Annie sleeps like a walrus. That’s not to say she’s an inelegant sleeper — she isn’t, she sleeps in this weirdly prim manner like Dracula, on her back, face up, mouth closed. It’s just that she sleeps forever. Whenever we hang out we always go to bed at the same time, of course, but my body clock simply refuses to allow me through the morning. Annie, if undisturbed, will sleep for 16 hours. It was for this reason that, on our second day in Manchester, I spent around four hours lying awake in my bed, looking at memes on my phone, awaiting the moment my friend would rise from her crypt.
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AK ’23 | Dr Knobhead, I Presume?
First thing she did was ruffle my hair, that incorrigible Yankee dickhead. I’d been extra careful that morning to get it just right. Now I was a mop-end scarecrow once again, angel-pube loofa head. God damn. I’d been thinking about how cool my entrance would be all the way there: I’d sweep up beside her, unseen, and I’d mutter some obscure literary reference, some fantastic quippy masterclass in British understatement – but no. She ruffled my hair, and after a year apart the first thing that escaped my mouth was something like:
“Dick!”
Continue readingColombia | Homeward Bound
I spent three weeks in Cali, in total. I didn’t leave for home on the 5th of February as planned; for reasons I can’t be bothered to get into (I’m a knob), I moved my flight home back a week, to the 12th of February out of Bogota.
Continue readingColombia | Dancehall
I was nervous to visit Cali for a bunch of reasons.
Continue readingColombia | Darkness
When evening fell on our first day in the jungle, it was time for the night hike.
Continue readingColombia | Into The Jungle
Our little boat moored one hour upriver from Leticia. The opposite bank of the river is Peru, and that’s where we climbed ashore. From the boat, we had to climb a muddy series of ladders to get up the bank. Alain (the Goblin) told us this was because the river, in its eternal ebbs and flows, was currently eroding this bank and depositing the silt on the other side; one collapses, the other widens into a new sandbar. With heavy rains recently, each day new great chunks of the bank were crumbling into the river, taking with them entire trees, and eventually, people’s homes.
Continue readingColombia | Tales From The River
I was nervous when I woke up. I lay on my bunk and thought about the ten thousand things that might go awry in the jungle. Bites, parasites, broken bones, falling branches, plus a thousand other horrors I couldn’t even fully form drifted through my mind. When I’m scared I always tell myself the same thing: this is what an adventure feels like. This is part of it. You can never be sure of what will happen. Do it anyway.
Continue readingColombia | Nipping Across The Border
On my last day in Cartagena I was out having breakfast with my friend Elo in a square splashed with warm Caribbean colour. We were sitting in the sweltering shade outside a cafe, and had just finished our food when a young American man came and sat at the table beside us with a sigh.
Continue readingColombia | Swashbucklers
I arrived in Cartagena in the early afternoon. The outskirts of the city are tall white apartment buildings, a bit too Miami for me, but further in is the old town, surrounded by an ancient stone wall. My bus dropped me outside the walls, so in the afternoon heat I meandered between tall vacation apartment towers and beneath the great stone gate leading to the old town.
Continue readingColombia | A Mystery In The Sand
A hungover-looking Juan picked me up in the jeep after a shower and breakfast (rice, arepas, plantain) and we drove deeper into the desert. The first day of the tour was, to be sincere, a load of old dicks. The second day was much better. Well, better might not be the word. Mystifying is more like it.
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