Category: In Flight
If you’re looking for my samples folder, it’s here.
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In Flight: Philadelphia, World Cup Final night
The security in Philadelphia is so slow and so badly organised and so repetitive that despite having 90 minutes to make my transfer to Washington I miss it. Now some people reserve their especial opprobrium for American security. That, I can understand. Others pick out American bacon. Or American exceptionalism. Or the infiltration of the…
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In Flight: London, 5 a.m.
Streets bare of anything but the orange glow of emergency lighting. Stretched black shadows of key workers (coffee shops, fast food joints) waiting thin and angular at bus-stops. Miles of normally pounded pavement getting a brief respite save for the endlessly-walking homeless and solitary drunks, wearing spirals and curlicues into its surface. London at 5…
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In Flight: Cloud Palaces
And a puff of cloud beneath, and the world is gone. London, rigid in its rows of suburban houses, grey and brown like a tired corpse, vanishes with a sigh. I look down at the passing clouds and I imagine them opening again, to reveal: flocks of dragons drifting beneath, mammalian muscles rippling beneath scaled…
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In Flight: Berlin
Some cities have a larger literary presence than tangible. Paris balances the two. London weighs towards the real, rather than the page. But Berlin, for me especially, is a city explored first in media, only peripherally in the real. Mr Norris Changes Trains, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold gave me a sense…
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In Flight Istria Day 2: Tito's Manservant
I’m writing a big article about Istrian food for Time Out: Croatia. I sometimes feel like the only adult in the world. It’s an arrogant feeling, I’m aware, but it’s more a view of assumed maturity; seeing people making the same mistakes I’ve made before, the same clichéd patterns of behavior cropping up. So here…
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In Flight Istria Day 1: Agrotourism
I’m writing a big article about Istrian food for Time Out: Croatia. I barely have a ticket. I don’t really know where I’m going. I’m told it’s Croatia but I don’t know where. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do when I get there. I do know that it’ll probably be okay, so…
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In Flight: Cities From The Air
For most cities from the air, the weather takes a more dominant role than any topographical or construction oddities; sunlight bleaches the landscape, snow blanks it out, clouds blank out even that blanking out. Once you’re in the city, the homogenisation continues; you’re lumped in the back of a vaguely-recognisable car marque and hustled through…
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The Carbonised Man
Three things I remember; the bridge, the warnings and the bomb. The bridge was located in the city-centre over Deansgate; in fact it’s still there, polygonal and filthy, scrabby bushes sheltering tin cans from the cleaning machines crammed up against it. I remember we used to walk past it every time we went to my…