Tag: travel writing

Big Heritage Chester article for Tortoise Magazine

The next issue of Tortoise magazine is out soon.

I’ve written an article for Chester’s new independent publication about Big Heritage, the not-for-profit organisation installing heritage attractions in historic buildings.

It’s based around an interview with Managing Director Dean Paton, who I met at Sick To Death [pictured above], the attraction about the history of medicine.

Here’s a sneak preview of the story:

“I always loved history and archaeology but, traditionally, it has been seen as a sport for the middle classes,” says Dean.

He is showing me around the Sick to Death exhibits, including a section dedicated to the first recorded incidents of The Plague in Chester in the early 17th century.

By 1603, we learn, 92% of deaths in Chester were due to plague.

“The problem with a lot of heritage attractions,” he adds. “is that there’s no excitement, no love.”

The organisation has also just completed a major project to reopen Western Approaches, the former secret WWII bunker under Liverpool. Dean is now working on a new project in Chester.

Read the full article in Tortoise magazine, available in independent shops, cafes and arts venues around Chester.

A travel-writing masterclass at HiOA university, Oslo

To Oslo then — thanks to an Erasmus exchange with a British university.

After a week in the Norwegian capital, I learnt that photojournalism is alive and well in Scandinavia, you can buy a pint for less than £10 and knitting is actively encouraged in the front row of Nordic lecture theatres.

But, most of all, I spent a couple of days teaching features classes and running a travel-writing with some very smart Norwegian students.

They rose to the challenge to write travel features in English and came up with some great story hooks.

My time at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences (HiOA) was a chance to reflect on my own teaching and see how lecturers do it in other countries.

The students [pictured above] seemed to enjoy it, too, and I had some good feedback about engaging learners through my communication.

I’m hoping to make the exchange between the UK and Norway into a regular event. Watch this space.

Just back: Gothenburg with dad for Family Traveller magazine

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Another half term, another family escape.

We did the Barbie cruise and the cycling trip to Holland, both of which went on to win travel-writing awards.

Last week I took the girls to West Sweden for four nights of city-break fun coupled with some time out on the archipelago.

See a Flickr gallery of images from the trip.

Farmyard fun

The highlight of the trip was definitely the chance to spend the night on a family farm in the countryside.

The Lekander family [pictured above] made us feel really welcome.

It was a travel story for Family Traveller magazine — check out the full article in a future issue.

Latte papas

But it was also a chance to talk to Swedish dads about how liberal Scandinavia values the role of fathers, recently passing new legislation to increase paternity leave.

Sweden, we found, puts family first and, boldly, strives to make it easier for fathers to spend time with their children.

We spent a morning hanging out with the so-called ‘latte papas’ Gothenburg and, as Henric Stahl [pictured below with 19-month-old son Marcel], told us:

“We’ve come to the point whereby, if you’re not taking your full paternity leave, then you have to explain yourself.”

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Even Caligari, a stalwart of Swedish kids’ TV, whose magic show we caught at Gothenburg’s Alfie Atkins Children’s Museum, bases his act around family values.

Watch a short Vimeo of Calgary below.

Mojo rising

In an age of top ten lists and mindless-filler content, it was great, as a writer, to get a commission with scope to address real issues in the context of an upbeat travel story.

It has revived my writing mojo.

And, better still, the girls had a ball.

So, England 0. Sweden 1 then.

What did you think of this story? Post your comments below.

Liked this? Try also West Sweden: Folklore traditions of midsummer.

The loneliness of the long-distance travel writer

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It sounds ungrateful.

A PR company, tourist board or tour operator flies you to an overseas location. They put you up in a smart, often recently opened hotel. They may arrange free passes for attractions and provide a guide to show you around the best sites.

Sometimes they even leave a little gift pack in your room with some chocolates to take home as gifts and a bottle of some obscure local firewater to strip the lounge of its paintwork.

They expect little in return. Just some words and a link to their website in a fact box under the story. And, if it’s not actually a proper story, then that’s okay.

A lot of them don’t read it anyway.

So what’s the catch?

It’s a tricky one. The loneliness of the long-distance travel writer is hard to quantify.

I think it’s a feeling of dislocation from the real world, a bubble existence without normal rules or conditions, a slow-creeping weariness with the very thing that once inspired you.

Being away is a transient, ethereal experience. You find yourself in a new place, or a new district of a place you half recognise. You briefly meet people who welcome you like a new friend, then forget your very existence within five minutes of leaving.

You spend a lot of time alone. Whether sitting in a hotel bar, pretending to be engrossed in your emails, or eating dinner alone in a restaurant, surrounded by uncomfortable glances and feigning an important air while taking notes.

I used to embrace the otherworldliness of it.

I would retreat from the real world to my too-big-for-one suite in the city’s latest boutique hotel and gaze pensively out the window, clearing head space with views across a rain-lashed Northern European landscape.

I liked just being ‘away’. But age and children have shifted the parameters.

I’ve grown tired of arriving in off season to an up-and-coming region still waiting to come up, bored of workmen still fixing fittings in my room at the ironically hip new hotel as I check in, and weary of the prospect of another dinner a un with an elaborate six-course tasting menu and a swarthy waiter with a pitying look in his eye.

Not even the accompanying multiple glasses of carefully selected wines from the extensive New World list can numb the feeling that my assignment has turned into a cruel parody of travel-scribe clichés.

After dinner I sometimes venture out alone, gasping for non-air-conditioned breath, to consult the handy free map. I draw my self-important conclusions about the latest trendy pop-up bar in a previously derelict warehouse in a district that was, probably just a matter of hours ago, a complete no-go-zone.

In essence I have fallen out of love with what Dylan Thomas would recognise as “my craft or sullen art.”

I still go away, although less these days and on far more judiciously chosen assignments. I often take the girls with me and increasingly delight in lights out by 9pm after a couple of chapters of Fantastic Mr Fox.

I still love finding the best angle on the story, the craft of placing the perfect, essence-capturing quote at the perfect about-turn juncture of the feature.

But, for now, the loneliness of the long-distance travel writer engulfs me.

Theroux would scoff as he set off for nine months in Nepal. The teen bloggers would trample me in the stampede for the free peanuts in the airport lounge. And the retired hacks would roll their eyes as they opened their invitation to supper at the Captain’s Table.

Maybe one day I’ll join them. Or maybe I’ll try to re-invent my sullen art for a new era.

Either way, they would all probably think me a whining, ungrateful bastard. And they would all probably be right.

 Can you relate to the ideas in this post? Post your comments below.