He started to make plans. He didn’t want to just see a bit of the world: if possible, he was going to see all of it. “Because the world is complex and vast, and because my general temperament is pretty timid and more towards the shy side, I wanted to be forced into adventure. The point of adventure is it’s uncomfortable and you have to grow in it.
“I had $1,000 in my bank account so I needed to find a cheap way to travel, and that led me to the guys who had walked around the world.” He read up about Steve Newman (an American who circumnavigated the globe on foot over four years in the late 1980s) and Karl Bushby (a British ex-paratrooper who set off in 1998 and is still walking today), and now he had his answer. “It seemed to solve everything I wanted out of life,” he says.
Thirst for Salt gestures toward the taboo of age difference, yes. But it is really about the larger taboo native to so many of our relationships: what we withhold, intentionally or otherwise, and what these things – whether because they cannot be shared, or because we are unable to recognise them as worth sharing – might say about us.
“This Isn’t Going to End Well” gives off the particular radiance of a life lived hard, whatever else: as such, a brand of American bildungsroman. There’s deep satisfaction to its arc, despite its inherent sadness — a wondrous glimpse of the melding, in human doings, of fate, character and serendipity.
In a series of deeply informed and carefully worked out examples, Ian Dunt takes us through the Westminster labyrinth to reveal an omnishambles. It is not – and he is clear here – because the people involved are corrupt or lazy. It is because the system is not fit for purpose.
She washed eleven leaves and thought of her sister.
In the nearly detailed day in the crook of the moon