Today marks a small anniversary in my world. It was exactly one year ago — January 8th — that I moved to Berlin and started a new life-after-Malta. Life in Malta was barely tolerable at the best of times, and at the beginning of 2017 it was spiralling down into an increasingly ugly mess of political and societal corruption. I sensed that violence wouldn’t be far off, and I didn’t want to be there...
The Christmas Market tradition goes all the way back to the Late Middle Ages in the German-speaking areas of Europe. It’s normally held during the four weeks of Advent leading up to December 25th. I’m an unapologetic Scrooge when it comes to all things Christmas — especially the overhyped North American consumer craze version. And you won’t catch me making a yearly appearance at a church just for...
“Excuse me, do you have a light?” I looked up to see a naked man towering over me, holding an unlit cigarette. He was smiling politely, but I had to crane my neck at a sharp angle to avoid speaking directly to his genitals. The waves sighed softly in the background as I told him in polite German that I don’t smoke, and he moved along down the beach to ask another bather. Such encounters were a...
This distant northern country might be the most popular tourist destination of 2017. It’s a place where the wind gusts so strong it will literally tear the door off your car. It’s a place where the landscape morphs and changes before your eyes such that you can see geological time. It’s also the country which publishes and translates the most books per capita in the world. Yes, I’m talking about...
Daphne Caruana Galizia was the most dangerous person in Malta. I probably don’t need to tell you who she is anymore, because her name is making the news worldwide. I first came into contact with Daphne on January 13, 2017. But of course I knew her work well by that point, because I had been a twice-daily reader of her blog for the past 6 years. Admittedly, I found her blog when googling key words...
A few readers have asked me how much research goes into the writing of a book. How much do you have to read in order to write? It really depends on the project, of course. And I’m sure it’s different for everyone. I tend to read quite a lot. Partly because I love to read, and doing a book or an article gives me an excuse to dig into a subject. You never really know what sort of obscure fact or...
I turned up the collar of my black trench coat and thrust my hands deep into my pockets. I didn’t have a semi-automatic pistol to clutch, so I held my phone instead. We had fallen into a Cold War movie, and I was trying to act the part. We’d spent the night of Tomoko’s birthday on a train from Krakow to Lviv, where we ate a railway station cake on hard fold-down bunks, chased with lukewarm Polish...
“Oh come on, ‘I’ for Italy!” “What’s the problem?” Tomoko asked, buckling her seatbelt and settling in for a drive. “It looks like my recently updated sat nav has maps for all of continental Europe…except Italy.” We were sitting in the rental car lot at Bologna airport. Night was falling. I’d never been to this part of the country before, and we had to get to the town of Faenza that same evening...
There’s a smallish town just outside the Berlin city centre that’s completely encrusted with palaces. It’s only 30 minutes away, at the end of the S7 line, on the River Havel. And it’s the most popular day trip from Berlin. Postdam was originally a Slavonic settlement, founded in the tenth century. But it was the Hohenzollerns who put it on the map. The house of Hohenzollern rose to prominence...
I learned and experienced many things during my years in Malta, and I wrote around 30 articles about it — most of them were positive, about the places we discovered, from small village streets to the windswept heights of Ras ir-Raheb and the coast of Blata tal-Melh. But some were critical, too. I found the history to be quite fascinating. The present culture not so much. And this past year of...
Sign up for my entertaining email newsletter and claim your FREE gift!
