousand books in his personal library, he is prouder of the ones he hasn’t read than the ones he has. This attitude should…
Being willing to look foolish is a key part of being happy. Me, in Ha Giang, Vietnam, April 2018. I realised in the writing of this post that all of the lessons I’ve reflected on here refer to results that have come not just from WRITING articles, but POSTING them in the public domain as…
Claremorris in the rare oul’ times ‘Tis fierce mild. Lovely start to the year. Christmas was great, and ended up being a much needed holiday. It was probably the first time I’ve had a chance to switch off my brain in about 4 months, and when I realised that’s what needed to be done, I…
Image: Keegan Houser on Unsplash I spent weeks and even months after doing a silent meditation retreat trying to put the experience and anything I learned from it into words. The results were a load of half-finished drafts of Buzz Feed-style “Top 5 Things a Meditation Retreat Teaches You” articles, never published as I never…
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal “All right, brain. You don’t like me and I don’t like you, but let’s just do this and I can get back to killing you with beer.” Homer Simpson “It’s a DEAL!” Homer Simpson’s brain I’d just arrived…
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash Autumn never meant much to me until this last couple of weeks. It just wasn’t summer any more, or I couldn’t wait for Christmas, and for most of my life it’s just been the first few months of the school year, a settling-in period. Life doesn’t start ‘til it’s nearly Christmas, and…