Daily Telegraph | Monthly column

I’ve got a new monthly column for the Daily Telegraph travel section on a Saturday. Over the next year I’ll be going to twelve different travel destinations around the world and staying there during the off-season. Brace for hurricane season in the Caribbean, rainy season in Thailand, Canada in the dead of winter, reverse migration…

Malagarasi River

Thanks to Rick Markell, who came to my reading in Berkeley, CA, we can see some photographs of the Malagarasi river taken in September 1896. His great uncle Heinrich Fonck spent over 10 years in what is now Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda, ending up as the acting governor of Burundi in 1908-9. When he returned…

Fat Possum Label Keeping Blues Alive

The offices of Fat Possum Records are located with wild incongruity between a police station and a Baptist church in the small, god-fearing town of Water Valley, Mississippi, where the lawns are deep and green and possession of beer is a criminal offence. I walk through the unmarked front door and past two weasel pelts…