About

I should warn you upfront that I have a problem with obsession.

Not in a worrying way, I think. But when I get interested in something I tend to go all the way in. A trip I am planning will consume an unreasonable number of hours of research before I have packed a single thing. A musician I discover on a Tuesday will have produced a playlist by Thursday and a concert ticket by the weekend. Notebooks and pens I will not even get into here, though there is a whole section of this site dedicated to exactly that.

The upside of this, after many years, is that I have developed a reliable set of things I actually like. Not things I was told to like, or things that ranked well on a list. Things I found the hard way, mostly. There is a specific satisfaction in nailing a trip. Finding a restaurant nobody told you about. Landing on the exact right version of a thing you did not know you were looking for until you found it.

The other thing I have noticed is that review sites tend to make me feel worse rather than better. Travel magazines with their authoritative top tens. Restaurant aggregators where a place is simultaneously a four and a two depending on who had a bad night. Amazon, which I will not start on. They make more noise than sense and I end up more paralysed than when I started.

So this is my attempt at something different. Things I paid for and actually have an opinion about. You will not like everything here. You might like a few things. Or maybe you find one new thing you would not have tried otherwise. That is enough.

Your mileage may vary.