The Ryanwood bobs gently against the quayside wall of Peterhead harbour. At just 80-foot long, she is dwarfed on all sides by industrial fishing boats. The six-man crew, and that of her sister vessel, the Castlewood, are busy loading provisions. Food comes on board, as does water, as does ice.
Read MoreIn The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes an impulse that, at times of great emotional stress, communicates a being’s distance from their birthplace, triggering the longing to be there, wherever “there” is, when the chips are really down. On Earth that can’t be very far, he argues: around 16,000 miles at a push.
Read MoreI ring the bell. No-one answers. The leaflet in my hand tells me this grey, slate-covered building – a monastery since 1895 – is the Church of England’s “best-kept secret”. But I have come to Hampshire to unravel another secret: that of the cult of Jane Austen.
Read MoreSuicide was never far from Hunter S Thompson’s mind. It was the night before Christmas Eve, 1977. At his typewriter, in a room 28 floors above Fifth Avenue in New York, he imagined going out onto the terrace, leaping "200 yards out into the air”, and landing broken and bloodied in the Plaza Fountain below. “Nobody,” he wrote, “could follow that act.”
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