Blog
Supermarket excitement, what to eat this winter
Very exciting news from our corner of Bulgaria: we’ve now got a Fantastico supermarket near us. I say ‘near’, it’s a 50-mile round trip. But that’s as close as any big supermarkets get for us. (There’s a small T-Market in our nearest town, about 10 miles away,...
Misadventures in sourdough
I have a habit of adopting trends several years after everyone else. It’s like an in-built aversion to doing anything popular at the time that it’s popular. For some reason, I wait until the popular thing has eventually tipped over into cliché and everyone’s...
Plugging back in
Long-time readers will know I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. The idea that I’ll suddenly learn to enjoy exercise, start saving money for my old age, or gain the ability to meditate, just because it’s January, is laughable. We all know I’ll be the same...
In praise of winter
It’s harder to appreciate winter in the UK, isn’t it? Especially if you aren’t lucky enough to work from home. I remember it being dark when I got up in the morning, dark when I left the house for work, dark for the last hour of working in the office, dark on the...
‘But cheese’ … a cosy chat about being vegan
A LOT of people asked me about veganism when I was back home. And the prevailing sentiment was, ‘I could never give up cheese’. Believe me, I get it. I was the same. We’d watch all those documentaries about the horrors of factory farming and I’d say ‘We should go...
Hello, England
Here I am, in the UK for the first time since *peers at watch*, oh yes, November 2019. That can’t be right, can it? Has the pandemic really wiped out that much time? Weirdly, though, it only feels like five minutes since I was last here. Perhaps that’s a sign I’ve...
David Pumpkins
There’s an old Saturday Night Live sketch with Tom Hanks where he’s playing this bizarre character called David Pumpkins. (Google it. It’s weird as shit.) And I think about that weird-ass sketch, and his funny suit, and the dancing – oh God, the dancing – every...
Autumn again
It feels like I start every other post like this: how is it [insert month/season here] already?! But indulge me while I do it yet again. Because it’s somehow October, if you hadn’t noticed, and all hope of pretending it’s still, ahem, ‘late summer’ has well and...
The B-word
Watch out, Brexit’s about. It’s had a few drinks, it’s feeling lairy, and it’s ready to fuck your shit up. As you can probably guess, I’m not exactly Brexit’s core target audience, what with me actually living in Europe, and being a soya milk-drinking, wet lefty...
Hell is other holidaymakers
We had the loveliest time in Parga. We really did. We went to the beach almost every day. We swam in the most beautifully clear, calm water. (In the bay off Parga’s main beach there’s an island that you can swim out to with a dinky little church and pathways to...
Summer nights, dry days
If you haven’t yet seen the Perseid meteor shower this August, you might have already missed out. It peaked across the evenings of the 11th and 12th. (But you might still catch some tonight, the 13th.) It’s become an annual ritual for us, to stay up and watch for...