Stories

As I packed up my blanket, still flying high from the previous hour and a half of amazing music, I realised something: I hadn’t taken any photos of the performers. In fact, I thought, I hadn’t taken many photos at all over the past three days at Folk Fest. I had brought all of my camera equipment, made sure every battery was charged, every lens cleaned, and yet… I had barely thought to take my camera out of its bag.

2017 held a lot of great moments for me, but it also held a few not-so-great moments, too. Here is the This Battered Suitcase 2017 review: the good, the bad, and the oh so very ugly.

This is how your heart breaks: slowly and deliberately, and then all at once. A story about falling in and out of love.

The last time I saw you, we hugged goodbye at the airport. It was cold outside, a dark November morning. The air felt sharp in my lungs, like if I breathed in…

The North Coast 500, Scotland Things have been quiet on this blog and its social media lately. I’ve been busily packing up my entire life, meticulously wrapping all of my belongings in bubble…

I met Ai almost exactly one year after I’d moved to Japan. I’m getting ahead of myself, though – I need to go back to the beginning.

In my early 20s, I was addicted to travelling; I had perpetually itchy feet. Travelling had me in its grasp, my wanderlust an uncontrolled entity. And like most addictions, I needed more money to sustain it. At twenty-four years old and jobless, my savings fast running out, I needed to start making money to support my habit. It only made sense that I’d look for a job in a different country; it seemed, in my mind, to be killing two birds with one stone. Soon I was looking up international jobs, researching visas, investigating how much I’d need for the plane ticket. I then did what seemingly every other twenty-something English-speaker with a university degree but no idea how to use it does: I decided to teach English abroad. It was relatively easy to find a job online, and after an interview and a grammar test, it was confirmed. I was going to be a teacher in Japan.