My father and grandfather were newspaper men, so you could say that ink runs in my veins. These days of course there's not a whiff of ink on the net, but I find that pixels can be as provocative, stimulating and enlightening as any corrosive pigment.

On his website Clive James recently mustered his pixels to consider the web as the work of a single giant spider. If only it were so, he mused, then 'we might teach it to behave.' For the web is 'more like a jungle, and the most we can hope to do is make the occasional clearing, in which a civilized form of safety may be found. The visitor needs a refuge not just from nihilism, prurience and insanity, but from the meaningless, which is practically the web's binding force even when it is providing necessary information. There have to be places where coherent expression can be found.'

I hope that some coherence -- along with a dash of fun -- may be found in these web pages, as well as in my books and journalism. You can judge for yourself the success of my battle against chaos by clicking on the left-hand links and reading some of my recent articles, following my Berlin blog, revisiting 'swinging' Sixties London, checking out my BBC Radio work and Guardian Unlimited reviews. Reviewing travel books is a gift of a job, reminding me of how lucky we (or most of us) are to be able to travel, and then to put our experiences into words. A journey -- with a beginning, middle and end -- is a convenient metaphor for life.

What else is on this site? Click above for details about my books and Asia Overland hippie trail pages. Also see the knowing me page with a biography, details of travel writing courses and a My-Family-and-Other-Characters photo gallery (with Winston the pig, Aunt Zita, the Reverend Hector, Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie). You can check out the FAQs and my newsletter there too. On the right you can sign on to my mailing list to receive it with news of books, blogs and broadcasts. And if there's anything you think is missing, or you'd like to discuss, just click here to drop me a line. I want to know. This site is here for you.

   

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