An update, roughly fifteen years late
I logged into this blog for the first time since about 2011 and found it sitting here exactly as I left it. Old posts, a design I clearly thought was very smart at the time, a couple of comments I never answered. Sorry about those. It seemed rude to close the tab without saying anything, so here is what happened in the meantime.
Not long after that last post, I stopped having a fixed address. That was around 2012, and it ran until 2020. Eight years of leases measured in weeks, of learning which countries let you sort out a SIM card in ten minutes and which ones make you produce a utility bill you obviously do not have. I lived in France, then the UK, then Hungary, and later Albania. Some of those were meant to be a few months and turned into years. One was meant to be a year and lasted a season.
People used to call it digital nomading, which always sounded more glamorous than the reality of hunting for a cafe with a working power point. But it did give me something useful, which was a very long run of European winters.
What I actually write about now
Most of my time goes to Ultimate Christmas Markets. It covers more than 300 Christmas markets across Europe and North America, and it exists because I got tired of reading the same four adjectives applied to every market on the continent. Some of these markets are extraordinary. Some are twelve stalls selling the same mass-produced ornaments and a queue for mulled wine that is not worth standing in. I say which is which. That has occasionally made organisers unhappy with me, which I take as a sign the site is working.
There is a Substack for it too, also called Ultimate Christmas Markets. That one is less formal. It is mostly me answering the questions people actually ask, the ones that never fit neatly into a destination guide. Which city to pick for a first trip. Whether it is worth going in late November. What to do when it rains for four days straight, which it will.
My travel blog Rearview Mirror is still there and still gets updated, though it is no longer the centre of things. If you followed me here for the travel writing, that is where it went.
The bigger shift is that I now write mostly about sustainability. Food systems, climate change, what happens to a place when its agriculture changes, why so much of what gets sold as environmentally responsible is nothing of the sort. That lives at Cultiveur, and increasingly it lives in video. I make a lot of short vertical videos, mainly on YouTube, because it turns out you can explain a supply chain in ninety seconds far better than in two thousand words. That was not obvious to me for a long time.
And now
I live in Australia. Perth, specifically, which is about as far from a European Christmas market as it is possible to get without leaving the planet. I still go back every season for the markets. The flights are long and I have made peace with that.
Coming back to this blog was strange in the way old writing always is. Some of it holds up. A lot of it is a person working things out in public and being quite confident while doing it. I recognise the voice, but the priorities have shifted considerably. I cared enormously about how many countries I had been to. I care now about whether I understood any of them.
I am not going to revive this place. It has done its job and it can stay where it is, as a record of a particular few years. But if you found your way here through an old link and wondered whether I ever wrote anything again, the answer is yes, quite a lot of it, just somewhere else.
The links above will take you there.
No, I didn't write this. Sorry.
