The Lucky Ones podcast resumes its death-obsessed philosophical travelogue in January 2020 with the author getting fatally blown off a cliff by gale-force winds in dense fog. Or nearly so, I can’t remember. But it will do so without this blog, which is seven episodes behind anyway. Who needs that. Listen on Spreaker, or subscribe on the service of your choice. Here’s the previous episode, in which no one even dies: Listen to “More Norther Still” on Spreaker. Read more
Episode 6 of The Lucky Ones podcast Text excerpt I continued reveling in the silence of Wapping, a district with the appearance of former stately elegance now slightly mortified at its own decline. It’s one of my favorite looks, one I plan to adopt myself someday, should my stately elegance ever slip. Soon it was clear that I was passing through a checkerboard of uncertainty and transition. This is the Docklands, Britain’s main portal to and from the world for a century,… Read more
Podcast excerpt Twenty-first century London sprawls over a thousand square miles of southern England, but for most of its history, London proper was packed into a single square mile – a district now known as The City. It had a single bridge, London Bridge, a twenty-arched catastrophe of stone and wood, and an easy target for cheap-shot nursery rhymes. This was the pocket-sized London that Shakespeare had known. But even as I walked into The City and past the gorgeous… Read more
Episode excerpt An escape hatch runs through the heart of the city. Once inside London itself, the Thames Path spurns the river itself, running 10 feet above the water and separated by a low wall. But standing down at the actual water’s edge – on what is called the river’s foreshore – the sound and sight of the city, of the cars and pedestrians passing above, are almost completely gone. I’d done it before, once by the Tower of London… Read more
Episode excerpt The photo of the gazing hiker had a paragraph with it, though I never got past the first sentence: “Great Britain has over 120,000 miles of hiking trails and footpaths.” I made a solemn vow to walk every one of those miles at least once during my visit. That’s less than 700 miles a day. Goals are so important. And there it was. Instead of Room 23 at the Bristol Motor Lodge, the British National Trail System… Read more
In the center of your chest is a pump made of meat. Then it gets worse. Read more
As I flew toward the 100-foot drop-off, I realized I was going to die. The only question was when. Read more
Would you listen to a podcast about an aging atheist’s complicated relationship with death? Read more
I told my kids these same things. But I don’t rhyme, and I’m not gorgeously illustrated. Read more
One tombstone recorded more heartache than any other. Read more
