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Miles & Musings

The other half of a curious life, gathered in one place. Travel that went further than planned, notes from family life, words worth keeping, and whatever caught the eye when no agenda was watching. Some of it is here purely for the pleasure of telling it, and some turned out to mean more than I expected. Wander through in any order. That is rather the spirit of it.

A hand holding a glass of cutting chai on a Mumbai street, with traffic and an auto rickshaw behind.

Cutting Chai

A measure that became the product. Cutting chai takes away half the tea and keeps every other part, which is a trick most of us spend a working life failing to manage.
A single white rose placed in the engraved letters of a name on the bronze parapet at the 9/11 Memorial in New York

The Rose Was Still There
Six smooth polished walnut stones stacked into a balanced cairn on a pale marble surface.

The Pink Book

My father gave me Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was young, and said I would be a man when I understood it. I took that literally. I failed the test, year after year.
An empty primary school classroom with wooden desks and a long blackboard. The board carries place value sums, a dictation list of Southeast Asian place names, science and social studies words, and an attendance count of twenty pupils.

They Placed Me. A Teachers Day Note.

A subject is a door. Open one for a ten year old and you have not handed over a topic, you have handed over a world, and nobody ever closes it again. A note on Teachers Day, where it came from, and three teachers who placed me somewhere I had not thought to stand.
Himalayan peaks in Nepal catching the first light of sunrise while the valleys below remain dark

A Mountain Lets Go

A glacier let go with no rain and no warning. I have photographs from Nepal on an old hard disk and there are no people in any of them. On grief that arrives from four thousand kilometres away, and what you do with it when there is no reason to be found.
Sunrise seen from an aircraft window, the sun breaking through a low band of cloud above a grey horizon.

The Cracks Are Where the Light Gets In

Where did last week crack? It is a better starting question than it sounds, and it takes about ten minutes.
The Sheltering programme, kept from that night in Brisbane.

We Are One

Three separate works, poured into one evening. A show about shelter that paused so a room of strangers could become one. Notes from Bangarra's Sheltering, and the quiet line running from Meanjin to Madurai.
Opening take-off photo: Aerial view of Mumbai from a climbing plane, city grid and coastline below

Neverland

Mumbai is chaos. From a climbing plane, it behaves. A post about take-offs, landings, monsoon blue roofs, and a song about a boy who did not want to land. (And a new website?)
An empty cricket ground at dusk, white picket fence in the foreground, floodlights and city skyline behind

The Undefeated

Ajinkya Rahane's name means "the one who cannot be defeated". He retired this week by calmly counting his defeats, which made me wonder what defeat actually is, and whether he ever truly met it.
A tabby and white cat resting on a person's shoulder, looking straight at the camera

Cats the Musical in Mumbai, and the Poet Who Started It

The only real cat in this blog post is the one above. The rest were people pretending to be one. All of it built from the silly cat verse of a poet who never knew what it would become.
A wooden pallanguli board with tamarind seeds in carved hollows, placed on a dark desk.

The School of the Open Street

A friend keeps a pallanguli board on her desk. Between meetings, she moves tamarind seeds from pit to pit. As I watched her do this, and something from decades ago walked in and sat down.
Street puppeteer Filip performing with marionette Mr. Filipo on a Saigon pavement outside the French Post Office, Ho Chi Minh City

No Strings Attached. The Puppeteer of Ho Chi Minh City

A puppet show on a Ho Chi Minh City pavement. A Polish performer with a lot on his mind. And a conversation that stayed with me long after the strings were packed away.
A single white rose placed in the engraved letters of a name on the bronze parapet at the 9/11 Memorial in New York

The Rose Was Still There
The Sheltering programme, kept from that night in Brisbane.

We Are One

Three separate works, poured into one evening. A show about shelter that paused so a room of strangers could become one. Notes from Bangarra's Sheltering, and the quiet line running from Meanjin to Madurai.
Street puppeteer Filip performing with marionette Mr. Filipo on a Saigon pavement outside the French Post Office, Ho Chi Minh City

No Strings Attached. The Puppeteer of Ho Chi Minh City

A puppet show on a Ho Chi Minh City pavement. A Polish performer with a lot on his mind. And a conversation that stayed with me long after the strings were packed away.
A baggage handler in an orange shirt arranges suitcases on the carousel at Delhi's Terminal 3

The Airport That Never Loses Your Bag

A process can be copied. A checklist can be shared. But the thing that makes someone arrange a stranger's bag at 4am, thirty years in, with nobody watching and no applause coming, that cannot be transferred in a training manual. It has to be believed. One airport understood this. The results speak for themselves.
Coffee in a grey ceramic cup beside an iPad showing a draft in progress, on a wooden café table

A Short Education in Coffee (Or: How a Simple Drink Taught Me I Knew Nothing)

From filter kaapi in a steel tumbler to Kopi Luwak in Bali, coffee turned out to be the most humbling education I never signed up for. Avvaiyar, the ancient Tamil poetess saw this coming. I did not.

The Weight of Forever

I stood there and could not move. Hundreds of thousands of locks. Every size. Every colour. Each one carrying two names and one enormous hope. That this would last. That nothing would change.

The Admiral That Embarrassed an Empire

He controlled the entire Maharashtra coastline from Sawantwadi to Mumbai. Every ship paid a levy called jakat. Those that refused lost the ship. He also founded Alibaug and issued his own silver currency, the Alibagi rupaiya. The ferry to his island leaves from the town he built.

The Bowl That Holds Everything

Painted black. Hollowed from a Mexican fruit shell. Travelled oceans. Then settled quietly into temple life, as if it had always been there. Accumulating wisdom through the ages when all I thought it collected was coins.

Tourist, Go Home

A wall in Barcelona said exactly what it meant. On travel, humility, and whose home you're actually standing in.

Cu Chi: What the Ground Remembers

He arranges the leaves over the hatch. In seconds, the entrance is gone. This, he says, is how an army disappeared.

An Unforgettable Wall Street Queue

I expected queues for coffee and museums in New York. I didn’t expect one behind a bull, or for it to stay with me long after I left.

The Fort That Forgot Its Kingdom

Thick walls, stubborn stones, and a silence that carries the weight of centuries.
A hand holding a glass of cutting chai on a Mumbai street, with traffic and an auto rickshaw behind.

Cutting Chai

A measure that became the product. Cutting chai takes away half the tea and keeps every other part, which is a trick most of us spend a working life failing to manage.
Six smooth polished walnut stones stacked into a balanced cairn on a pale marble surface.

The Pink Book

My father gave me Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was young, and said I would be a man when I understood it. I took that literally. I failed the test, year after year.
An empty primary school classroom with wooden desks and a long blackboard. The board carries place value sums, a dictation list of Southeast Asian place names, science and social studies words, and an attendance count of twenty pupils.

They Placed Me. A Teachers Day Note.

A subject is a door. Open one for a ten year old and you have not handed over a topic, you have handed over a world, and nobody ever closes it again. A note on Teachers Day, where it came from, and three teachers who placed me somewhere I had not thought to stand.
Himalayan peaks in Nepal catching the first light of sunrise while the valleys below remain dark

A Mountain Lets Go

A glacier let go with no rain and no warning. I have photographs from Nepal on an old hard disk and there are no people in any of them. On grief that arrives from four thousand kilometres away, and what you do with it when there is no reason to be found.
Sunrise seen from an aircraft window, the sun breaking through a low band of cloud above a grey horizon.

The Cracks Are Where the Light Gets In

Where did last week crack? It is a better starting question than it sounds, and it takes about ten minutes.
Opening take-off photo: Aerial view of Mumbai from a climbing plane, city grid and coastline below

Neverland

Mumbai is chaos. From a climbing plane, it behaves. A post about take-offs, landings, monsoon blue roofs, and a song about a boy who did not want to land. (And a new website?)
An empty cricket ground at dusk, white picket fence in the foreground, floodlights and city skyline behind

The Undefeated

Ajinkya Rahane's name means "the one who cannot be defeated". He retired this week by calmly counting his defeats, which made me wonder what defeat actually is, and whether he ever truly met it.
A tabby and white cat resting on a person's shoulder, looking straight at the camera

Cats the Musical in Mumbai, and the Poet Who Started It

The only real cat in this blog post is the one above. The rest were people pretending to be one. All of it built from the silly cat verse of a poet who never knew what it would become.
A wooden pallanguli board with tamarind seeds in carved hollows, placed on a dark desk.

The School of the Open Street

A friend keeps a pallanguli board on her desk. Between meetings, she moves tamarind seeds from pit to pit. As I watched her do this, and something from decades ago walked in and sat down.
Crispy masala dosa served on a banana leaf with tomato and coconut chutney

The World Ranked Our Dosa. We Have Feelings.

Masala dosa just made it to sixth on a global pancake list. Sixth. In a country where 99.99 out of hundred makes parents wail in despair. But that is not why I am unsettled. It is the list itself that is the problem.
A baby cot in an emptying room during renovation — on letting go of things that hold too much memory

The Art of Letting Go of Things (When Things Won’t Let Go of You)

A dining table, a Texas ticket, a bright red perfume box. On why letting go of things is harder than acquiring them, and what it quietly costs us.
Green kinetic sand creature with googly eyes and antennae, looking mildly bewildered

What your IQ says about you. And what it doesn’t.

IQ began as a tool to help children. Alfred Binet did not design it to be lobbed across a press briefing. And yet, here we are.