But if you insist on actually travelling, keep it simple.
Travel light. Stay with friends when you can. Ask people who already have the means to travel for help or advice. Keep visits short. Skip the expensive tourist version of a place and mingle with the locals instead.
You don’t need to see everything, buy everything, or do everything.
Take less. Spend less. Stay briefly. Live locally. Live with awareness. Make every moment count.
Budget travel is really just minimalism with a change of scenery.
That sentence is not entirely accurate. The book had already been written. I simply did not know that it was a book yet.
I started with a collection of pieces I had written over time — observations, memories, reflections, humour, frustrations, stories about work, family, ageing, technology and the peculiar business of being alive. They had accumulated as individual writings, each complete enough in itself. Today I asked ChatGPT to look across them and see whether there was something larger hiding among them.
There was.
What began as an exercise in organising writing themes slowly became an act of discovery. The pieces were not as disconnected as they appeared. Beneath them ran a surprisingly consistent thread: a man looking at his life while still very much living it.
That distinction became important.
This was not going to be a book in which I stood at the end of the road and explained what I had learned. Nor was it going to be a self-help book dressed up as autobiography. I did not want to become the wise old man dispensing answers from the mountaintop. I am still climbing the bloody mountain.
And occasionally wondering why I chose this particular mountain.
The chapters began to find one another. Stories that had been written independently started forming a journey. Humour became important because life itself refuses to remain solemn for very long. Some chapters carried weight; others allowed the reader to breathe. Gradually there appeared to be a rhythm to the whole thing.
Then we asked a more important question:
What is the reader experiencing while travelling through this book?
That changed the exercise again.
It was no longer enough for the individual pieces to be good. There had to be a reason to turn the page. A movement had to take place — not necessarily towards an answer, but towards greater recognition. Ideally the reader begins by reading about my life and somewhere along the way quietly starts thinking about their own.
That may be the real purpose of the book.
We looked at repetition, pacing and humour. We considered where ideas were being explained after the story had already done the work. The editorial principle became increasingly clear: tighten the writing without polishing the fingerprints off it.
I want my voice to remain there.
The slightly mischievous observations. The contradictions. The moments where seriousness suddenly trips over something ridiculous. The willingness to admit that I sometimes understand life beautifully in retrospect and considerably less successfully while it is actually happening.
By the end of the day, something existed that had not existed this morning.
Not merely a collection of writings.
A book.
And then another idea appeared.
The book should not simply end.
At the end there should be an essence — perhaps 18 Principles of Living Life Fully. Not commandments. Certainly not another grand system explaining how everyone else should live. Rather, principles distilled from the journey through the book.
Something the reader can carry away.
More importantly, something that points backwards.
The final pages should somehow return the reader to the beginning, except now the beginning looks different because they have travelled through the book. A circle rather than a straight line.
I like that.
There is still a foreword to write. I deliberately want to write that after careful deliberation. I need to discover what I want to say before the reader enters this strange collection of stories that somehow became a coherent journey.
There is also an epilogue now, standing separately from Chapter 19. That feels right. Chapter 19 belongs to the journey. The epilogue belongs to the moment after the journey, when the reader and writer stand for a while looking back at where they have been.
Tonight I find myself amused by the whole thing.
I have spent years designing systems, frameworks, architectures and models. I tend to assume that meaningful things must first be designed and then constructed.
Today the opposite happened.
The thing already existed.
We simply recognised its pattern.
Perhaps there is a lesson in that too.
Not everything meaningful in life needs to be engineered into existence.
Sometimes you live it first.
Then, one evening, you look back and discover that somehow you have written a book.
Have you ever regretted reading a book — which one and why?
The Second World War had ended. Nazi Germany had been defeated. Winston Churchill—war leader, statesman and journalist at heart—set out to record how the conflict should be remembered.
His six-volume The Second World War became one of the defining accounts of the war: a monumental narrative written by a man who had not merely witnessed history but had helped to shape it.
I read the entire work, from the gathering storm to the final victory.
And when I finished it, I was disappointed.
Churchill wrote with undeniable power and journalistic flair, but he also wrote through his own cultural and political lenses. It was primarily the story of Britain and the Allied cause. The Germans had another story to tell. So did the Russians. So did the civilians whose lives appeared only at the edges of military and political decisions.
That is why I sometimes regret reading it. It demanded considerable time and attention, yet I had allowed one participant’s account to become the pair of glasses through which I viewed the whole war.
William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I read later, offered an important counterweight. It brought me closer to the internal development of Nazi Germany and to the conditions through which its ideology gained power. It did not replace one complete truth with another, but it reminded me that no single narrator owns history.
My discomfort with a purely Allied account is not an attempt to defend Nazi Germany. The systematic murder of six million Jews, along with the persecution and killing of millions of other human beings, remains an inescapable horror. No change of lens can make that truth disappear.
But condemnation of the outcome is not enough.
If history shows us only the monster at the end, without showing us how ordinary people gradually accepted the monster’s reasoning, we lose one of history’s most important warnings.
The Holocaust did not begin with the death camps. It began much earlier—with fear, humiliation, economic distress, resentment, propaganda and the division of society into “us” and “them.” It began when individual human beings were reduced to a category and the category was presented as a threat.
That process is not confined to one country or one period.
Recently, I listened to a Tucker Carlson programme in which an extraordinary claim was made that more than 100 million undocumented immigrants were living in the United States. The language was familiar: these people are consuming our resources, threatening our way of life and changing our culture. The proposed answer was to find them, gather them up and deport them.
The point is not whether a country has the right to control its borders. It does. Nor is it wrong for citizens to be concerned about rapid social change, pressure on public resources or the preservation of a shared culture.
The danger begins when the human beings involved disappear behind a label.
“Illegal aliens.”
“Foreigners.”
“Invaders.”
“Enemies.”
Once people have been converted into a threatening mass, it becomes easier to speak about them without compassion—and eventually to act against them without conscience.
In Germany, the recent electoral victory of the Alternative for Germany in Saxony-Anhalt has understandably awakened memories and fears. Yet simply pointing at German voters and declaring that history is repeating itself may also prevent us from understanding what is happening. People rarely believe that they are choosing evil. They believe that they are protecting something: their security, identity, livelihoods, families or future.
Understanding that reasoning does not mean endorsing it. It means examining the path before it reaches its darkest destination.
This is not an anti-American post, nor is it an anti-German one. No nation or political group stands alone in the judgment seat—and neither do I. The tendency to turn unfamiliar people into a threatening “other” belongs to humanity. It can emerge anywhere fear becomes stronger than curiosity and certainty becomes stronger than compassion.
Churchill wrote an impressive account of the Second World War, but it was still an account written from one position within the conflict. What I regret is not that I read it, but that for a time I mistook one perspective for the whole story.
Perhaps that is the greater responsibility of reading history: not merely to remember the terrible things people did, but to understand how they learned to justify doing them.
The true story begins long before the atrocity.
It begins in the words we choose. In the fears we cultivate. In the stories we repeat about people who are different from us.
The difficult question is not simply: How do we protect our culture and values when they appear to be threatened by change?
It is this:
How do we respond to that change without surrendering the very humanity and values we are trying to protect?
Airports are not places I file in my Favourite Places folder. They are rather like insurance: unavoidable, valuable and seldom a source of pleasure.
Imagine that you are my suitcase.
You have already been packed beyond your natural capacity, weighed, labelled and handed over to strangers who clearly do not share my concern for your wellbeing. Now you are rattling behind me through an international airport, trying desperately to keep up.
Your wheels clatter over every tile. One of them has begun to squeak in protest. I pull you faster.
“Come on—we have a connecting flight!”
You would like to remind me that you were designed for travel, not endurance racing, but suitcases are rarely consulted about the itinerary.
We follow the signs: left, right, upstairs, down an escalator, onto a train and then through a passage that appears long enough to connect two neighbouring countries. Eventually, we emerge into another departure lounge—only to discover that our boarding gate is still somewhere beyond the horizon.
I am tired. My shoes hurt. My breathing is becoming heavier, and your squeaking wheel sounds increasingly like a small animal calling for help.
At last, we reach the gate.
I stop. You collapse beside me with the unmistakable relief of luggage that has survived another transfer. Neither of us wants to move again.
Then I begin the ritual.
I check the boarding pass. I check the gate number. I check the departure screen. Half an hour later, I check everything again, just in case the airport has quietly moved our flight to another terminal while we were not looking.
Time slows down at airports. The next flight is hours away, there is nothing meaningful to do, and you cannot sleep because you must keep an eye on your luggage—which, after what I have just put it through, may be considering escape.
Shops glitter invitingly on every side, offering watches, perfumes and chocolates at prices that suggest they come with their own boarding passes. But I resist and push onward towards the gate.
There are only three things I truly need from an international airport.
First, clear signs. I want to find my way without the added excitement of an adrenaline rush.
Second, Wi-Fi. I need entertainment and the opportunity to tell my family, “I have arrived safely. I am at the gate. I think.”
Third, I need somewhere comfortable to sit—or, even better, to stretch out. Occasionally, one finds those wonderful reclining chairs that look as though they were designed for a Hawaiian island resort but somehow took the wrong flight and ended up in an airport. You lie back while the clock continues its slow, deliberate march.
If memory serves me correctly, the airport that provided these three essentials best was São Paulo/Guarulhos–Governor André Franco Montoro International Airport, followed closely by Dubai International Airport.
And the worst airport?
I cannot nominate a single one. The worst airport is whichever one I happen to be crossing when I am exhausted, the connection is tight, the signs are confusing and my boarding gate is apparently situated in another postal code.
Perhaps one day I will learn to appreciate the extraordinary complexity of airport design. Until then, airports will remain unavoidable necessities—places to pass through and survive, rather than destinations to treasure.
And when I finally board the aircraft, I settle gratefully into my seat while my suitcase disappears into the darkness below.
What’s the most annoying trope in books or movies?
When I saw today’s prompt — What’s the most annoying trope in books or movies? — I struggled to think of one.
I don’t really watch movies looking for annoying tropes. I watch them for entertainment. I’m quite willing to suspend disbelief and accept that certain things simply happen in Movie Land. Familiar tropes don’t bother me much.
But after thinking about it, three came to mind.
The first is the great cinematic chase.
The person in front has already been stabbed, shot or injured. They are limping badly, clutching a bleeding wound, falling over tree roots and occasionally stopping to gasp dramatically against a wall.
Behind them comes the perfectly healthy assailant, running at full speed.
The attacker is gaining rapidly!
And yet…
Ten minutes later they are still exactly twenty metres apart.
Apparently there is some unwritten rule of cinema that villains may approach their victims threateningly but are prohibited from actually catching them until the script gives permission.
Then there is the villain or monster who simply refuses to die.
The hero shoots it.
It gets up.
The hero shoots it again.
It falls off a cliff, is blown up, drowned, electrocuted and crushed underneath something weighing approximately three tons.
Finally, silence.
The exhausted hero looks at the apparently very dead remains, breathes a sigh of relief and turns away.
And every person watching the movie thinks exactly the same thing:
Don’t turn your back on it!
Sure enough, somewhere behind the hero, a finger twitches.
Here we go again.
But the third trope that came to mind bothers me for a completely different reason.
The great war hero fights his way through enemy territory, killing dozens — sometimes hundreds — of enemy soldiers. They fall everywhere. We seldom know their names. They are uniforms, targets, obstacles and bodies.
Eventually our hero survives and returns home.
Then the music changes.
His wife sees him.
His children run towards him.
There are tears, embraces and beautiful images of reconciliation. Perhaps a child is lifted into the air. Perhaps his wife touches his face. The camera lingers lovingly over every moment.
And we understand what the filmmaker wants us to understand:
This man is a father.
A husband.
A brother.
A human being.
He matters.
But the camera never goes back to the battlefield.
It never follows one of those nameless bodies that our hero left behind. It never shows the wife who waits for someone who will not return. It never shows another child standing at a window waiting for a father.
Those people were fathers too.
They were husbands, brothers, sons and friends.
Of course, stories need protagonists and antagonists. A movie cannot tell everybody’s story. And sometimes there really is a clear aggressor and a clear defender. Recognising the humanity of an enemy does not mean pretending that everyone’s actions are morally equivalent.
But there is something worth noticing in the way stories can humanise one person while turning another into scenery.
Perhaps that is the trope that should annoy me most.
Not the wounded man who somehow outruns his healthy pursuer.
Not even the monster that requires seventeen separate deaths before finally getting the message.
It is the trope that quietly tells me whose humanity matters.
Because if the camera had followed one of those anonymous soldiers home instead, we might have been watching an entirely different story.
Zeal4living 