I started this website more than 16 years ago to chronicle a year off, which turned into a four-year journey, which culminated in a decade living in Bali. And, just in case anyone’s been dedicated enough to check, I’ve had it offline for more than a year now.

Why take a site offline? Well, to précis, I was heavily involved with the Tesla Takedown protest movement against Elon Musk, which, during the heady days of DOGE (remember them?), seemed as though it was going to tank Tesla’s share price. (Tesla sales in Europe remain dented, but, as befits a company run by a man whose distinguishing talent is stock pumping, its share price remains regrettably bulletproof and Musk is, at the time of writing, a paper trillionaire. Heyho.)

Anywise, as you’d expect of a woman doing anti-fascist stuff, I received a few unpleasant messages, so it seemed like a good idea to take this site down to avoid being doxxed or having edited lowlights pulled out for public distortion.

As to why I kept it offline, after the media and (I assume) the anonymous keyboard warriors had moved on to the next thing (Palestine Action, since you ask)?

Well, that’s a longer story. The first element is that, as you’d expect of what was initially a family travel blog, it had a lot of pictures of my spawn as a child. In my defence, 2010 was a very different place from 2026, when we’re much more aware of privacy and it’s normal to grey out the faces of a child’s peers on a sports day photo shared in a family WhatsApp group.

However, thanks to the magic of AI (from dark web tools to Musk’s very own Grok), in 2026 any random pervert can turn child pictures into CSAM (child sexual abuse material). Understandably, therefore, neither Zach nor I were enthusiastic about leaving them up, and it felt like a good deal of housekeeping to go through 16 years’ worth of imagery downloading and deleting every pic with a kid in.

Another element that gave me pause is this. I’m fairly confident that some of what I’ve written over the last 16 (almost 17) years won’t read well in today’s new and (for some) more enlightened era. Exoticism is now, correctly, a cardinal sin of travel writing, and I’m sure there’s absolutely loads of that. (Many people also aren’t fans of “parachute” writing, but I think a personal blog can be excused, particularly as I’m not presenting myself as an expert.)

More damningly, I’m fairly sure there are bits that go beyond exoticism to stereotyping and worse. There are likely some personal revelations that I ought not have committed to the internet. And there are also things that are just plain embarrassing, like a chirpy endorsement of a camp where you pet tigers (you’ll be stunned to learn that these things are built on abuse).

After some reflection, I’m not going to go back and delete or rewrite 16 years of posts through a decolonising lens, or even simply with the wisdom of age. That would be both dishonest and a massive waste of time. Let’s just say there are lots of things buried in the hinterlands of this blog that I wouldn’t write now and, if you stumble across one of them and it offends you, I apologise. (Also, if you find anything so offensive you feel it needs to be deleted or CW-d, drop me a comment and I’ll do something about it.)

My third concern was practical. The online landscape has changed beyond recognition. Writers are on Substack (or beehiiv if you don’t like Nazis); photographers and videographers are on Insta and TikTok; the world and its wife has a podcast. Further, Twitter is now a fascist cesspool; Facebook is a ghost town; influencers carry more clout than travel writers, let alone travel bloggers.

And, as the garnish to this particular shit sandwich, AI, plus the oncoming march of AI agents, is both transforming search and destroying the broader internet, making discovery increasingly more difficult even for bona fide newspapers with millions to burn. At its crudest, it’s hard to find readers for a blog nowadays—I’m not sure many people even read blogs any more—and it’s phenomenally difficult to make even pennies from a blog.

On the other hand… I’m travelling for a few weeks. After giving up flying and returning to the UK (large and related decisions that I intend to write about), I’m working my way through Spain to Morocco then back up to Ibiza for a Christmas cat-sit. I’d like to write about that, and not necessarily in a form that packages tidily as conventional media, so why not write about it here? Further, I have some general thots about the way the world is going, and I’d like a space to write about those, too.

So, while I reserve the right to start a Substack or a podcast, I’m also hoping to revive this blog. Consider this a shot in the dark.

Thanks to NoName_13 for the image, which you can find on Pixabay.

The post To Blog or Not to Blog, That Is the Question appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

I’m not entirely sure this says anything good about me as a person. But what upsets me the most about this is the sheer, untrammelled stupidity of almost everyone involved. Unlike Boris Johnson, a character I fear we cannot yet consign to history’s dustbin, I’m not a believer in the Great Man theory of history (and, yes, it is ALWAYS a man).

Let’s be clear: the confluence of tech wealth, post-truth, the clickbait economy and the oncoming climate apocalypse was always going to throw up one or more men whose main skill set is that of the old-school carnival barker. Tesla’s price/earnings ratio is currently around 200:1, compared to 7:1 for Stellantis, while sales are actually falling: It’s a valuation driven historically by rubes and lying tweets and now by assumptions about institutional corruption. Trump was so abysmal a businessman that he managed to bankrupt a casino and would have been considerably richer had he just invested the inheritance he acquired from his racist father in the S&P500.

But we are where we are, and the dynamic duo that someone described as a stupid person’s idea of a smart person and a poor person’s idea of a rich person are rampaging around breaking things. And, like it or not, they’ll have real impacts on all our lives. We have at least three easily identifiable bubbles threatening to pop (AI, weight loss drugs and crypto) and a freakshow of religious loons, 4chan fascists, “leopards won’t eat MY face” tokens and the kind of dumbass conservatives that appointed Hitler as Chancellor at the helm of the world’s largest economy when that happens.

Let’s just say nations rarely become more democratic or more functional during a massive economic downturn in a time of immense social change.

Like a lot of the tech overlords doing their damnedest to destroy the one planet we can currently live on, Musk is a big-picture thinker.

We live, as the apocryphal Chinese curse has it, in interesting times. Throughout human history, people have collectively gone nuts during times of stress, and a very large proportion of the developed west got sucked down sundry internet rabbit holes during lockdown and never really emerged. The invention of a set of machines that can, using just plagiarism, overpriced GPUs and planet-desiccating quantities of energy and water, lie fluently in a range of media has not helped this. (And, yes, there are other uses for AI, and, no, it’s not all bad, and, yes, like dot.com in 1999-2000, it remains a massive bubble.)

Donald Trump was not a billionaire until he played one on TV. He does not believe in climate change. He also does not believe in exercise, believing that a human being is born with a finite amount of energy that should be reserved for dining on charcoaled steaks or room temperature Big Macs. At least 26 women have accused him of sexual assault, including his first wife, while a New York judge went to some lengths to explain that a jury found him guilty of raping E. Jean Carroll, albeit with his fingers not his dick. He is profoundly and wilfully ignorant about everything from California water flows to basic economics.

Like Hitler (or, perhaps more relevantly, Berlusconi), Trump is as risible a figure to his adversaries—the hair! The orange! The white bits around the weirdly squinty eyes!—as he is a cult hero to his acolytes. And, yet, he’s capable of doing huge, huge damage to the entire planet at a critical stage in its history. He wants to open coal-fired power plants to feed the plagiarism machines. He wants to reset the clock to an era of colonial expansion, closed economies and unchallenged white male dominance, perhaps because this is the only period of history he remembers from school, and perhaps because it’s the only way to get the Trump name on the physical world map.

Musk is, also, in many ways, a laughable figure. A pathologically unfunny shitposter and internet troll, a man so bizarrely fragile that he takes time out of his busy day to steal the jokes of others, a man so high on his own supply that he’s been radicalised by the platform he owns, a self-proclaimed free speech warrior who’s currently suing advertisers who didn’t fancy their ads running alongside the CSAM, racism and crypto spam that now infests X-Twitter. (Side note: One of the more appealing elements of Donald Trump compared to Musk is how conspicuously Trump despises his core constituency, while Musk is quite embarrassingly thirsty for the approval of his own.)

Even more laughable, perhaps, is his Mars obsession. Like a lot of the tech overlords doing their damnedest to destroy the one planet we can currently live on, Musk is a big-picture thinker. He’d like to be a type of Hari Seldon figure, the ultimate great man of history, the visionary who got us off Earth and made us a multiplanetary species, thereby future-proofing humanity against supernovas, cosmic death rays, stray asteroids and sundry other existential risks. (I suspect, from his alleged freakish enthusiasm to donate his sperm to even the most passing acquaintances, that he’d also like to be one of those super-procreators who ends up in everyone’s DNA in a few centuries time, like Genghis Khan or Edward III.)

The corollaries of this elevated perspective are unfortunate, perhaps especially so when coupled with ketamine and the trollish sensibility that led him to deliver a Nazi salute at Trump’s coronation. Getting to Mars is step one in ensuring that trillions of future humans get to exist, so justifies any amount of suffering caused to any number of people in the present moment. The existential risks of death rays, supernovas, etc outweigh the current small-picture risk of the climate crisis, meaning he can continue to block high-speed rail, burn through tonnes of energy on his plagiarism machines, and ally with climate-change deniers such as Trump.

Obviously, not only because Musk is a shyster with an abysmal workplace safety record and a tolerance for risk that won’t really cut it on a hostile planet where a mission has to survive six months without external support, but because of fundamental issues such as there not yet being an energy source light enough to bring six months’ worth of food and material to Mars, he ain’t going to be putting people on Mars anytime soon. But he seems hellbent on destroying the only planet we currently have in pursuit of doing so.

Looking at the raging Dunning-Kruger cases who are currently leading the world’s largest economy, this feels, both tragically and comically, more and more plausible to me.

It’s a hell of a premise for a sitcom. Two monstrous narcissists with unresolved daddy issues and a white supremacy fetish are sharing a White House. But one wants to take America back to the Gilded Age and the other wants to bump humanity into the twenty-fifth century. Who’ll win out?

Except it isn’t funny, because it’s happening now, it’s happening for real, and the many, many people around the world leading more-or-less blameless lives and trying to do the right thing by their loved ones, their communities and the planet are on the receiving end of it.

One explanation of the Fermi paradox is that the closer a species gets to becoming extra-planetary the more likely it is to extinguish itself through (to name but a few of the more currently obvious possibilities) climate change, rogue AI, bioweapons, chemical weapons or nuclear war. Looking at the raging Dunning-Kruger case studies who are currently leading the world’s largest economy, this feels, both tragically and comically, more and more plausible to me.

Happy February!

Image credit: Madhav fallusion, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post On the Unbearable Dumbness of the Moment We’re In appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

So, what is new? Everything and nothing. Despite a couple of long stints back in the UK, I’m still based on Bali, still in the same house, in fact, demonic fishpond and all. Currently it’s the water pump that looms largest in the galaxy of broken things.

In fact, I’m very much based on Bali as I’m endeavouring to address my carbon footprint with the goal of living a sustainable life by 2030. That means I haven’t got on a plane since flying in from the UK via Istanbul in June and am aiming not to fly until I say goodbye to this particular base next year.

Overland travel in Indonesia beyond Bali is fun and doable but takes time, which seems to be in short supply at the moment. Still, I’m going overland to Jakarta twice at some point fairly soon to acquire a Polish passport, so stay tuned for some old-fashioned travel blogging.

Zach is still (just) at university, in his final year at Oxford. His current post-graduation plans are to earn some money in Australia and then take the GAP year of which Covid deprived him, with some time in Bali to see me and his mates. He’s happy, funny, great to look at, and seems generally well-adjusted, which is about all anyone can hope for. I expect that, like the rest of Generation Covid, he’ll figure out some career stuff in due course before getting replaced by an AI and having to figure out some new career stuff.

The main reason I’m busy, despite being an empty nester, is that I’m trying to combine earning money before the global banking system collapses again with a large creative project. I took a six-month writing course (online) with Curtis Brown Creative in the UK and am now in what I hope are the closing throes of finishing a novel, after which comes the real fun part of finding an agent (or not, of course). For an idea of how hellish this can be, I recommend the excellent Nerd’s Eye View (I also recommend her memoir, which did ultimately see the light of day).

I intend to write more about my attempts at sustainable travel and also share some thoughts on sustainable travel writing (and whether such a thing even exists), but my current plan is to move to Italy once the lease on this house expires next year. In theory, that will allow me to see family, travel and enjoy a fab life without the need to get on planes ever again.

Essentially, the pandemic made me, like many others, rethink a lot of things that I’d previously taken for granted, and post-pandemic, I’m still in a kind of stasis, albeit a thoughtful one. But I’m grateful that I and my loved ones have survived it unscathed—and looking forward to having more to write about than the plague.

*: The headline picture? That’s Balian. Pretty, isn’t it?

The post What’s New, Pussycat? appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

First, the good news. More workable vaccines have been developed more quickly than pretty much anyone thought possible. This is a huge achievement and a great sign for the future.

Now, the less good news. We have no idea how long the immunity from these will last — or, in the case of the UK, what the consequences of altering the tried-and-tested vaccination schedule will be. We also don’t know whether all, some or any of these vaccines stop people being able to transmit the disease.

Most importantly, not all vaccines seem set to work well against all existing mutations, let alone future mutations, which will be under considerable evolutionary pressure to become resistant. (Novavax, for example, was almost 90% effective in the UK, where the British strain dominates, but barely 50% effective in South Africa, where the South African strain dominates.)

This is…. Not ideal.

***

The WHO recently asked Britain to pause its vaccination programme after covering the most vulnerable, and share its vaccine wealth with poorer countries. Beyond the ethical case (unlikely to speak to a Boris Johnson government), there’s a clearer point of self-interest here: if you let the virus spread more or less unchecked in poorer countries, more and more mutations are likely to develop and those that are vaccine-proof will prosper.

Bitter experience suggests, however, that rich countries won’t be donating vaccines to poor countries until they’ve vaccinated everyone, possibly even including pets. So we’ll likely see a bunch of more-or-less vaccine-proof mutations arriving, which will mean vaccines need to be reformulated.

Mutations, needless to say, will be an absolute gift to antivaxxers, Qanoners, Plandemicers and Covid-deniers of all shapes and forms. That — and I’m looking at you, America — may well impact some rich nations’ ability to achieve herd immunity.

Regardless, rich countries that are controlling their pandemic will increasingly tighten their borders against poorer countries that aren’t. And, let’s face it, every single country that has controlled its pandemic has severely limited international travel.

***

Right now, it’s clear that nations which are progressing with vaccination — like those few that have the virus under control — are not opening their borders, but closing them. Wealthy European countries are restricting entry to protect their populations from new strains. And, while a handful of EU nations, signally Iceland, are opening their doors to other EU citizens with EU-approved jabs and yet-to-be-determined certificates, you can bet your bottom dollar that rich nations are not going to make it easy for residents to travel to countries that don’t have the virus under control and come home bearing new and exotic strains. (I also suspect that travel corridors with other rich nations rather than, say, Vietnam will be the priority.)

I don’t think we’ll see restrictions as harsh as Australia’s, with citizens having to apply for permission from central government to get on a plane and nationals stuck outside the country awaiting space on very limited flights. But strict vaccination, testing and quarantine requirements, plus the sorts of travel advisories that invalidate most insurance, will make journeys like the one I used to make so regularly (between the UK and Indonesia) complicated, fraught and hella expensive.

At the moment, international travel is very, very difficult, with flight cancellations, border closures, route closures, changes of visa rules, changes of testing or quarantine regulations, and even blanket bans on nationals who’ve spent time in infected countries being implemented at whiplash speed. Long-haul travel is particularly fraught: I’ve heard of people stuck for weeks in what was supposed to be a transit stop after the rules for their destination changed after they’d departed.

And between “rusty” pilots and struggling airlines skimping on maintenance, flying is going to be considerably less safe than it was. With an increasing number of airline bankruptcies plus route closures and reduced passenger numbers, it’s also going to be very much more expensive.

***

There has been a lot of talk about vaccine passports — an extension of the old yellow card which holds your yellow fever and other vaccination records. But, besides the not-insignificant issue of getting 200-ish governments to agree on a globally recognised format and build the digital framework in a sane timeframe, there are a range of other challenges.

Firstly, it’s already clear that not all vaccines are created equal: some simply don’t work as well as others, and others will work better against certain strains. Should Indonesia’s choice of vaccine, China’s Coronavac, which proved just over 50% effective in trials in Brazil (though over 90% effective in trials in Turkey), be treated as equivalent to a vaccine with 95% efficacy? What if said vaccine with 95% efficacy proves only 30% effective against a new strain?

Secondly: how do you protect against fraud? Indonesia has a thriving market in fake Covid tests and I’m absolutely certain vaccine passports will be available at a price in many, many countries.

And, thirdly, if a new strain that’s not been tested against existing vaccines emerges in a country or spreads to another and other nations shut down flights and close their borders, what difference will a vaccine passport make?

***

I am neither Einstein, an epidemiologist nor a public health expert, so I’m not sure what the best route forward is here. Letting the virus rip through the population won’t just kill and sicken many and drive new mutations, it will overload health services — and the idea that society and the economy can continue to function normally when soldiers are stationed outside hospitals to turn away the sick and dying is just plain delusional. Hoping that the virus will mutate to a less virulent form runs the risk of it becoming more virulent.

If world governments could agree to shut their borders (with limited, tested exclusions for trade and compassionate reasons) and pursue elimination strategies, and rich nations could help poor nations manage the cost, the virus could be wiped out. But the chances of that sort of cooperation seem about as high as the chances of global climate change coordination.

Many less wealthy nations are unlikely to finish vaccinating their populations until 2024, by which point one can assume their early vaccinations will be largely moot, either because the virus is less virulent or because mutations will have out-evolved the original vaccines. So, I think the days of gaily hopping on a plane to Bali, popping across to Vietnam, travelling overland around Cambodia, Laos and Thailand then hopping over to campervan around Oz, are gone for the foreseeable. Vaccines and (supervised) quarantines will remain part of life until the virus is either eliminated or becomes less virulent.

I’d like to say I have a brighter vision for inter-European travel. But I’m not at all sure that, after a reasonably relaxed 2020 summer culminated in a brutal winter wave, many EU countries are going to open their doors to fellow Europeans without quarantine this summer (this interview with a German virologist explains why).

For 2021 — and, quite likely, 2022 as well — I think it’s time to embrace the joys of slow, limited and local (perhaps extremely local!) travel. I will, of course, be delighted to be proved wrong.

Image by MasterTux from Pixabay.

The post What Do Vaccines REALLY Mean for Travel? appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Which isn’t to say my 2020 has been bad, in the grand scheme of 2020. I still have (some) work. I’m in Bali, where there are (currently) a lot of freedoms. I’ve not lost any loved ones, contracted long Covid (or, indeed, any form of Covid) or been consigned to solo lockdown. The boy had a reasonably normal start to university — not imprisoned in halls of residence or confined to study from home. Hell, I even went to Italy.

But, on a personal note, it’s hard to navigate the major life change that is an only child flying the nest while Covid simultaneously limits options and creates wild uncertainty. And on an objective note, mutant Covid (both the British and the South African variants) has me worried. The fact that it made its debut just as vaccinations started to roll out and light appeared at the end of a tunnel feels like a very low blow. Seeing more and more countries slam the door shut on visitors from the UK makes me feel further and further from my family.

There’s an intensity of experience when a lockdown eases that I’ll continue to treasure — the sensory blast of a restaurant meal, the intense immersion of a movie on the big screen

There have, of course, been bonuses to this absolute binfire of a year. Discovering the quiet pleasures of walking, cooking, baking. Practising mindfulness, acceptance, yoga, meditation. Time to read and write — although, with all the doomscrolling, I find my concentration’s shot. Making time for family, albeit often remotely. The US election, and with it some faint hope of action on the climate.

There’s an intensity of experience when a lockdown eases that I’ll continue to treasure — the sensory blast of a restaurant meal, the intense immersion of a movie on the big screen, the all-round wonderment of wandering a beautiful city such as Rome.

But coming into the New Year, I feel in limbo, no longer really an agent of my own destiny, no clear goal or destination, with all the plans I’d made for this life stage unmade and, as yet, nothing obvious to replace them. It’s an almost oxymoronic feeling: simultaneously trapped and unsure.

And I’m terrified by the state of the plague: British hospitals already maxing out their ICU capacity with a month to go before we see the impact of the Christmas mingling, California rationing care, even countries that had controlled the epidemic starting to lose their grip. It’s likely we haven’t seen the last of the mutations and it’s still unclear how long vaccine immunity will last.

The virus was lab-created by Bill Gates to force us all to take a fake vaccine which will both include tracking microchips and render the populace sterile

Conspiracy theories have always flourished at times of intense social change and, even prior to the pandemic, we were living in fast-moving times, as social media replaced old media as the primary news source. But it’s frightening to see how far the conspiracy theories around the pandemic have spread.

Some versions are mild: there is a medical conspiracy to exaggerate the number of cases to raise money somehow or there is a political conspiracy to exaggerate the number of cases to enhance social control. People aren’t really dying of Covid, but other conditions, or those who are dying lived lives that were not worth saving anyway. Other versions are full-blown batshit: the virus was lab-created by Bill Gates to force us all to take a fake vaccine which will both include tracking microchips and render the populace sterile.

But they’re all quite frightening. Not, perhaps, as frightening as Qanon, where a cabal of high-profile paedophiles, including Tom Hanks of all people, are sacrificing children to feast on a substance produced in their blood. But frightening because the old world where most agreed on the basics has been replaced by a world where people fight from their siloes — and, as the economic pain continues to bite, this will only get worse.

The climate crisis, from the melting Arctic to burning Australia, is becoming harder and harder to ignore

Ah, yes, the economy… I’m worried for my son, who is, like all the Covid generation, going to be educationally disadvantaged compared to those who came immediately before and immediately afterwards, and is likely to graduate college into one of the worst economies the world has ever known. I’m worried for myself, having failed to make provision during the good times.

And I’m worried for the world. We haven’t had a banking crisis yet in this catastrophe, but one can’t be far off. People not only on Bali but in the wealthy UK are turning to food banks and to charity. It can’t be long, surely, before desperation fuels crime and riots?

Meanwhile, the climate crisis, from the melting Arctic to burning Australia, is becoming harder and harder to ignore. It already looks as though expectations of temperature rise and sea level rise may have been optimistic, rather than the reverse. Mitigation is going to reshape the world in unknown ways, but I’m fairly confident a nomadic life, like the one I lived for four whole years, is likely to be impossible.

One broadly optimistic analysis predicts that life won’t really pick up until 2024. I can only hope he’s right.

The post Happy New Year: The Worst Is Yet to Come appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Grateful as I am for the flat – which my aunt rented as a base for whoever was looking after my brother when he was in the depths of Stage 4 cancer – the pandemic still sucks. I had a raft of plans for the next five years: a long lease in Bali to provide Zach the home base he wanted while at uni and me the chance to travel the world by home exchanging (and sit out the recession we were overdue). The bulk of my income for the last five years or so has come from writing about travel and bars, both sectors on the sharp end of coronavirus, as indeed is publishing in general.

Put crudely, my entire life for over a decade has centred on the ability to skip between countries and continents with no obstacles more significant than the odd hellish bus journey or visa hassle. Covid has kicked all that hard up the arse. And here in the UK, as the idiot at the wheel of the clown car demonstrates our English exceptionalism by releasing lockdown and hollering to the public to spend, spend, spend, it’s hard to see a way back, or indeed forward.

By Chinese New Year, when Xi Jinping locked down Wuhan and slammed the brakes on the economy, it was obvious that something very nasty was on its way.

Thanks to friends in China, Covid appeared on our horizons in early January. By Chinese New Year, when Xi Jinping locked down Wuhan and slammed the brakes on the economy, it was obvious that something very nasty was on its way; by early February it was clear that we were looking at a full-blown pandemic. As I travelled, that month, from Zermatt to Zurich and Zurich to Innsbruck and Innsbruck to Salzburg and Salzburg to Vienna and Vienna to Dubrovnik, I scrolled the news obsessively, and, as borders started to close, my world narrowed until I broke my rule against short-haul flying and bailed for Blighty.

But I don’t think I’d envisaged what would come next. I think I imagined something brutal but short: carnage like Wuhan, followed by a fairly rapid return to business as usual. In the UK, we escaped the collapse of healthcare systems seen both in Wuhan and in parts of Italy by callously and (I assume) deliberately sacrificing care home residents, allowing them to choke to death one after another with no prospect of a hospital admission and no guarantee of drugs to ease their passing.

I didn’t envisage the economic insanity: currently, around 10 million workers are furloughed at the government’s expense, awaiting the moment when the economy magically restarts, or October, when the furlough ends and their jobs evanesce, just in time for the winter second wave.

And I still can’t see what comes next. Is this the start of societal collapse? Will the banking system hold up? Or will a vaccine magically appear and life, at least for those who have kept their lives and their health and their jobs and their homes, go back to normal? How will the pandemic and climate change interact?

It’s a strange, helpless feeling, not to know where we are or where we’re going. The knowledge that we’re led by an idiot narcissist who literally shook hands with people in a hospital full of coronavirus cases only makes that loss of agency sting harder.

Unless and until there’s an effective vaccine and reliable cure, the nomadic way of living – crisscrossing borders with merry abandon – is over.

In Indonesia, the picture is no rosier. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on as testing levels are low and numbers are being massaged at the micro and the macro level. Even with limited testing, however, numbers continue to rise and some experts think they may not peak until November. And, although Bali has set a goal of opening to tourists on the auspicious date of 11 September, word is that the Covid referral hospitals are already full.

The desire to reopen is understandable. Tourism is the main driver of Bali’s economy and most guides, hotel staff and the like haven’t worked since March and are reliant on charity or family farms for food; lawyers, web developers, estate agents and their ilk are finding invoices unpaid and the work tap running dry. But it’s hard to see which countries are going to accept inbound flights from Indonesia, let alone add the nation to the safe list that lets travellers get insurance.

One of the few elements that is clear is that the pandemic will reshape the way we travel. Unless and until there’s an effective vaccine and reliable cure, the nomadic way of living – crisscrossing borders with merry abandon – is over. (It’s likely that many borders will remain tight even if this current pandemic is resolved.) Expatriate lives, always predicated on the idea that, if trouble or illness strikes, you can head home, look markedly less appealing now that working overseas might mean missing a parent’s funeral. Flights are going to be more expensive, more complicated, more risky and less pleasant than ever before.

And, from my perspective, the more lockdown opens up, the more obvious it becomes that I’m in limbo. I remember thinking, back in March, that I’d cycle the EV6, from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, once the pandemic was over. But I have no idea how long that will be: one year? Two years? Three or more? Are we basically in August 1914, believing it will all be over by Christmas? Will the economic collapse start to resolve in two years? Ten? Never? I don’t have a straight answer when I’m asked when I’m going back to Bali; I don’t have a straight answer when I’m asked how long I’ll be here.

The economy is shedding jobs like dandruff even with the government paying the wages of over a quarter of the workforce.

It’s the uncertainty that makes this new phase of the pandemic so challenging. During the hard lockdown, which for less vulnerable people in the UK meant leaving the house only for essential shopping, essential work and one round of exercise a day, the only thing to worry about was maintaining a routine and hanging onto sanity.

It felt like a challenge, to make this quality time count, to demonstrate one’s Blitz spirit, to keep calm and carry on. I didn’t bake any bread, but Zach baked cakes; I invested in a tapestry kit (currently approximately 80% completed); I started plotting out a novel (tbc); we created routines and, generally, made the most of an exceptional situation. It felt, in an odd way, like a bonus, to have time with a young man who’d otherwise be off doing his own thing.

Facing down the new normal, however, it becomes more obvious what we’ve lost. Lockdown was a few weeks. This could last many months, or even years.

My personal economic anxiety is intense – my income’s fallen off a cliff and the Bali lease I’d considered an asset now feels more like a liability, as two families now rely on it for income. Commercial writing is one of the first things businesses cut in any economic downturn and this unprecedented downturn is accelerating a range of longer-term trends, from telemedicine to the death of newspapers.

More generally, it feels as though we’re looking down the barrel of another Great Depression, with Britain particularly in the firing line. The economy is shedding jobs like dandruff even with the government paying the wages of over a quarter of the workforce; our idiot leaders are ploughing full steam ahead towards a no-deal Brexit at the end of the year, quite possibly during a second wave of Covid; the stock market is acting like it’s on crack; and the world’s largest economy is in the hands of a man who finds identifying a picture of an elephant a meaningful intellectual challenge.

I’m anxious about the second Covid wave hitting here in winter: during Spanish flu, it was the second wave that was most lethal. I’m anxious about being stuck here for winter, but I’m also anxious about being stranded thousands of miles away from my son (and my parents) during a once-in-a-century plague. I’m anxious about Zach’s future. And, perhaps most immediately, I really don’t like the new normal.

The new normal combines uncertainty over events you’d prefer to be set in stone with the need to prebook and militarily organize activities you’d rather do on impulse.

Now, I don’t want to come on like one of those fine American fillies throwing tantrums in the dentists or the grocery aisle, but I do find wearing a mask puts a damper on proceedings. Obviously, it’s the only socially conscious thing to do and a public health necessity. But one’s own recycled breath is never the sweetest; it’s depressing donning a reminder of the plague whenever you leave the house; and a mask is not particularly comfortable on a hot day.

Further, I’ve never been a fan of queuing and queuing for the supermarket is just plain depressing. There seems little point in shopping for clothes when you can’t try them on. I could really do with seeing a dentist but teeth cleaning and fillings are not on offer due to a lack of PPE. Gyms and yoga studios, replete as they are with people breathing heavily in a confined space, seem like a recipe for infection and, while I’m pleased that bars and restaurants are opening up, I need to watch both my pennies and the plague.

While I appreciate my privilege, compared to people with chronic health conditions, folk going hungry, folk without a job, folk who have lost loved ones, I deeply miss the ability to live in a freeform, fluid way. The new normal combines uncertainty over events you’d prefer to be set in stone (will my parents’ golden wedding in Italy be a go? Will Zach start university as planned?) with the need to prebook and militarily organize activities you’d rather do on impulse.

I’ve lived with this toxic combination of uncertainty about the future and restrictions on the present since February and I only wish I had a crystal ball to confirm when it will end. With Hong Kong going through a third wave, American hospitals beginning to overflow, parts of Catalonia in lockdown and global infection numbers continuing to accelerate, it feels that we are closer to the beginning than the end.

***

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The post Easing Lockdown Is the Hardest Part of This Pandemic appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Naturally, flying came up. When you write about travel, you see, you don’t just tend to fly a lot. You tend to encourage others to take flights. Often, many, many flights. And the performative greenness of composting, shunning air-conditioning, reducing meat consumption, school striking etc pales into comparison if your work involves writing copy and articles that sell travel by plane.

You probably know the maths. We all do. One return flight, even a short-haul flight, generates more carbon dioxide than the average citizen of some countries produces in a year. And, in England at least, 1% of fliers take almost 20% of international flights, while the top 10% of fliers take more than half of all flights.

The more I thought about it, the more the role of “writing about travel” fell into the category of something I’d rather not explain to any future grandchildren as they confronted a climate-ravaged wasteland besieged by refugees from the uninhabitable tropics. Organised tours with day trips by plane – often when perfectly good trains are available? Weekends away with a flight at either end? Stories for inflights, constructed with the specific goal of selling yet more flights? All this with almost every nation in the world set to miss its (already inadequate) 2030 climate goals?

Travel writing seemed almost as hard to justify as writing for the fossil fuel industries (something I have also done). I concluded that I’d give up short-haul flying and work towards a lifestyle that excluded long-haul, give up copywriting for egregiously flight-heavy travel, start to gradually move towards doing more environmental writing, and start to talk about this particular elephant in the room on this blog….

Then Covid happened. International borders shut down and airports became dead zones. The skies magically cleared. Nobody was going anywhere (or hiring anyone to write copy or journalism!), so smug blog posts on the joys of train travel within Europe felt as redundant as booking a cruise aboard a plague ship.

But slowly, flights are starting up again. Even as we face down a climate crisis that could lead to as much as 8° C (12.5º F) warming and will most likely lead to almost half of that, according to David Wallace-Wells’ excellent The Uninhabitable Earth, airlines are pleading for, and often receiving, government bailouts.

It’s difficult to emphasise how utterly batshit this is. Aviation was a rapidly growing sector, both in terms of passenger numbers and in terms of emissions. Currently, insane subsidies mean that it’s often, in the developed West, cheaper to travel by plane than by train. In any sensible world, trains would be subsidised and flying heavily taxed (perhaps, as the Greens suggest, with a tiered levy that hits frequent flyers hard and leaves the annual holiday or trip of a lifetime largely untaxed). Social distancing, which seems set to be the new normal for some time at least, is easier and more climate-friendly on trains than on planes.

Now is the perfect time to let the aviation sector go the way it needs to go in climate terms – and not just by refusing government bailouts to tax exile billionaires. If there’s one thing working from home should have taught us, it’s that a lot of business travel is a waste of time and carbon. Flying is even less pleasant than it was, with bare bones and often socially distanced service followed, in many countries, by compulsory two-week quarantine, with or without Covid testing.

I can’t, yet, entirely give up flying: Like lots of people around the world I have family in one country and a home in another (Covid depending, of course). But I’m working towards it and I am flying less. Because if you’re campaigning on the streets for climate action but taking 20 flights a year, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

A lot of us talk, now, about a green recovery from Covid, and a Green New Deal. People who can afford to fly already use much, much more than their share of the planet’s resources – even more so in the developed west. Few of us are comfortable engaging with the behaviour changes we’ll need to make, whether that’s wearing layers in winter and switching off AC in summer, reducing meat consumption, mending clothes, cutting out flying, reducing our internet use, buying less, or accepting slower delivery times. (And, no, reducing plastic use doesn’t count: it’s great for the oceans but in many cases “sustainable” alternatives use more energy and resources than a single-use plastic bag.)

Flying will likely need to revert to where it was in the 1980s, when most of the rich world flew once a year for their summer hols, if that, and the majority of the world’s population never flew at all. There will need to be heavy investment in trains and ferries (including making ferries greener), at national and transnational levels. And, just as across other industries rendered obsolete, this will entail job losses, business failures, pivoting, adjusting and retraining.

Even without trying to rectify global climate injustice, this isn’t going to be easy. It seems unlikely that an increasingly fragmented, nationalist world will manage the necessary concerted action. And feedback loops will make matters worse. Last time Zach visited Australia, his inter-city trains were cancelled because bushfires had warped the rails, and the self-same bushfires made the roads too dangerous for rail replacement services to run. No prizes for guessing what caused the bushfires, and his short-haul flight will only have made things worse.

But there are things all of us can do. Plan our travel in long blocks, rather than as weekends, and make shorter trips by land or ocean transport only; pay the extra to travel by train (or book well in advance while tickets are still cheap); go overland wherever feasible; and query whether that face-to-face work meeting is really necessary or can be done by Zoom. Because if we’re going to exit Covid in the right direction — rather than ramping up fossil fuel use in the face of climate doom — we can’t go back to the way we were. We need to travel, and to live, a very different way.

The post Let’s Not All Start Flying Again appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

A lot has happened since I last posted, and most of my draft posts have been overtaken by events almost as catastrophically as the game show host our friends across the water so wisely elected in 2016.

The one about how marvellously quiet European cities are in February and how blissful it is to travel in the off season hasn’t aged well; the one about Zach getting into Oxford (yes, THAT Oxford, and, yes, we do now have a definitive answer to the question: ‘Does travelling the world for four years necessarily fuck up your academic future?’) requires a rejig; much of my lovely Bali content is dead in the water (who could have imagined that a public health strategy centred on lying and the power of prayer could have such catastrophic results apart from, well, everyone?!); and let’s just say that interest in home exchanges is lower now than it was when the banks weren’t wiping down the cashpoints with sanitiser every two hours.

I must, however, observe that long-term travel and a “career” in freelance writing have proved excellent preparation for the world of lockdown, apart from the peripheral matter of earning enough to feed oneself, that is, and surely only someone entirely dissociated from the love of their craft would dare to quibble over a little thing like that.

Here Zach and I are in a small town in rural Norfolk (loooong story, but to précis: He was here, I was in Dubrovnik, Ethiopia with my spritely yet definitely boomer parents seemed like a very bad idea, the apartment was already paid for, and, well, here we are…) – and there we go, my syntax, like the fake-tousled fake-clever Etoxonian handjob that waddled into Number 10 a mere few months back, has completely lost control and is off on indefinite sick leave.

Sorry, cheap gag! But, seriously, years of hellish third-world bus journeys (such as the time we spent 36 hours stuck behind a broken tree in rural Borneo), ferry journeys (such as the 24-hour vomit comet to Flores), and even motorbike journeys (such as the time I tried to get us both to Papua from Bali on a Vario and made it all the way to Timor Leste, yes, yes, I KNOW) have taught us to exercise patience in close proximity, roll with the punches, and generally adapt to radically changed circumstances the moment they appear (or, in this case, before).

And changed they are. I made the fatal error of forming plans for this year, life bit me firmly on the arse, and quite frankly I won’t be bothering with that again.

Seeing two fixed points gleaming on the September horizon like the North Star – my parents’ Golden Wedding in, umm, Italy, and Zach’s impending start of university, still TBC – I booked a tonne of stuff. Having the foresight to identify a recessionary risk (although I assumed that to be nationalist idiots rather than the fucking plague), I gamed out a genius plan, which basically involved retreating to Bali to ride out the economic storm and using the house to travel via home exchanges, and, yeah, that’s aged about as well as all my draft blog posts, although our two months pootling around Europe in fancy apartments was rather splendid.

But I digress. I realise we’re all basically living on the internet now. Every conversation I have, due to the fact that nobody is doing anything, is basically social media, right down to the cat video discussions and baby interrupting videos discussions and the man who showed his arse on a conference call video discussion and the “Is Joe Wicks unusually sweaty or just being nice?” discussion (if mercifully, although we ARE only a week in to lockdown, free of the five-day knockdown drag-out bitch fights over ropily sourced trivia). Time has warped into some strange weird meaningless loop — although if you have a restaurant you love or neighbourhood bar you adore that’s doing takeaway, I recommend ordering in on Friday night to give the week some structure. And it’s really not at all clear what’s real, what’s fake, who’s lying, who’s mistaken, who’s deliberately avoiding knowing, and who’s just really fucking stupid.

Anywise, I have digressed enough for now. Since in these difficult times I am ALL about the public service and have sweet fuckall to distract me from writing, I’d like to know what sort of content you — if there are any “yous” still out there! — would like to see from me. I want to write a service piece about home schooling at some point (but may do that for someone who will pay me first); I will write about lockdown, because that’s where we are; but would you also like some nice escapist content from our recent jolly around Europe? We went to so many lovely places that I’d be happy to share, even if it now feels like postcards from another planet.

Drop me a comment and let me know. And, most importantly, stay safe, stay well, and look after your loved ones, your neighbours, your old folks and your immuno-compromised.

The post Welcome to Lockdown appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

I’ve lost weeks of my life to Game of Thrones. Twice over, in fact. Once, when I discovered the books, in Harbin, China, at a time of year when temperatures routinely drop to -30 (that’s -22 of your American Fahrenheit) and few things are as appealing as retreating under the duvet in an apartment superheated by Soviet-style communal coal-powered boilers and mainlining several thousand pages of good old-fashioned storytelling.

Then a second time, when I finally braced myself to watch the TV series, having remained adamant it couldn’t possibly be as good as the original. And, perhaps in more moderate doses, a third time, after I persuaded my spawn into watching the TV series with me. Between that and reading the reviews, the pre-match analyses, the shameless speculation on sites such as Winter Is Coming, and even lists of the real world Game of Thrones shooting locations, plus writing a few stories on the topic, I must have spent several hundred happy hours immersed in the Seven Kingdoms. And, yes, I could probably have learnt a new language in that time. Your point is?

Anywise, when the decision was made to wrap the entire thing up in six episodes of season eight – long after the series overshot George R R Martin’s books – I was on tenterhooks. It’s not easy, to put it mildly, to land as many disparate threads and geographies as the writers were wrangling. Whole hosts of awkward meetings and greetings – Daenerys with Sam, whose father and brother she exterminated with dragonfire, Jaime with Bran, last encountered during that unfortunate defenestration in Season 1 – had to be negotiated. Long-lost characters such as Melisandre had to be reintroduced to an audience less obsessive than me. And, as none other than Stephen King observed on Twitter, that shit is hard to do.

Now, since over 1.6 million absolute weapons have currently signed a petition to remake Game of Thrones Season Eight “with competent writers” – because, lord knows, only D-list amateurs get hired to write $15million-an-episode telly and any numpty with a keyboard could do WAY better – I appear to be in a minority.

But I thought the writers, and everyone involved, did quite phenomenally well. Not least in resisting the temptation to leave Cersei and Euron dominating a devastated Westeros. We owe them, in fact, an immense debt of gratitude for spending the big end of a decade creating so much epic entertainment.

People who are cross about Game of Thrones seem to fall into two main camps. There are the Night King fanboys, generally male, who wanted the culminating battle of good and evil to come at the end of the season, and good to triumph, preferably with a firm, manly and heterosexual hand. (Because if there’s one thing we’ve learnt from Game of Thrones to date, it’s that good can be relied on to triumph over evil…)

And then there are the millennial feminists, generally female, who feel that Daenerys’ character arc had not been clearly enough signalled by her crucifying and burning alive her opponents plus about ten bazillion references to the family tendency to insanity and her father’s attempts at mass murder by arson. And that, further, the loss of her identity as rightful ruler and her lover simultaneously, the slaying of two of her dragon “children” and both her longstanding counsellors before her eyes, and her betrayal by two other counsellors was not sufficiently a motivating cause for her to go absolutely apeshit with her nuclear dragon.

To both of these schools of thought, I say:

Let’s start with dear Dany, who, let’s face it, had she been male and a minger would have been rumbled ages ago. Game of Thrones is, for a show set in a version of medieval Europe, positively replete with strong female characters, many of whom (Sansa, Arya, even Yara) make it through to powerful, positive endings. (And, yes, yes, I know there were some hardass bitches in medieval Europe, but Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabella of Castile did rather stand out in a crowd.) To cry misogyny because Daenerys goes full White Saviour on dragonback is just plain misguided.

Relatedly, there is a distinction – and not a particularly delicate one – between “I wanted a happy ending for this character and didn’t get one” and “the writers don’t know how to construct a plausible story arc”.

Now to the Night King. Game of Thrones is not, primarily, a zombie flick. It’s about power and the corruption it entails, and many other things, but 28 Days Later it is not. Therefore the ice zombies needed to be eliminated. And, when a chick who has spent most of the last few seasons literally training with a succession of stone-cold killers, that is – for the crusty sock brigade who somehow missed those character developments – entirely, 100% appropriate.

Finally, as to King Bran, and the happily ever after Kings Council, with Tyrion, Ser Brienne, Ser Bronn of Highgarden, and the rest? Sure, the writers COULD have gone full literal, and ended on a bleak picture of starving Westerosi stumbling across a ravaged, wintry landscape full of rapey Dothraki, hungry eunuchs, leaderless northerners and, of course, one very, very cross dragon. But, let’s be honest now, I don’t think any of us would have liked that very much. I thought flashing forward to a happily ever after ending – not incidentally justifying Bran’s ongoing and rather irritating presence in the series – was about the only option to tie up those dangling loose ends.

And, yes, I am waiting with bated breath to see how GRRM brings his own ending in. He is currently promising his long-awaited sixth book in the series, The Winds of Winter (and, god, no I haven’t read the prequels – The Silmarillion is exhibit A here as ever), as early as July next year. And perhaps, now the TV series is done and dusted, that will happen. We can dream, right?

The post Welp, I Thought Game of Thrones Ended Just About As Well As It Could Have Done appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

The nine-year-old is now 18, and within months of graduating high school. Next stop? A year out (some of it in China), then university, almost certainly in the UK for PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics). I am surprised to find that I’m closing in on 45, and that we’ve been in Bali for more than five years.

Both midlife – and, let’s face it, I’m unlikely to live past 90 – and spawn taking flight are pretty liminal life stages. Neither are bad things. I look forward to seeing Zach safely launched, although I’m well aware that, at least for folk of privilege, adolescence now officially extends to around age 24, so this is just another stage in the parenting journey. And I don’t feel or look as old as I might have thought I would, had I ever thought about what 45 looked like.

My brother, however, was relatively recently diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, which is one of those things that turns lives upside down. It’s his story to tell – he writes about his life with autism and, now, with both autism and cancer at Aspi.Blog – but it has very much carved a dividing line through the lives of others, too, shearing the last few months neatly into “before cancer”, when one lived a care-free existence replete with personal and professional activity, and “after cancer”, when one, well, didn’t.

A friend, who lost his best friend to cancer in his 30s, said that since then he and his wife have chunked their lives into 3-year goals, so that at any given point they’re working towards the next objective. I don’t think I can be quite that structured in finding positives from someone else’s cancer journey, but I have formulated a broad-brush five-year vision, and I’m looking to set myself goals that nurture that bigger picture every month. (Why vague? Partly because the geography is going to relate to Zach’s life choices.)

So, yes, this is, in essence, a New Year’s resolution post. In February. And, yes, you have my permission to stop reading.

***

Have they gone now? Whew.

One set of goals is financial. I’m not going to share specifics here, but the global economic boom isn’t going to last forever (far from it), and I’m not nature’s most provident person (VERY far from it), so I’m working on a series of targets, 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month, chunked monthly.

Another goal is to be more present for Zach. Cancer brought me to the UK for a slice of last year and juggling work, travel, family and cancer wards didn’t seem to leave a lot of space for anything else (and, yes, I tried to do more – friends, culture, socialising – and, in the end, I spent the first week of January flat on my back exhausted). So in addition to being physically present, I’m working on being actively present: cooking, putting phones in jail over meals, making the time to chat not only over dinner but when he comes in from school, actively doing stuff together (when his own friendships and relationship permit), and generally being mindful. I’m also being tidier. (That’s less a goal per se than a means of feeling both maternal and in control.)

Beyond those two overarching goals, the first goal I’m chasing is weight loss. I read that New Year’s resolutions are best pursued one at a time, which made sense to me, so, while I’ve got a stack of stuff I want to work on, I’m starting with weight loss. When I weighed myself towards the start of January, I was over 80kg (that’s more than 12.5 stone, or 176lb), which is… a lot.

My target weight is 65kg (which is still a bit over 10 stone, or 140lb), largely because it’s comfortably within a healthy BMI, and it’s a plausible-sounding number, and from over 80kg to 65kg sounds like a good round number whether you’re thinking in kilos or stone. But I’m not hung up on the number. I never really weighed myself until I got fat. So if I get there and don’t like the way I look, I’ll drop a bit more. If I’m happy with my body before I get there, I’ll stop.

The goal is two-fold. The primary one is to be happy in my own skin again – it’s really no fun having your stomach get in the way when you bend over to reach for things or cringing each time you look in the mirror while you shower, and, yes, thin privilege is real and I want mine back. The secondary one is health: fitness, longevity, etc.

I’ve never been particularly fussed about my body, but that’s because it’s always done roughly what I wanted it to do, and from here on in, that gets a lot harder.

***

For what it’s worth, there’s no great mystery to the weight gain. I finally managed to give up smoking in October 2016; I’ve had several rounds of medication for minor issues with weight-gain as an associated side-effect; I drink too much; and, despite being in my mid-40s, I persist in eating like I’m 22. Plus I did a bunch of travel. Jet lag is not conducive to a healthy diet and whenever I go to the UK, especially in winter, I stuff my fat face with childhood-era carbs, from salt and vinegar crisps to family-size bags of sweets to Yorkshire puds, that you just can’t get out here.

I am beginning to suspect there’s no great secret to weight loss, either: you simply need to consume fewer calories than you use and (and this is the hard part), stick with it. You also need to accept that, once your 40s hit, you can no longer eat what you feel like eating when you feel like eating: your relationship to food needs to fundamentally change. Time will tell if I’m there yet.

Anywise, I’m using an app called Noom, which counts your calories, measures your exercise calories, and gives you a calorie budget: you get extra food calories if you exercise, but not all the calories you use. (It also wants me to do 10,000 steps a day, but, while there’s a yoga studio approximately every 500 metres around here, pavements are in distinctly short supply.)

In January, I cut out booze (for Dry January, a British institution), stuck to 1200 calories a day (or thereabouts… I didn’t weigh my food because, well, who DOES that?!), started weighing myself daily, and started exercising (not all on the same day). I lost a solid 4kg, and can see the impact on my beer-gut, my bum and – oh joy of joys! – my double chin already. Along the way, I’ve rediscovered the joy of yoga and am feeling fitter, stronger, bendier and more relaxed.

For February, the plan is that I will have two more relaxed days every week, when I can drink alcohol and consume 800 calories more than the app says I can (fun tip: swim for a couple of hours and it gives you LOADS of calories). I’m also upping my exercise, adding two brutal hot Pilates sessions a week to my more leisurely melange of yoga, swimming (breaststroke), treadmill (walking) and weight training (desultory). It’s early days, but I seem to be still losing weight, albeit more slowly, and am feeling a lot less martyred than I was in Dry January.

***

In other 2019 news… I’m hoping to tend this blog a little more than I have done over the last couple of years. I’m not sure what that’s going to look like, as yet, and you’d be unwise to hold your breath awaiting updates, but I hope – particularly for those vanishing few who’ve been along for the ride over the last near-decade(!) – it will be fun both to read and to write.

The post 2019: the Year of Self-Improvement appeared first on EscapeArtistes.