facttime

2021 was the year when I finally made it to one of the two speciality-coffee-and-pinball bars on my to-visit list: Tilt , in Birmingham, which I've since been to several more times, usually on my way to Wolves matches. But it has taken another year for me to get to the other one, Chief Coffee , even though its Chiswick location is a little closer to home. As usual, I blame the delay on the lack of convenient transport routes from my area of south-east London to much of west London and my District Line anxiety (am I on the right branch? Is the train actually going to stop at Turnham Green?). It was on another recent District Line journey (this one enforced by a broken Bakerloo Line) that I spotted an advert for a revival of Closer at the Lyric Hammersmith to mark the 25th anniversary of the excellent Patrick Marber play. I immediately booked tickets for a matinee and decided to seek pre-theatre caffeination at Chief Coffee. To my relief, the Tube did indeed stop at Turnham Green an...

I was sad to bid farewell to my old passport this week — not just because it was an EU one (*sob*) but also because the stamps inside remind me of the many great travel experiences I've enjoyed over the past decade. To highlight some of these wonderful memories, I decided to pick out one photo from each year, and boy was that hard! (I cheated because the header image features an 11th photo. Sorry!) And at the end of the post, you can find more details about my experience of renewing my UK passport during these incredibly hectic times. 2013 — Ziplining through the clouds in Monteverde, Costa Rica My friend and I spent two weeks exploring Costa Rica  back in 2013. Ziplining through the cloud forest on a 1km-long zipline in Monteverde was definitely one of the best moments of a trip filled with great beaches, beautiful forests and diverse wildlife. Visiting a coffee farm for the first time came a close second. 2014 — (What's the story) vermillion torii? Kyoto, Japan My whistlest...

It's time for the latest installment of my bimonthly series where I pick my favourite five books from among those I've read over the past two months. My tally for May and June was slightly down (mainly because there were a couple in there that — were I less of a completionist — may well have been DNFs), but I still read 17 books. I'm up to 59 at this mid-year point, which means I'm comfortably on track to meeting my goal of reading 100 books by the end of the year. Heading off on holiday soon? Perhaps you'll find inspiration in some of my picks, although I must confess that they aren't all that summery! There's also an honourable mention in the form of Chris ' The Flight Attendant ' Bohjalian's Old Hollywood meets East African safari thriller, The Lioness . It's been massively talked up on #bookstagram and as I made my first visit to East Africa this year, I was really looking forward to reading it. I loved the depictions of the Tanzanian la...