It is odd what sensory snapshots the brain chooses to reference when recounting an experience of a country. What the congealed grey matter selects, as though from a honk of research papers, to highlight in a lurid pink, green or yellow. Our poetic license tries to hold onto the delights, the scenic spectacles, yet the [...]

Reassuringly if you live in the Fens, or discouragingly if you are a Fen tiger*
of old, I can bare witness to the fact that there really are groups of men
sitting and watching the water in our dykes. To the untrained eye, having
peered into one of the more meagre manmade ditches myself, I was [...]

England is a country of undoubted natural beauty, almost forgotten
and overshadowed by cinematic New Zealand and other readily filmed
countries. Such panoramic foreign delights may light up our faces at the
cinema but we must again turn our attention back to our own treasures.

If the lens of Peter Jackson were to grace our rolling hills and patchwork
fields, [...]

As nectarines trundle along conveyer belts above puddles of urine,
whilst miserable arms protrude from sodden pants squeezing and
tweaking their skins for ripeness…

The long body of a man again craned over a small stove
and peered into a heavy based pan as an egg bubbled and turned
a pale snot green…