—
For The Emigre

—
For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

— Idries Shah

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‘The trouble with the straight and the narrow
..Is it’s so thin, I keep sliding off to the side.’

— Jason Spaceman
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, Wednesday, August 29 1906
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Globalisation is going into reverse.

The (great) auk became extinct because he forgot how to fly.

Your underpants contain cellulose.

In the medieval period, walking through a labyrinth or maze was seen as a mystical alternative to the laborious completion of a pilgrimage to, say, Jerusalem.

To get a full stop on a European keyboard, you need to use the Shift key.

There are no seal-hunters left in K’akartoq.

Five-card Charlie pays 5 to 1.

Jeff Bezos is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire.

The Bible is written over Herodotus, and the Koran over that.

Diamonds are easy to steal.

There is more genetic diversity within Africa than there is in the rest of the world put together.

The Marquis of C made sacks in Botany Bay.

None of us knows how long fear takes to decay.
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Imagination fired by a picture of his father outside an Arctic shed, artist and writer Dan Richards sets off in search of places that ‘allow mankind a foothold in otherwise inhospitable terrain’.

Icelandic ‘houses of joy’ (not what they sound like), fire-watching belvederes, a Mars-research training facility, an offshore lighthouse: Richards hankers after the ‘astringent’ and ‘spartan’ architectures of these fixtures built ‘where nature takes over’. And though he’s not the type to wrestle overmuch with definitions, the bothies of the Highlands perhaps come closest to his ideal of ‘small emergency refuge shelter only.’

Ranulph Fiennes he is not, however. Slightly harried, somewhat clumsy (he smashes his phone before he even gets to Iceland), terribly enthusiastic, the tone of Outpost is part adventure/travelogue, part live-in art project. He has a tendency to the poetic phrase, and is extremely generous towards artistic sensibilities (not all readers will be convinced by the Turner Prize-winning shed-made-into-a-boat-then-into-a-shed-again chapter), but he avoids the pitfalls of a lot of earnest and/or politically-motivated nature writing. And while he dutifully name-checks the usual suspects like Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin and Wendell Berry, he is by inclination, one feels, more likely to refer to Werner Herzog movies, or Björk.

The end result is like a more-upbeat Geoff Dyer, written in engaging and thoughtful prose – literally: he narrates his thoughts sometimes – with occasional mock-ingenuousness, and cheerful punning. He has a nicely self-deflating sense of humour (the Arctic shed, he notes, is just that: a common-or-garden shed, noteworthy only for the fact that it’s in Svalbard). I chuckled frequently. He’s also not afraid of detours or of anticlimaxes, and is creditably shy of being seen to ‘retrofit significance’.

It would be wrong to suggest Outpost is more about the journeys than the destinations – but Richards’ real talent is in people-watching. One of his outposts is in fact a writers’ retreat in Switzerland (complete with heated floors), in which he concludes that few of us, honestly, do our best work in isolation. And just how viable is that sort of lonely travel, these days? ‘How far was far enough to truly be remote’? (One wonders, frankly, if more folk mightn’t travel further/harder if ‘not dying’ was more or less their sole objective).

Quite fittingly, he never makes it to Ny-Ålesund, whither his father went: it is protected now. Jack Kerouac wrote that ‘no man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness’. To this Dan Richards adds the imperative of ‘making guardians of consumers’ in our besieged environment.

—
For Geographical

—
For The Oldie

— The Nelson Evening Mail, January 23 1907
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The first pedestrian has been killed by a self-driving car.

Starbucks employees do not capitalise their As.

The sound of the bagpipe fattens the sheep and lambs of all Arabia.

125 academic papers mention Adam Smyth.

At 53 one is too old for Everest.

Moldiv Smooth Skin will make your skin flawless.

Babies learn the practicalities of distance by repeatedly punching themselves in the face.

Gustav Mahler put the word ‘schwer‘ beside certain passages in his musical scores.

In a fundraising speech, American president Donald Trump has said he made up facts during a meeting with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.

Cutlery should always be kept in the top drawer.

Easter Island – or ‘Rapa Nui’ – belongs to Chile.

Poetry readings are the worst form of entertainment that has ever been invented.

A five-star review is a five-star review.
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—
For The Oldie

— The Nelson Evening Mail, July 17 1908
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A transgender man has had a baby five years after having one as a woman.

Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Crown Prince of Dubai, is known as ‘Fazza’.

‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer’ is an advertisement for Hitler or something. It says this under a picture of him.

Old corned-beef’s rusty armour spreads disease.

Nice things cost money.

1.5 people is the exact wrong number to do anything efficiently.

England batsman Alastair Cook has played in his 150th test match at the WACA.

Author Boris Starling’s career began aged eight, when he plagiarised a story from a Tintin novel.

Aristotle walked a lot.

John-Boy Walton’s first spouse was Almira Gonzales. They divorced in 1993.

A female spy was the last woman to be executed in Finland.

Homeopathy is based on the false claim of the benefit of super-diluted substances and the principle of ‘like cures like’. While it has been debunked by hundreds of studies, people still want to believe in magic cures.

Don’t forget, many West Malling shops are open today.
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