Month: October 2023

In 2010, I picked my copy of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov from my bookshelf. I had made a few attempts at it, but with life’s interruptions, the eight hundred pages were daunting. I now felt guilty that I had not read a book that was influential to so many writers and readers. A quick read…

Whilst Sir Walter Scott took a trip to Stratford Upon Avon, Li, a Business Studies student at Glasgow University was having a road trip with friends to see The Glenfinnan Viaduct. That same year, Kioko, a middle-aged widow was on a flight from Tokyo to Canada. Her mother several years earlier flew from Tokyo to…

There is a beautiful piece of cinematography in Nikita Mikhalkov’s movie Urga, where one is presented with a vast panoramic field of emerald grass. There’s movement in the distance. The image gets closer and closer and slowly coming into focus. It’s accompanied by the sound of rumbling hooves and snorting. Wafts of agitated dust float in a…

With the lamp suppressed The universe enters in The child gapes with awe I suppose it must have been the late summer. I had been spending the month on the idyllic Island of Bute on Scotland’s west coast. We had a cabin with no running water or electricity. My job was to go and fill…

In 1999, I found myself working in Norway. One evening as I sat looking over the fjord. I felt a deep sense of melancholy when Enigma’s Return to Innocence played out the drama; an image and sensation that no golden-hour shot could ever capture. I watched this large golden ball of compressed energy close in…