In northern Holland there’s a bar that’s spooky as hell. You descend a flight of steps, beckoned from the street by the unearthly orange glow of a room lit only…

Alexa misheard me. I was after ‘Scipio’, a gentle rock/classical track from Sky, but instead I got something a lot heavier, ‘Scorpio’, by someone I also misheard and straight away…

From the ground to the sky. Or, a quick trip down the Piccadilly Line.      The Piccadilly Line is a ladder, with rungs all the way down from Cockfosters to…

     Well, I couldn’t just call this piece ‘Politics’ could I, no-one would read it. They probably wouldn’t go near ‘Politicians’ either, as millions of words have been written about…

What a Wonderful World…      …it would be without us.      I watch a lot of nature and wildlife programmes. They’re real balm to the headlong madness of living as…

     A couple of friends and I went hiking for a week, and covered quite a bit of the Lake District. We were 6th-formers, me at a school in Cumbria,…

A short motivational tour.      If students seem discouraged, I often tell them that playing an instrument can take you to amazing places all over the world, and that I…

Often the target is bed, or lunchtime. Bed, if I arrive home late from Heathrow and don’t even bother to do anything downstairs, but simply keep walking, through the door…

The rain pattered onto our rucksacks as we tramped around the fields that day. We walked through wet woods and along splashy paths. It wasn’t oppressive weather, but gloomy; gloomy…

     For football fans who love or hate Man United. Which is all of them. The Crash of '79. Or was it a crush? It was certainly crushing, and as…