Link Salad for 26 February Today marks two cultural anchors that make 26 February unusually fertile ground for a link salad. Taxi Driver (set in New York) was released on 26 February 1976. Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables, (set in Paris) was born on 26 February 1802. Yesterday’s link salad spread outward into a […]
This is the first blog post about link salads, which will provisionally sit on their own blog at some point in the not too distant future. A link salad is a structured stream of consciousness. It starts from a fixed anchor — usually a date — and follows associations across people, places, events, songs, films, […]
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Exoticism is often talked about as if it were an objective quality. Some places are “exotic”; others aren’t. But in practice, exotic appeal is relative — shaped as much by where you live as by where you travel. Nowhere is this clearer than when you compare the Canary Islands with Hawaii. Distance changes everything From […]
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How are pages kept updated? Behind Car or No Car sits a long-running fascination with how cities actually work. That curiosity goes back nearly 50 years and has been shaped by observing how people move through places, how transport networks evolve, and how urban form affects everyday life. Layered on top of that is more […]
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One of the most useful distinctions in our ratings is between what most people do and what we think you should do. These two scores often line up closely, which is reassuring: it suggests that traveller behaviour, local infrastructure, and the car-hire market are broadly in sync. Abu Dhabi, for example, scores 7 for what […]
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Featured image: the Great Pagoda rising above the trees at Kew Gardens, London. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, usually known simply as Kew Gardens 🌳, is one of those rare places where science 🔬, beauty 🌺, and history 🏛️ quietly coexist. Sitting beside a gentle bend in the Thames 🚣♂️ in southwest London, Kew is not […]
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Featured image: The bleak alpine landscape of Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger deep in a May afternoon, with the frozen waters of Bachalpsee in the foreground. The absence of people and the muted tones give the image an almost monochrome quality, despite being a colour photograph. In mid-May 2007, I spent a few days in Interlaken, […]
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Featured image: Sunset looking back towards Mallaig, with the low evening light dictating the mood and quiet power of the scene. 🌅 All photographs were taken using the Sigma DP1 with a 19mm lens, capturing natural colour, texture, and atmosphere with minimal interference. 📷 Tucked away on the rugged Knoydart peninsula, the tiny village of […]
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Featured image: A Spanish AVE train at Seville Santa Justa station. …And Why the UK Struggles Spain now operates the most extensive high-speed rail network in Europe, a transformation achieved in just a few decades. It stands in sharp contrast to the UK, where completing even one major north–south high-speed line remains elusive. Much of […]
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When snow brings transport systems elsewhere to a halt, Swiss mountain railways keep running — calmly, predictably, and almost boringly on time. This isn’t luck, and it isn’t just “Swiss efficiency” as a cliché. It’s the result of hard geography forcing honest engineering, backed by culture, governance, and long-term thinking. Here’s why Alpine railways in […]
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