Last night I watched My Octopus Teacher on Netflix, a documentary about a filmmaker who, on the verge of a mental breakdown, gives up work to free dive off the Western Cape of South Africa every day. Wetsuitless, he slips into the cold, turbid waters of the South Atlantic Ocean every day (without exception, whatever…
Read More
I used to write a lot of irreverent blogs about being ‘a bit too fat’. As a topic, I suppose it became my speciality. This is partly because, being British, I’m naturally compelled to make disparaging comments about my own appearance for everyone else’s amusement…but it’s also because that’s how I genuinely spent my entire…
Read More
At the moment life feels pretty serious, what with all the fears and stresses of the worldwide pandemic, and the way the threat of illness is changing the minutiae of our lives in so many unexpected ways. COVID-19 is forcing us to realise how fragile the systems we base our lives on are, and how…
Read More
I’m 30 soon. All my late twenties, 30 has loomed like a cloaked figure on a misty street, one gnarled finger beckoning me to some dark and terrible fate involving wrinkles, grey hairs, dead eggs, big bills, bigger hangovers, new fat deposits and a keener sense of my own mortality. Interestingly, the closer I creep…
Read More
There’s nothing more annoying than some self-professed wellbeing expert telling you how to live your life in the middle of a government-enforced lock-down. Especially when it’s threatening your livelihood and riddling you with anxious visions of a summer spent in a darkened room spooning jam into your mouth under your face-mask because all those people…
Read More
I’m sitting in an almost empty airport in San Jose after a zippy drive up the Pacific coast through the dawn with a really friendly taxi driver who treated me to The Best of Red Hot Chili Peppers for most of the way. My lack of Spanish meant we couldn’t talk much, but he smiled…
Read More
I’m writing this blog in a grassy clearing at the top of a jungle-covered mountain overlooking the bright blue Pacific ocean. I’ve just spent the last hour or so climbing some scarily steep, rubbly hills to get up here so I am disgustingly sweaty. I am also, slightly unnervingly, being circled by vultures. Still, I’m…
Read More
Today, while walking barefoot in the surf of a Costa Rican beach in a happy, slightly disconnected daze, I caught a flicker of dazzling blue from the corner of my eye. My first thought was that it was a bit of plastic, because it seemed so unnaturally blue, but upon closer inspection I realised it…
Read More
I feel like I’ve been here in Costa Rica for months. In reality it’s only been 5.5 days, and only four of them have been at yoga school, which is where I am now, by a beautiful brook in the jungle inhabited by iguanas, geckos, dragonflies, monkeys, sloths and about a bazillion unseen noisy little…
Read More
It’s about 2am in Costa Rica. I woke up an hour ago because my body thought it was 7am, which – at home in the UK, it was. Usually waking up naturally at the same time every day is useful for things like getting to work and going for a smug early jog, but not…
Read More
