Golly it is hard to blog when you can’t connect to some of your favourite sites. First, the NYT. Now Wikipedia. I promise to add the links when I get back to the land of unfettered access.¹

When I was young, we didn't have English gooseberries (Ribes uva-crispa). We had Cape Gooseberries (Phys...

I’m in Kunming, Yunnan province, in the southwest of China just above Viet Nam. And the place is chock full of surprises.

I fired up the GPS, just for fun, and got a reading. As it happened, Luigi had just texted me. so I texted back the coordinates. Less than 30 seconds later he texted back the h...

It’s night in the big city. Down by the point a foghorn blows. A phone rings, clearing the fog.

“It’s Bob.”
“Good to hear you. What's up?”
“I need a hand.”
“Sure. Ask.”
“You were at the Geneva gig, right?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You know how we always monitor the audience, see what’s happening out th...

We’ve been reading bits of Elias Canetti's Voices of Marrakech. In one of them he talks about the importance of a room of one’s own to the full enjoyment of the city around. How right, even if the room is one’s own only for the night. So different today, our last night, from our first night. Very...

Which raises the question of who I am. From the first night in the Jamaa el fna, when someone called me “Moustache” in the French mode, that has been my main name. But I’ve also been called Ali Baba more than once, and I’ve just been told that I look like a Colombian soccer player of years past, who...