Sunday, May 13, 2012

Robert Burns, the hard-living 18th-century Scottish poet, lyricist and culture hero who died aged 37 in 1796, is one of the most oft-quoted writers with roots in the British Isles.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Those who know me know I tend to pick up and go quite easily, as the travel bug has never loosened its hold. This time, I've made the ultimate getaway to paradise to escape my regular routine of work and college. I'm talking about Kauai, Hawaii.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

England gave the world the Windsor chair, but it was the city of Matsumoto in central Nagano Prefecture that reinvented it for Japan.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

It looked like the kind of comfortably oily rag that makes a mechanic's job easier — the sort you find scrunched up in the corner of a garage soaked with tales of its long career, how it protected all manner of tools from rust, greased jamming gears ... and helped fix Mrs. Jones' "unfixable" carburettor back in '83.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

A colossal, dark-skinned man rides along the sidewalk on a motorbike: no helmet, two small children aboard — a vision of life in the laconic Tropics. There are times here too on Yonaguni, the westernmost land mass in Okinawa Prefecture, when you see a curvaceous island woman in a vivid, flower-patterned dress, and you think of Paul Gauguin and the Tahitian women he painted.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Sitting in sublime obscurity in a raised valley one hour by bus from Bitchu-Takahashi, Fukiya Furusato Mura in Okayama Prefecture must surely be one of Japan's most under-appreciated rural destinations. Mention the name even to Japanese travelers and you are likely to draw blank expressions.