On Jeremy Corbyn and Leadership

/ Dan Hackett / 3 Comments

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This post is not travelling related, but listen: shut up. This post is about politics, it is about ideologies, and it is about bravery.

The UK will have a general election on the 8th of June. Current polls have Labour some 20 points behind the Tories. If nothing changes in the next six weeks, Labour are set to take a pasting, Corbyn will be savaged, and a triumphant Right will cheer the fall of left wing politics across the Western world. Because, you know, the idea of affordable housing and fair pay for nurses is fucking nightmarish. Continue reading →

Drink, Play, Loathe: Day 3, Paris

/ Dan Hackett / 12 Comments

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Drink, Play, Loathe – Day 2, Paris

Woke up at 3am because Aish, one of the Canadian girls, was talking in her sleep. Her mumbles continued for some time, then grew into tossing and turning, then thrashing, until at 4am she swung her legs over the bunk, dropped onto the floor, and sleep-sprinted out of the room in her knickers. Her friend Sarah jumped up and grabbed her, then must have remembered not to wake a sleepwalker, and simply followed her out of the dorm. I shrugged and fell back asleep. Continue reading →

Drink, Play, Loathe: Day 1, Paris

/ Dan Hackett / 7 Comments

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It’s just after 7pm, and it’s been a strange sort of day. I feel like I’ve done a huge amount, and yet due to my exhaustion none of it feels real. I’ve been dreaming.

After waking in Berlin at 4am, I landed in France at 8.30 this morning and got the train into Paris. I got very confused and lost in the station, and finally arrived at my hostel around 10.45, and tried to check in. The girl looked at me like I was a half wit. Check in isn’t until 2, of course. I took my backpack and slunk off into the city. I decided the Louvre would be first. Continue reading →

Drink, Play, Loathe: The Trip

/ Dan Hackett / 2 Comments 
“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.” 

― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

So, I’ve been on a trip of Europe, and kept a diary all the while. If travelling is anything at all, it is unpredictable, and the trip I expected to have was, as is usually the case, radically different to the reality. Modern life is a series of spinning plates, and the more you age, the better you become at keeping them spinning. I am young, and youth is wonderful, but the trade off of so much freedom is that fairly regularly, largely due to my own gross incompetence at being alive, my plates come crashing down around me all at once, and I am left lying bruised and stupid beneath a heap of porcelain. Continue reading →

The Berlin Diaries – International Women’s Day

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If you’ve followed these rambling diaries at all, you’ll have seen a steady decline in my sanity over the past six months, from wide eyed new kid on the block to another paranoid, muttering hermit on the U Bahn.  When I arrived, all I saw was bright lights and endless glitter, and everything else was muted in the background, and I didn’t care to know anyway; but after half a year, those beautiful faces in the foreground melted away as if someone refocused my brain like a camera lens, and behind everything I saw so much that I didn’t like. In the depths of winter, my spirit shrank to smaller than it had ever been before in my life. I’d fallen out of love with the city, and the thought of seeing out the rest of the year here made me shudder. But, as I’m fond of saying, a lot can change in a day. And in Berlin, a lot can change in a minute. Continue reading →

The Station

/ Dan Hackett / 2 Comments

Hey,

I’ve not been writing much recently due to some reasonably large changes in my life. I got fired, I got hired, my girlfriend and I broke up, almost got back together, then broke up again, and I went on a lonely two week trip around Europe booked on a heartbroken whim. What on earth possessed me to book to go alone to Paris immediately after a break up, we will never know. March has been tough month. The word ‘tumultuous’ springs to mind. As does ‘shit’. The following article is probably the most honest I’ve ever written; I wrote the first draft a week ago and have been staring at it ever since, not daring to post it. Every writer out there waxes endlessly about the need for absolute honesty in writing, but in reality, it’s scary.  I don’t want to be judged unfairly, or laughed at. But we’re not on this earth to be timid, so here it is. Continue reading →