We Do Adventure

I had a long conversation about humanitarian aid with a co-worker today. It was about humanitarian aid but it touched on education, transport, housing, displacement, development...the list could go on. The seemingly endless list says less about our ability to stick to the point than it does about the complexities of helping people in difficult situations. When faced with so many variables, most of which you have little influence over – certainly none you control – it would be easy to admit defeat before even attempting anything. While neither of us seem predisposed to pre-emptive defeatism, as we look at where we go from here it’s fair to say we’re both grappling with the question: where do you start? You have to start with what you can do. Yes, there needs to be a big picture, a grand scheme perhaps, but those are never achieved overnight. But the picture must be of individuals, of names not numbers. Help must help them. Self-serving projects may make for great project reports but for...

The three L’s are the watchword for purchasing property but what about selecting a cinema? Those who follow all my digital output closely might have seen me talk recently about living six months in a city with no cinema. In the last week we were staying in Dubrovnik - one of Croatia’s leading coastal destinations. It’s a city steeped in history and, rain or shine, it never fails to be beautiful. The Old Town houses numerous museums and art galleries. However, these we overlooked upon the discovery of the cinema nestled as the end of the Stradun. Sure it wasn’t the size of those in London’s Leicester Square, perhaps it doesn’t impress like a night on Hollywood Boulevard – and, yes, the seats were hard, the screen small and the sound a little dodgy – but how many times can you say you’ve been to the cinema and walked out to be greeted by a view like this? We have – twice!

My average entry runs to about two-hundred and fifty words, so according to the old adage this entry should be about four times more informative than the norm! I have a friend who tried their best to bully me into learning to touch type. Sadly, I still type with two and a half fingers – a sorry confession, I know. Telling all the stories we could tell is hard given typing-time constraints. On occasion I stretch to sending a friend or two a couple of picture’s worth of text but even that is woefully inadequate. So here is a view we see most days – slightly enhanced for your enjoyment – your thousand words start here...

They say the sense of smell is, of all the senses, the strongest evoker of memories. Today mine was jogged as I filed down the bridge of a guitar. Since Friday I’ve set up five guitars in as many days. To the uninitiated this might seem like unnecessary fiddling but, while the results may not always be visible to the untrained eye, it can be the difference between and playable and an unplayable instrument. So this morning as I was vigorously scraping the bridge of an acoustic guitar across my rasp, working towards a much comfortable playing action, I caught a whiff of something I knew I’d smelt before. It was not a pleasant smell. The bridge is, or certainly was in this case, made of some sort of dense plastic. As I shaved away, little flakes were sticking all over more hands; static, and stubbornly refusing to be shifted. It was the rasping that was releasing the odour. Was it an industrial or biological connection? I called Ben over – was it a farm yard smell? He couldn’t place it. T...

Spring arrived, at least according to the calendar, at the weekend. The weather here has yet to really wake up to the fact however this morning we were thrown into an unplanned burst of spring cleaning. Our landlord called to say he wanted to collect money for rent and bills today – nothing unusual in that. Then he said people from his insurance company needed to take pictures. That, he assured me, is normal here. I’d never heard of it. We’ll have to trust him they’re not going to appear on some real estate website, advertising the apartment for sale or rent! (This is unlikely as such websites are not particularly common here.) The apartment was in no state to be photographed, at least not by anyone other than a scenes of crime officer, or perhaps environmental health. OK, so I exaggerate but it’s funny the mess you’re happy to live in when you know no-one is looking. I’d been restoring a guitar over the weekend, which made some mess. Various rehearsals and song writing exercises meant...

In a brief moment of down time on another busy Saturday I was idly surfing the internet when I stumbled across this: "An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered - an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." That is a slice of wisdom from GK Chesterton . I’ve had a mixed relationship with Chesterton. Father Brown annoyed me but I found A Man Called Thursday and, in particular, The Napoleon of Notting Hill fantastic reads. However I struggled to get into Orthodoxy, although when I finally finished it I think I understood. Obviously it was ‘adventure’ that grabbed my attention but it’s left me pondering the nature of ‘inconvenience’. What is inconvenient about living in Bosnia Herzegovina? Rightly considered the answer is, on the things that matter, very little. But then U2 announce a tour and you rue not living an hour from Wembley and ponder if it’s worth trying to get tickets for Zagreb – and face ten times the travel time! Wrongly considered it’s quit...

Coming soon is part 2 of this video. The one in which we reveal to all our readers outside Mostar just what colour the Gimnazija is being painted. Residents will have observed colour creeping down the side of the building. In the next week it'll make it's way across the front leaving this as possibly one of only a few video references of what the unpainted version looked like. If you haven't had a tip off and fancy a bit of fun why not guess at the colours and leave a comment below. My only clue is there are two of them - enjoy!