The Metropolitan Police grades calls for service in three ways. I‑grade (Immediate, 15 mins), S‑grade (Significant, 1 hour), E‑grade (Extended, 24 hours). Each grade has its own risk but also a reputation amongst officers.

This is different to my usual writing but I hope it will be of interest to my readers. From 2020–2025 I had the chance to serve on a busy Met emergency response team in central London; this is how a shift felt, with all of our jargon and slang in bold on first mention.

This post is a tribute to the amazing work that the men and women of the Metropolitan Police do every single day and I hope they enjoy reading it.

06:58 - Briefing

A response shift in central London starts in a room that smells faintly of unwashed body armour and freshly cracked cans of Monster. A picture of the King is stuck to the wall with evidence tape. It’s 6:58 a.m. and Early Turn is about to begin. A young in service officer scrolls the briefing slides on a big screen: names and faces who’ve “come to notice”, addresses to keep in mind and in our pocket notebooks.

One of the Sergeants — a skipper — reads out the assignments while our Inspector — the Guv’nor — sits beside her. The Met patrols in pairs, and supervisors must navigate the politics (and the odd retired romance) that make some pairings impossible. I’m paired with a good friend and we give each other a nod across the room.

Briefings are theatre in miniature: a wry aside for the officer who as always slides in at the last minute, clip-on tie in hand; a rippling laugh at an ugly mugshot on the briefing; and a quiet word to the probationer too new to have been issued his name tag.

We file out, grabbing a few pairs of latex gloves from the box by the door. Best to double-glove; you don’t want to touch half the things we’re about to touch. Then it’s vests on and a hunt for car keys.

The Met dresses as it always has: stiff white shirt, black tie, dark trousers. Then the reality of this century gets bolted on top: stab vest, radio, a body-worn video camera with a little red blinking light. Our belts hold an extending baton, metal cuffs, tourniquet, and a small can of pepper spray. Unlike most countries, almost all British frontline officers do not carry firearms. Some will clip on a Taser; it isn’t mandatory.

Keys live in a filing cabinet near the skippers, and the post-briefing stampede has a pecking order. The nicest cars — the Area Cars — are reserved for advanced drivers with years in and the training to match. Next rung: IRVs (Incident Response Vehicles), for those trained to run blue lights to calls. The dregs are the Pandas — A-to-B only, no lights or sirens for their drivers, veteran interiors with a unique smell and a long memory of Commissioners past.

The back of every Met car carries the city’s anxieties in object form: a round Perspex riot shield; an acid kit that is really rubber gloves and a big bottle of water; a first-aid kit and defibrillator; and a throw line for someone who decides to go swimming in the Thames.

I’m the passenger – an operator – for an IRV, our callsign is 41. While my driver makes tea, I go to grab the keys, gently shouldering someone out of the way before they grab the car we want. As I head back to my partner, the dozens of radios around the writing room begin to echo with a voice from Met Command and Control (MetCC)

07:14 - I‑grade, Peabody

“I-Grade now, possible domestic incident on the Peabody Estate, Block C, Flat 28. Sounds of a disturbance heard by the call-taker.”

I wedge myself and my vest into the car’s passenger seat – my driver drives and I try to help with everything else. The clue is in my job title, I operate the radio, read the maps and monitor our call’s updates as they come in on the tablet balanced on my knees. Control’s summary pings through: names, flat number, a neighbour who “can hear shouting”. I ask Control to see if we’ve been there before. I trim the map to what matters — long straight roads with bus lanes as arteries, avoiding the Mayor’s infamous one-ways and the cyclists who will materialise out of thin air at the worst moment.

The driver keeps to his mirrors and momentum, they know what they’re doing. They’ve been on a four-week driving course, I don’t even own a car. But I try to stay at their speed. It is never “the next left” out of my mouth but “the fourth left” and I count them down one by one. Navigation through London's tangle of streets is a challenge; the art is shaving seconds that allow us to safely make progress.

As the blue lights skate along brick and butcher’s tiles, a lone PC on foot gives us a small wave. He’s today’s Diary Car. They go to appointments to take statements or follow up on non-urgent crimes. He’s noticeably without a car — they ran out after briefing — and destined to attend pre-booked grief and weariness by bus and Oyster card.

Those two words are probably the most important in the Met’s book of slang. A griefy call is one that is important but will mean a lot of complexity, drama, and paperwork. A weary one is when police shouldn’t even be there, but where you end up sitting on a sofa you’ve sat on before; listening to a frequent flier tell you about a mean Facebook message from their ex-wife’s sister’s cousin.

We arrive on scene. Estate stairwell with rubbish bags split by foxes’ teeth. It’s always the top floor. Shoes by a thin door. Camera on with a double press. You learn to tune a doorbell like a violin. A Griefy call gets fortissimo until we get in; a weary call gets a single ping that hopes for no answer. This is griefy. The door cracks and a pair of wide eyes appear in the dim hallway.

Even with good notes, a doorway is a curtain. He is pale and loud; she is flushed and small. I start the same way every time: “What’s happened?” It buys ten seconds — long enough to find the children, the dog, any injuries, and the temperature of the air. We separate the voices that have braided together: he gets distance and a chair to talk to my partner; she gets water and a straight sentence about choices and no one gets to stay in the kitchen.

The child on the stairs gets a stuffed dinosaur rescued from under a radiator dripping with the thrown breakfast. I’m forced to play at being a psychiatrist without a degree and a parent without having a child.

No guns on our hips, so authority is posture and choreography. Angles that keep us safe without announcing themselves and can keep a reactionary gap as best as a tiny London council flat can. The baton is there to open letter boxes; all we really have is our voices and hands and if shit really hits the fan there is the orange emergency button on the radio that alerts the whole borough with a heart-stopping tone. In those first twenty seconds of turning up on scene you know whether it will be an arrest, safeguarding, or waiting for an ambulance - or all of the above.

The camera’s red light blinks and beeps like a tiny conscience and, for once, helps. We leave the room cooler than we found it. It turns out it was just an argument that got too loud. It’s formally called a “non-crime domestic”. No offences have occurred – yet, and so we will simply record a risk assessment for our safeguarding officers to check in the morning. The forms begin, child contact reports get sent off to the council, the practical kindnesses that look like bureaucracy until the worst night happens and someone is glad the boxes were ticked. We leave with a plan that will survive until morning, which is often the only honest victory on offer for an officer on a response team.

After a sip of our tea and coffee that have already gone cold, we exhale but then it starts all over again.

The female controller’s voice is already familiar—half chess player, half conductor. “Units for an I‑grade?” is not a question so much as a promise the city expects you to keep in fifteen minutes. “Robbery outside Harrods, suspects just made off, last seen all in black on e-bikes towards Knightsbridge, victim on scene.”

09:40 - Robbery, Knightsbridge

Each borough has its own radio channel, whose voices are the unseen choir of MetCC: civilians and non-operational officers who answer 999, turn panic into coordinates, dispatchers who talk to us and a controller who grades chaos into I (now), S (soon), E (eventually but probably never). The best call‑takers keep people breathing on the phone while turning panic into coordinates and verbs. You live inside that cadence. You also learn the physics of keying up fast; hesitate and you’re cut off mid‑call sign by someone keener.

I grab the radio and assign us. There’s a small pride in pressing the button first, a smaller guilt when you can’t. Resources are thin: two boroughs, hundreds of thousands of people, one police station and one response team sometimes barely into double digits of officers some days. Just a few years ago the same area had six response teams operating out of six police stations, but that was before the cuts.

We’re too late to catch the robbers. Sirens help, but an e‑bike can cross London while we’re still parting a sea of traffic. The victim has a sore arm and a missing £130,000 Patek Philippe. The Area Car roars past in a vain attempt at a search. We focus on the report. He’s visiting from the Middle East. “I love London,” he tells us, “but it never feels safe any more. This wouldn’t happen in Dubai.” We apologise and take swabs from his wrist in case any of the suspect’s DNA remains. CCTV shows two men in black on black bikes. Not much to go on. We leave the report in the Robbery team’s tray, not that they will have time to investigate it.

Response officers conduct what’s called the “primary investigation” for every incident they attend - they take an initial report, ascertain if there’s any leads and look for camera footage and if it requires further investigation, off it goes to the relevant specialist detectives. But very little makes it to those teams.

We are issued a flowchart and almost every path on it leads to closing the investigation. Victim not interested? Close it. Value of the theft below £100? Assessed out. No CCTV available to collect right now? Don’t even bother, just give them the crime number and go back to work.

11:00 - Welfare, St Mungo’s

“From Met Control – we have an S-grade, welfare check. Caller is the subject’s sister. Last contact last night. Has not been answering his phone. Currently staying at the St Mungo’s hostel. LAS holding calls and unable to attend at present.”

All the Pandas are busy with their own grief, it’s just us left so we go. Not all our calls are crime. Many are crises with administrative clothing. The LAS are the London Ambulance Service and are equally short-staffed, with much of what they can’t handle left to the Met.

The police have become Britain’s social service of last resort, dropped into people’s worst five minutes with no backstory and every expectation to fix things.

No blues or sirens for this one though —S is soon, not now—but we make progress where we can. I ask Control for any previous attendance; there are three reports in the last year, one with a note about medication and missed GP appointments. I’m also warned our subject “flashes Mike Hotel” - a code for mental health issues.

Hostels, halfway houses, asylum hotels, they’re all the same. A terraced Victorian house in a nice part of town knocked into a multiple occupancy dwelling with a couple of dozen bedsits for society’s most vulnerable and watched over by a receptionist who spends their shift on all-day-long video calls back home. The stairs smell of last night and are sticky. The top floor again.

We knock as if waking a friend. “Police. Not here to arrest anyone. Just checking you’re alright.” Nothing. Telling Control it’s an “NRRK” would be the easy result - No Reply, Repeat Knocking, move on – but the notes say previous attempt, so we buy a few extra minutes from the clock. I call the sister; she’s crying quietly in Leeds and says he hasn’t answered texts since midnight.

A shuffle. The door opens. A bedsit with too much sky in the window. The floor is more belongings than carpet. A mattress for a bed. We stand by a sink that’s been full for weeks. A stack of NHS letters, unopened. He lights a cigarette and tells us he’s missed his depot injection and feels low but won’t kill himself — and you learn to know who means it. He lights another cigarette and makes clear he doesn’t want an ambulance and definitely doesn’t want hospital.

Sometimes there isn’t much we can do. He’s alive, he isn’t about to harm himself, and he knows where help is. Another safeguarding report, numbers swapped with the hostel, and we’re back to the road.

The morning goes Q — we never say quiet — as people start work or school and the crackheads are yet to wake up. We swap life updates with another unit at the gates of Hyde Park and tell the kind of jokes that keep the edges soft.

Another S‑grade comes out — a weary neighbour dispute about a fence in Kensington. Radio silence. No one volunteers like they did for the robbery, they know it will be what we call an LOB – Load of Bollocks. Then the dreaded roll call through the callsigns from the Guv’nor begins - he needs someone to go. 81 are tied up at hospital; 82 are dealing with some problematic Irish Travellers; and 83 are sitting next to us and very much available. We grin in sympathy as 83 peels away into the sunset, not to be seen again for the rest of the shift. “Gone but not forgotten,” I say to my driver.

12:45 - I‑grade, Uxbridge Road

On the car’s other radio we’re tuned to the neighbouring borough’s channel in case they need help. They do. “I‑grade, males fighting outside Ladbrokes on Uxbridge Road, weapons involved.” Silence. Their units are all busy and it’s not even 1pm. The Diary Car offers but it sounds on the radio like he’s on a District Line train. Their skipper gets on the radio: “Send it to surrounding channels, please.” When it lands on ours, we offer. It’s just us. “It’s on the way to your box (the in-car tablet) now, 41. White male with a bottle, last seen outside Ladbrokes.”

Blue lights through traffic, crossing from one borough to another. We hope the fight will be over before we turn up and it will be what the Met call an ASNT (Area Search, No Trace) but which veteran officers term an ATNS (Area Trace, No Search) . Outside the betting shop, two men circle each other while hundreds walk by as if it isn’t happening. Broken glass glints on the pavement. I’m out before the car fully stops but my driver carries the Taser; I wait half a beat and give the only order that matters to the one with the bottle and the ripped shirt.

“Put it down. Get back.”

He hesitates. That heartbeat is longer in the retelling; in the moment it’s a coin flip. My driver is out now, Taser drawn. Two red laser dots quilt the man’s sweaty chest. The bottle hits the ground. We move in. Wrists, cuffs, click, lock. Choreography; ugly, practised. It was unprovoked; the victim wants to make a report. I tell our new friend who stinks of beer that he’s under arrest for assault and possession of an offensive weapon.

Then comes the van. A Ford Transit with a prisoner cage built into the back. My partner stays to get statements and CCTV footage while I hop in the van and a ride to a custody suite follows. The old days of cells in every station are long gone; now prisoners travel across London to one of the few remaining custody suites. Our usual custody suite is closed as the cells are “too cold” and I am sent south of the river to a station I’ve never been to.

There’s usually a queue of vans in these stations’ yards, a conveyor belt of the morning’s mistakes. When we get to the front, a custody sergeant appears with trademark sceptical eyebrow. Officers believe that most custody sergeants think putting prisoners in their cells is a major inconvenience.

After a search, I explain the arrest to the custody skipper. She’s seen it all before. She sits on a podium with several other sergeants, each booking in a prisoner of their own and hearing accounts from officers. I’m in a clearing house for London’s detritus. Most in this custody suite are already well-known to police and are on their nth chance at redemption — which has once again ended with the harming of a fellow citizen and is marked simply by a opening a new page in their custody record.

I get a barrage of questions from the sergeant and the prisoner answers a risk assessment about their mental and physical health, but eventually detention is authorised. He’s then placed in a cell and twenty-four hours begins counting down. For the new prisoner it’s time for a nap and a microwave meal but for me it’s only the beginning. Due process is slow on purpose—and painful by accident.

I get a ride from another van and meet my driver back at our station, he grabbed us Nando’s on the way and we get to work. This will need a crime report, a case file and other assorted paperwork.

15:00 - CONNECT

Paperwork means using CONNECT. CONNECT is the software that was meant to stitch the job together and instead unpicked hours from our lives—dropdowns that lead to more dropdowns, attachments that won’t attach, a clock that eats afternoons and a save function that sometimes deletes entire reports. The adrenaline of the arrest crash lands like a wardrobe. It steals time and willpower so effectively you wish you were dealing with a mental health crisis two streets over. CONNECT is so hated that statistics show a decline in arrests after it launched, so desperate were cops to avoid using it.

We tap like birds at our keyboards as our colleagues return their cars and Tasers, waving us goodbye as they go to the pub down the road. We promise we’ll join them but we know that’s unlikely. Even the Diary Car leaves before we do, the No. 11 bus having got him back in one piece. The irony isn't lost: the officer without a car gets home before the ones with blues and twos.

17:00 - Handover

I press submit and we both sit there praying as the wheel on the screen turns and turns. It freezes for a moment. “Don’t you dare,” both of us mutter in sync.

It then spits out a case number; CONNECT has grudgingly accepted our digital offerings and we make our handover to one of the Late Turn skippers. They’ll get our prisoner interviewed and charged. As we head for the locker room, the voice once more speaks to the writing room.

"From Met Control, units on the I-India Grade now..." But it's not for us. We slid the batteries out of our radios hours ago, we're finished and if we hurry we can still make team drinks. We step over a homeless man sleeping by the front counter when we leave, while the stressed station officer attempts to take a Chinese student's phone theft report through Google Translate.

Tomorrow the radio will crackle and someone will be the first to the doorway. Cuts or no cuts, London dials 999 and someone goes.

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As I eased myself into the steaming waters of a hot spring bath at the remote countryside inn, the stillness was gently broken by the murmur of an American voice drifting through the fragile paper walls.

I’d returned to Japan for the third time: to chase the kind of confusion and gentle mishaps had made it so enjoyable before. But travel is changing. Earlier, I'd watched the American checking in, tapping earnestly into Google Translate to solve an issue. The elderly innkeeper—whose family had run this inn and its onsen (baths) long before the first smartphone or foreign guest ever arrived—nodded politely, replying through the screen as if he'd always done it this way.

Not so long ago, traveling here required careful preparation and a willingness to get lost. Finding an inn like this once meant deciphering maps, puzzling over bullet train schedules and street signs that seemed purpose-built to frustrate outsiders, and celebrating triumphantly when, against all odds, you found yourself at the gates. Today, Google Maps delivers you straight to the doorstep, calculating your arrival down to the minute. Even the thrill of Japanese vending machine roulette has diminished—ChatGPT can tell you exactly what's in every mysterious bottle or snack.

Some resistance to "tourism on easy mode" persists. Many of the best restaurants refuse reservations via email, social media, or even English telephone calls. This policy is understandable, but it's only a matter of time before an AI agent can flawlessly book seats for omakase (chef’s choice of sushi), paving the way for the most unappreciative guests imaginable. At one centuries-old soba (buckwheat noodles) restaurant in Kyoto, a nearby group of tourists used Google Translate to inform the waitress that, while excellent, the food "could have used some garlic powder." It's no wonder some of Japan's greatest countryside inns maintain zero web presence, deterring foreign tourists altogether - unless they get a recommendation from a local in the know.

Perhaps inevitably, menus there have begun preemptively translating dishes to avoid awkwardness. “Fish sperm,” becomes the more palatable “soft roe” or “cod milk.” Near Tokyo Station, I had dinner with a local friend who pointed out the restaurant’s Japanese-language menu quietly advertised “all you can drink for $30”—an offer notably missing from its English counterpart.

Travel advice for Japan from the pre-smartphone era now seems charmingly redundant. Keep a card with your hotel’s address in Japanese? Just use Uber or show the driver Google Maps. Carry wads of Yen? "Cardo" is almost universally accepted now.1 Your well-traveled uncle might warn tattoos will exclude you from the respectable baths and hotels, but today's trendy Japanese patrons sport Carhartt streetwear over patchwork inked sleeves—if you're turned away, it's likely because you're foreign, not because of your tattoos.

Over an omakase lunch, I asked a sushi chef if he minded that half his customers were now foreign visitors. “No,” he said, aware of the power of the dollar, as long as they truly appreciated the sushi.

Yet at one of Japan's best sushi restaurants, I watched as a wealthy Chinese tourist, covered head-to-toe in branded designer clothing, scrolled through his phone while casually shovelling Otoro (fatty tuna) into his mouth, without ever glancing down.

It’s not just Japan. In places that once promised isolation or adventure, connectivity is now constant. A friend who hoped for a retreat from the world booked a horseback trek across Mongolia's steppes and found better 4G there than in parts of London.

The obvious solution is the occasional rebellion. In Kyoto, I abandoned any pretence of an itinerary and entrusted my day to a 95 year-old guide called ‘Joe’ Okada. Joe is Japan’s oldest tour guide. He spent his childhood in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, built warplane propellers as a teenager, watched B-17s drop firebombs on Japan and narrowly missed becoming a kamikaze pilot, finally learning English playing baseball with American occupiers.

Joe didn’t care about online ratings or influencer recommendations; instead, he lamented modern Japan's obsession with sweetened matcha and insisted on showing me his favourite hidden spots.

As a respected elder, Joe moved freely. I watched him firmly slap an antique samurai helmet despite a sign pleading, “Please Do Not Touch,” simply to demonstrate its strength. Later, he confidently entered a bustling sushi restaurant with a line of tourists out the door, emerging moments later with fresh inari sushi (stuffed tofu pockets) personally delivered by the amused staff.

After the sushi he took us a few doors down into a quiet cafe. He wandered into the kitchen and politely shouted at a chef who followed him out and at a formica table demonstrated with remarkable skill how to make a perfect cup of true matcha. He was a champion maker, Joe told us, but didn’t advertise the fact and so didn’t get the crowds.

Later, in the quiet of a local courtyard, Joe taught me2 how to slice fruit and vegetables with a samurai sword, gently insisting I gather the scattered pieces afterward, as his wife planned to cook them for dinner.

Amusingly the thing that Joe seemed to enjoy showing us the most wasn’t Kyoto’s temples or its dedicated craftsmen, but an automated storage machine that takes bicycles and uses a robot elevator to deposit them deep underground. We stood there and watched it consume bikes for some time, Joe chuckling and growing no less bored as each bike went down.

The irony is of course I had found Joe online, yet his presence felt deeply out of step with the digital age. When he spoke of wartime Japan or post-war occupation, he wasn't reciting history but sharing memories. His knowledge wasn’t searchable or taggable—it lived in quiet friendships built over decades, in personal connections to shopkeepers and craftspeople whose names would never surface on an app.

Spontaneity can be seen as inefficient now. It must feel underwhelming for tourists, I think, arriving at temples or landmarks already familiar from months spent scrolling online. The most memorable shrine I've visited in Japan was one I found by accident in Tokyo, dedicated to Admiral Togo. It stays in my mind as one of its plaques, an argument is made that Togo was the literal reincarnation of Horatio Nelson.

Similarly, one of my best meals this trip was at a Michelin-starred yakitori place we stumbled into without reservations, catching a last-minute cancellation. Pure luck, and utterly delicious. Afterwards, we found out the restaurant has a 3-month waiting list.

My friend Chris Arnade wrote a great tale from his trip to Japan about how he made friends with an izakaya (pub) landlord and its customers, all by accident when he had the intention of going somewhere else entirely.

The more accessible Japan becomes through apps and translation tools combined with a very attractively weak Yen, the more its most cherished establishments will try to retreat from that accessibility. The ryokan owner who once welcomed the rare foreign visitor now hides from TripAdvisor fame. The chef who might have proudly served a curious gaijin (foreigner) now requires expensive Japanese intermediary agencies to make reservations and filter out the ‘unsuitable’.

Technology can enhance our adventures, but true discovery happens when we put the phone away and connect with people on their terms. That remains timeless.

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Skip the bottom for my list of Bangkok food recommendations.

There are two things that are surprisingly rare in Bangkok: trash bins and babies. It’s no secret that Thailand, and especially its capital, is facing a demographic shift. Fertility rates have plummeted to among the lowest in Southeast Asia, influenced by a combination of urban living costs, work priorities, and evolving social values that discourage large families. Strollers here are more likely to carry dogs than toddlers. Trendy hotels increasingly cater to pet owners, and it’s common to see women in matching outfits with their Pomeranians — a telling sign of changing lifestyles and priorities in the city.

The scarcity of everyday conveniences extends beyond just a quieting nursery scene. Trash bins can be maddeningly elusive. You might end up clutching a finished Thai milk tea for several blocks, scanning every corner in vain before reluctantly stashing it in your bag until you reach your hotel. It’s a small detail, but one that will stick with you as you traverse the city’s crowded sidewalks.

This was my third trip to Bangkok, and for the first time, I ventured into areas known for their seedier nightlife. In previous visits, friends from Thailand guided me through more insular, “local” scenes, and I was never inclined to visit famous spots like Khao San Road or Soi Cowboy. On my way to Bangkok’s main padel club (a fast-growing sport that’s gaining popularity across Asia), I finally had to walk down Soi Cowboy.

Nigerian pimps, another curious fixture in Asian cities that deserves further study, called out from the street’s doorways, promising “full service” and crudely slapping their hands together as I passed. Their presence reflects the city’s layered nightlife economy, where international migration meets local tourism.

While this seedier side contributes to Bangkok’s image as a party capital, it hardly defines the city as a whole. Just blocks away, you’ll find elegant temples, bustling markets, quiet cafes, and neighborhoods where Bangkok’s natives go about daily life, largely unaffected by these pockets of neon-lit vice.

If there’s one truly frustrating aspect of life in Bangkok, it’s getting from place to place. The BTS Skytrain is clean and efficient, but its coverage is limited. Ride-hailing apps like Grab can fill the gap, but you’re still at the mercy of the city’s notoriously snarled traffic. In 2016, traffic lights were shifted from automated timers to manual operation. Police officers stationed at intersections now decide when lights change, and any pause for a bathroom break or a TikTok scroll can extend your wait interminably.

Local friends advise avoiding any travel between 4:30 and 7:30 p.m. to steer clear of the city’s rush hour. These three hours can turn what should be a short hop into a mind-numbing crawl. Just as you think you’re moving forward, a police motorcade might zip by, halting your lane as a sleek, black-tinted minivan slinks past.

To escape the gridlock, I spent one afternoon at Bumrungrad International Hospital, known for its world-class medical tourism services. For a few hundred dollars, I underwent a thorough health check that would make the Mayo Clinic look like a medieval apothecary’s shop. After checking in at the top of a small skyscraper, I changed into beige pajamas and embarked on a medical marathon. Blood tests, ultrasounds, and a cardiac stress test were all handled with assembly-line efficiency.

Waiting for the results, I noticed that nearly all of us patients were travelers. No one made small talk — perhaps out of shyness or the mild absurdity of getting such a premium checkup abroad. Breakfast, courtesy of the Marriott, was served while we waited. Finally, a charming doctor gave me the all-clear, leaving me to marvel at the fact that top-tier healthcare here can feel as common as a hotel lobby check-in.

Having hopped between places where chopsticks or hands are the norm, Thailand’s preference for the fork and spoon felt like coming home. The story goes — and there are varying versions — that one of the country’s early modernizing kings, often cited as Rama V, introduced European utensils after traveling abroad, yet remained wary of arming his subjects with knives. Whether or not this tale is perfectly accurate, it’s illustrative of how old customs merge with outside influences to create something uniquely Thai. These subtle cultural adaptations appear in dress too, with fashion-forward Thais donning wide-legged jeans from the new Carhartt Work in Progress store.

Bangkok’s culinary landscape is a highlight of any visit. It’s almost impossible to have a bad meal, and you can trust your instincts at even the most unassuming street-side stall. The combination of textures, flavors, and heat — sometimes intense enough to bring tears to a seasoned traveler’s eyes — is unparalleled. I have collected a few of my favourite spots below by category:

Local:

Sam Lor - Get the omelette
Charmgang - If you can handle very spicy food, there’s few places better
Ten Suns - Beef noodle soup, enough said.

International cuisine:

El Willy - If you get bored of noodles, this is the spot for paella.
Cento - Constantly changing Italian menu, trendy Thais rave about it.

Coffee:

Song Wat Coffee & Roasters - Fun area to walk around
Roots at Thonglor - Only using Thai beans

After dinner:

Thaipioka - Great DJs. Recently renovated, local crowd.
Apt 101 - Another recent opening. Only place to find a salsa evening in Bangkok.

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Bangkok is a city where contradictions thrive. In a place where dog strollers replace baby carriages and traffic lights heed human whims, it’s the city’s unpredictability that keeps you coming back for more.

As I settled into Seat 16F on Singapore Airlines Flight 23, that was certainly the attitude I had. This was exciting! A journey I thought would have to be broken up across continents and airlines was suddenly streamlined.

My home for the flight was a sort of pod, a wide leather chair that reclines into a large footwell and can on-demand be turned by the crew into a luxurious padded bed. The space is dominated by a huge TV screen just inches from your face and there are various cubby holes to lose your passport in.

Once settled in, I was immediately struck by the fact that no one seemed to acknowledge that we were about to be in the sky for almost an entire day. Everyone remains disturbingly calm, as though an 19-hour flight is a perfectly reasonable thing to submit your body and brain to. No one seems to be thinking, “Hang on, isn’t this a bit much?”

I am sat in a middle seat and have someone next to me who either speaks no English or speaks it so well that he’s already determined I’m not worth engaging with. We lock eyes for about two and a half seconds before he reaches out and slides the privacy screen between us, as if to say, “Whatever happens in this seat, we will not be experiencing it together.”

On the ground, a flurry of flight attendants and crew bustle around, taking orders for the three to four meal services that will be provided and distributing the socks you only find on planes and in hospitals to prevent blood clots. So concerned they may kill a passenger, Singapore Airlines does not even have an Economy-class cabin on this route, offering only Premium Economy and Business Class, the latter of which has 70 seats. The captain comes on to inform us that he and four other pilots will be operating the flight in shifts while a constantly rotating crew of flight attendants will look after us, between taking rests in a break room built into the back of this Airbus A350. Due to the war in Russia, the route will take across the North Pole, over Europe, the Middle East, India and then down into Southeast Asia before touching down in Singapore two days later on Thursday at 5:30 in the morning.

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Hour 1: It Begins

But it’s not Thursday yet. It’s Tuesday night in New York and it’s 10:30 AM Wednesday in Singapore1. I’m supposed to be awake, realigning my circadian rhythms to Singaporean time, but the cabin has already taken on that ethereal quality—lights dimming, the hum of the engines like white noise wrapping around us, a low murmur of voices quickly dissipating as people surrender to their pillows the moment the seatbelt sign is off.

But not me. I have my coffee. My other neighbour in the window seat stared at me when I ordered it from Priscilla the flight attendant, but I’m convinced if I let myself drift off now, I’ll wake up in some kind of jet-lagged fever dream where I’ve watched all eight Harry Potter films and tried to start my first novel – both activities equally regrettable in their own way.

I refuse the meal service, something about a full steak dinner at this time of night does not appeal.

This is going to be the most productive 19 hours of my life. A novel and three movies down? Maybe I’ll learn a bit of conversational Malay from Duolingo just to mix it up.

I pull out my notebook, a cherished recent gift from someone bored of hearing my endless ideas that will likely never become anything and who realised they would be better written down. There’s something about the cabin air that makes the mind restless but unproductive. I convince myself that writing these notes will keep me from slipping into the darkness of sleep. I’m holding on. For now.

Hour 2: I Shall Overcome

Bored already of my own thoughts, I begin browsing through the absurdly large Singapore Airlines movie library. From budget Chinese flicks to Hollywood blockbusters they have it all. Normally on planes I find myself watching the same things, Crazy Rich Asians, Notting Hill, a Transformers movie, something to just make the time go by.

I settle tonight on Bad Boys: Ride or Die. I hit play. Five minutes later I give up on Bad Boys: Ride or Die. Instead, I settled for Firebrand, about Queen Katherine Parr and her travails being married to an ageing and increasingly grotesque Henry VIII —a movie about Tudor England while I’m hurtling over the Atlantic on a Singaporean Airbus. At this altitude, history becomes a bit of a blur.

With the film finished, my finger hovers for a moment over Mad Max: Fury Road but I instead opt to dip into my book, a biography of the explorer Richard Burton. He’d have hated this. I manage a few pages before putting it down.

Every single element of the aeroplane is trying to lull me to sleep. The lights are down. The flight attendants have vanished, but in their wake have left Kit Kats on my seat. The white noise of the engines hypnotises me. My fellow passengers are completely silent and could be dead for all I know. But I must stay awake. I continue to fidget with things, each an attempt to anchor me and keep my eyes open.

I begin listening to a Spotify playlist my friend sent me, it’s mostly intense Eurodance and in the darkness I listen to it. Adagio for Strings pulses in my ears as I watch the tiny model plane inch across the moving map on my screen. It’s surreal, like some strange version of a silent disco that’s gone on too long. The only lights are the red ones from the plane’s wings, flashing against the blackened sky.

Eventually I stand up to go to the bathroom and when I come back, I find that my bed has been mysteriously prepared for me, though I never asked for it. The blankets are tucked just so, the pillow fluffed to perfection. I lie down, my body heavy with exhaustion, and for a brief moment, I feel a wave of relief. I close my eyes and drop my eye mask.

Hours 3-11: The Dark Ages

I sleep soundly, or at least I think I do. Dreams blur with reality in this pressurised tomb.

In one, I'm Richard Burton crossing the Arabian desert, except the sand dunes are made of aeroplane blankets and Priscilla keeps appearing as a Bedouin guide offering Kit Kats instead of water.

I surface occasionally, like a deep-sea creature rising for air. Each time, the cabin looks exactly the same – that liminal space between day and night, reality and dreams. During one of these moments of consciousness, I check Burton's biography on my armrest. He once spent 96 hours crossing a desert without sleep, I read, before the words swim away from me.

Even in my semi-conscious state, I can hear him scoffing at my luxurious delirium. The seatbelt sign chimes, my only measure of time passing.

Hour 11: Hydrate or Diedrate

I wake up at some indeterminate hour to the sound of clinking cutlery and the bustling of flight attendants who have suddenly reappeared. The scent of Singapore’s famous chicken rice lingers over the business class cabin. Discarding my eye mask, the flight map tells me we’re over Azerbaijan—still seven and a half hours to go. Seven. And. A. Half. More. Hours. Welcome to the Deep Vein Thrombosis Express, as my friend Mike Bird called it days before I flew.

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I get up to stretch my legs, wandering the aisles like some sort of lost, jet-lagged ghost. I stretch. I moisturise. I drink more water than any human should while airborne, silently wishing for one of those Dune-style water recycling suits. I notice that while I slept, a flight attendant has kindly deposited another Kit Kat on my armrest— which I immediately devour.

While I sit poised in my pod to await my chicken rice, I dive into my book on Richard Burton, the explorer, whose restless spirit makes me feel both inspired and ashamed—ashamed because, while he crossed deserts on foot and braved hostile territories, I am struggling to sit in a climate-controlled capsule with a fully reclining seat and chicken satay on demand. Burton really *would* have hated this.

The food is fantastic, the flight attendant Priscilla shows me all the sauces I need to mix and the sweet chili very briefly wakes me up.

Hour 12-15: The Aeroplane Eats My Soul

After the meal, the lights suddenly go out again, plunging the cabin into that familiar, unsettling dimness. Priscilla, my most recent anchor to reality, has vanished. Why am I still in the air? Haven’t we already lived this moment? I stand up. I sit down. I listen to music. I listen to the engines. It’s all the same now.

Craving something to pull me out of my existential haze, I turn to the movie library and land on The Menu. It seemed like a good idea at the time, having not seen it before. Within minutes, I regret everything.2 I begin to experience an existential crisis, how am I any different up here to Ralph Fiennes’ captive diners. I pause the movie for one of my endless bathroom breaks and also take a snack from the galley, a bun that exclaims it is the “HAPPIEST BREAD ON EARTH!”

As I put my headphones back on, I resolve that I need to get off the aeroplane. I look at the map to consider exit points and realise we are still over Azerbaijan.3

I finish the movie, however, unlike the diners my fate has not been resolved and I am still in the air. I cheer myself up by using the in-flight Wi-Fi to doom scroll, which then stops working over India. This flight is the height of human lunacy, the pinnacle of our collective delusion that we’ve conquered nature.

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Hour 16: Panic in the Skies

I am still in the air, which shouldn’t be a surprise at this point, except it very much is. We’ve entered the stage of the flight that feels like a dark purgatory where the boundaries between time and space, and even my own sense of self, are rapidly eroding. The problem with a 19-hour flight, I’ve realised, isn’t just the sheer duration but the absolute, soul-crushing knowledge that there is no escape. You can’t get off. You can’t leave the cabin, the pod, the carefully curated luxury, because there is literally nowhere to go. You are trapped in this tube of metal hurtling across the sky at impossible speeds, and even the HAPPIEST BREAD ON EARTH bun (which I’ve obviously eaten) can’t ease the growing sense of claustrophobia.

And here’s the thing: we’re all pretending like it’s fine. Every one of us, tucked away in our individual cocoons, isolated by noise-canceling headphones and privacy screens, is quietly participating in this mass delusion. We’ve been up here for 16 hours, and yet, the man across the aisle still smiles politely when Priscilla asks if she’d like more champagne. Is no one else slowly coming apart? I walk the length of the plane and even in Premium Economy, everyone seems to be carrying on just fine.

Am I the only one who feels like their mind is slipping out of sync with their body? I peek through the privacy screen and my seat mate is watching a live football game, which I think he has been doing since we took off.

I realise this sounds melodramatic, but that’s only because you’ve likely never been on a 19-hour flight where the airline pampers you to the point of disorientation. It’s luxury that borders on an existential crisis. I have every comfort at my fingertips, and yet, I want nothing more than to escape, to breathe air that doesn’t come from a recycled filtration system, to walk on ground that isn’t moving at 600 miles per hour.

I press my hand against the window near the galley, feeling the cold seep through. Burton once wrote about the desert's ability to drive men mad with its endless horizons. At least he had horizons. All I have is this artificial atmosphere and the growing suspicion that this flight is actually a psychological experiment in human endurance.

Hour 17: Everything is Fine

The change comes not gradually but all at once, like surfacing from a deep dive. Perhaps it's the way the light suddenly streams through the windows, painting familiar shapes across the cabin. Or maybe it's the fact that Burton, in my book, has just emerged triumphant from another impossible journey. If he could cross deserts on camelback, surely I can cross continents in a flying luxury hotel. The Wi-Fi is back. We're no longer over Azerbaijan. Priscilla appears with another Kit Kat, and I accept it not as an offering from the gods of air travel, but as the simple comfort it is.

The lights are back on in the cabin, and just like when the lights go up in a nightclub after hours of sweaty, joyful oblivion, the sudden illumination feels like a harsh reminder of the reality we’ve been avoiding. The passengers around me, once blissfully cocooned in their pods of dark, mid-flight serenity, now look like extras in a disaster movie, sleep-deprived, hair slightly askew, faces drawn with the unmistakable pallor of recycled aeroplane air.

I am, at long last, at peace with my fate. The rhythm of the engines, once ominous, now feels like a familiar lullaby. I’ve become a fully functioning part of this airborne ecosystem. Look at me—I’m hydrated, I’ve moisturised three times, and I’ve eaten the HAPPIEST BREAD ON EARTH.

The Wi-Fi goes out again. Priscilla has vanished once more, as though she’s some kind of fairy who appears only when I start to lose faith in the human condition. For a brief moment, I feel that old twinge of panic. The existential uncertainty returns, like a subtle tremor beneath my feet, reminding me that no matter how many Kit Kats I get, I am still trapped, endlessly circling over Azerbaijan.

Hour 18: A Slow Descent

I should be excited right now. We’re so close to landing. But instead of excitement, all I feel is this creeping dread, like my body is finally rebelling after 17 hours of pretending it’s fine. My legs ache from sitting too long. My back feels compressed, despite the luxury of a flatbed seat.

A brief visit to the bathroom is where I face the full brunt of what 18 hours in the air does to a human face.

My body is confused, my mind is fuzzy, and I’m starting to wonder how long it really has been, perhaps the map has been lying to me.

I attempt to read again, but the words blur together on the page. Richard Burton’s adventures in the Arabian desert feel strangely distant – probably because my own adventure is less “braving the elements” and more “surviving the fifth viewing of Crazy Rich Asians.”

The captain appears on the intercom, if he really is the captain, and explains we are now beginning our descent into Singapore Changi Airport. The cabin is secured, and we begin to get lower and lower and I slowly mentally begin to return to Earth.

Hour 19: Arrival

The wheels touch down with a gentle bump that seems almost anticlimactic after 19 hours of flight. As we taxi to the gate, the first hints of Singapore's tropical dawn paint the sky in shades of pink and gold.

Burton once wrote about the moment of arriving in a new land, how the body knows it's somewhere different before the mind catches up. He was right – even through the aircraft's walls, I can feel Singapore's characteristic humidity reaching out to greet us.

We deplane into Changi Airport's vast terminus where a massive indoor waterfall thunders nearby – nature perfectly contained and controlled, much like our journey here. My fellow passengers disperse quickly, some still wearing their aeroplane pyjamas, others already changed into crisp business attire as if the last 19 hours were merely a strange dream.

I've crossed continents in a single bound, traded day for night and back again, and somehow emerged mostly intact. My phone buzzes – it's an email from Singapore Airlines about my return flight in two weeks. I quickly swipe it away. I don’t need to think about that right now, I have a flight connection to Malaysia to catch.

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In my travels across the globe, I've come to believe that Franz Kafka wasn't writing fiction but rather a traveler's guidebook. From the low fluorescent ceilings of Tokyo's municipal offices to the Escher-like staircases of the Questura in Rome, bureaucracy seems less a system of governance and more an elaborate practical joke played on the unsuspecting globetrotter. As diverse as these systems may be, they share a universal language of red tape, rubber stamps, and resigned sighs.

For just over a year, I lived in Delhi. I loved it and when I die, I am sure you will find “India” written on my heart. However, much of that year was spent learning a language that wasn't Hindi or Bengali, but that of the Indian bureaucrat. My time there left me with a profound appreciation for the country's capacity for organised chaos.

It often felt like a calculated game, designed to defeat all but the most committed. The acronyms were never explained and the forms were never straight forward. To extend my visa, I needed an NOC7, which was passed through RAW8 before returning to the MEA9. Updates were never proactively shared, so days were lost visiting ministries, clutching a numbered ticket, with only blisteringly hot chai for company. Complaints? I’d need to speak to the perfectly named Department of Public Grievances.

Yet, amidst the frustration, there were moments of unexpected humanity. A shared laugh over a particularly absurd form requirement, or a sympathetic nod from a fellow applicant—these small connections made the endless waiting somewhat bearable.

It is not just the customer that faces suffering at the hands of a rubber stamp. Bureaucrats themselves are not immune from the systems they watch over. In the period of British rule in India, any official had the right to, once in their career, raise a grievance directly with the Viceroy of India for their opinion. It could be used on anything but, once used, the opportunity was then gone forever. In China, the Qing Emperor Yongzheng became so tired of hierarchy and official quagmire that he began direct correspondence with junior officials, short-circuiting the usual information flow to solve problems.

During my gap year, I spent several weeks in Zimbabwe. On arrival at Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport, I was given an immigration form to complete from a cabinet that looked like it had survived several coups. Midway through filling it out, the power cut —a reminder that some systems, like Zimbabwe's, seem to run on both paperwork and hope.

When the lights flickered back on, I handed the form to the immigration officer, who pointed out I'd left the occupation section blank. I explained I was 19 and traveling. She responded with the kind of blank stare only bureaucracy can perfect. I took the form from her hands and scribbled "Stamp Collector" in the space, for which in return I received a visa and another power cut.

Contrast this with Japan, where efficiency is an art form, but not necessarily a helpful one. A friend recently traveled to Tokyo to get married, despite the fact neither he nor his lovely partner were Japanese. On arrival at the city hall, they were shuffled by a security guard to a rather mundane desk sat between the sections for "DOG LICENSES" and that of "TAX REGISTRATION."

There, I watched my friends' application for marriage be reviewed by no fewer than seven (somewhat confused) officials, with stamps each more decisive than the last. Their original British birth certificates were taken— to be filed in the infinite depths of the Minato City Hall, a place where the efficiency feels more like a ritual than a service. In Japan, it was less about getting married and more about ritual. Efficiency, I realised, was more a cultural value than a practical service At the end, the happy couple posed for photos, with Fujitsu photocopiers for flower arrangements .

In recent years, technology has entered this bureaucratic arena. Governments worldwide have begun to digitise their services, promising a future free from paper forms and interminable queues. The rubber stamp has been replaced by the digital signature, the long queue by the loading screen, but the fundamental experience – that uniquely human blend of hope, frustration, and absurdity – remains stubbornly intact.

I recently attempted to renew my passport online, a process the website cheerfully assured me would take just minutes. An hour later, I found myself locked in a digital dance with a system that seemed determined to reject every photo I uploaded. Apparently, my ears were "too visible" – a criticism I'd never before received and wasn't quite sure how to address.

For those brave souls embarking on their own odyssey through the global maze of officialdom, I humbly offer this hard-won wisdom:

1. Dazzle Your Enemy: Carry every document you've ever owned, the more stamps and seals on them the better. When faced with an unhappy official in a remote corner of a faraway country, quickly wave your school certificates but do not let them see them up close, the paper’s thickness and its mesmerising exam board hologram should have the desired effect. And don’t forget to bring extras, in the land of endless paperwork, the man with a thousand photocopies is king.

2. Develop Skills in Superposition: Learn to be simultaneously assertive and deferential. Schrödinger's Traveler, if you will – existing in a state of both insistence and compliance until the moment of bureaucratic climax.

3. Cultivate Zen-Like Patience: Time moves differently in government offices. What feels like eons to you is but a blink of an eye to the cosmic forces of bureaucracy. Meditate. Bring a book. Consider getting into journaling.

4. Perfect the Art of the Polite Panic: When all else fails, a well-executed moment of controlled hysteria can work wonders. The key is to appear simultaneously desperate and apologetic. NEVER cry. It's a delicate balance, but when mastered, it can melt even the coldest bureaucratic heart.

5. Befriend the Gatekeeper: Never underestimate the power of a genuine smile and a respectful attitude towards the administrative staff. The person at the reception desk often holds more practical power than the official behind the glass. In Colombo, a chat about crab curry with a security guard became my golden ticket, bypassing hours of wrong turns and idle waiting.

   It’s in these small moments—tucked between endless forms and waiting rooms—that humanity cuts through the absurdity. Kafka wasn’t just writing fiction; he was capturing the essence of global bureaucracy. We may all be at the mercy of the red tape, but with a smile and a little patience, we can learn to play the game

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I approach the glass door, my reflection briefly merging with the scene inside and as I step in I realise I am entering a realm where the ordinary transcends the extraordinary.

The initial thing that is obvious is the smell – the top note hits me first. The crisp zing of filter coffee intermingling with the sweet aroma of waffle batter hitting a blisteringly hot iron. These scents dance in the air as the door swings shut behind me. But then, the heart notes of Eau de Waffle emerge. Here is where the savoury elements come into play, the smokiness of bacon being shuffled on the griddle complemented by the richness of the margarine soaked eggs crackling in the pan.

But it is the base notes of the scent that truly define the experience. Deep lingering aromas that still cling to my shirt hours later and burrow themselves deep inside my memories. At the foundation it’s the warm nutty smell of coffee that has been sitting on the burner for 23 hours, but just as vivid is the sweet caramelised sugar smell that can only come from decades of high-fructose corn syrup spills on hot griddles. And underneath it all is one hard to place but so obviously present, the scent of worn vinyl seats and well-rubbed laminated menus. The embodiment of years of late-night conversations and all the human drama that unfolds in the booths that now surround me.

My eyes now begin to take in the scene. Behind the counter are hunched line cooks with their backs to me, like Catholic priests before their altar but instead of incense it is the smoke from bacon rising in front of them. As a waitress approaches me, for just the briefest of seconds eyes across the restaurant flicker to scan me. In a booth near the window a lone trucker sits over his three stacked plates, while at the counter two twenty-somethings in rumpled clothes lean in close, whispering at the same volume as the grill.

The waitress approaches, and I notice she has two name badges. My eyes move between them, adding to the surreal atmosphere - one reads "SHAUNA," the other "SHAWNA." She meets my gaze with the weary but knowing look of someone who's seen a thousand late-night souls just like me and I avoid the obvious question. With a bright smile, she gestures towards an empty booth, her movements efficient yet almost graceful, like a dancer who knows her routine by heart. As she slides the laminated menu in front of me, her hand lingers for a moment on its worn surface. 'Coffee?' she asks, her voice low and slightly raspy, perfectly suited to this hour between worlds. I nod, and she's gone in a swish of blue uniform, leaving me to contemplate my choices.

I run my fingers across the menu, its slight stickiness a testament to countless spills and good times. In the fluorescent light, the staged images of waffles and hash browns take on an almost iconographic quality. I find myself studying each option like a scholar of an ancient text searching for meaning in the various arrangements. The hash browns, I realise, are not merely a side dish, but a canvas for a deeply personal ritual. Each order is a incantation, a string of words that holds power and meaning:

1. "Scattered" - the base state, potato shreds spread across the grill like stars in a constellation.

2. "Smothered" - onions caramelized and folded in, adding depth and mystery to the mixture.

3. "Covered" - a blanket of melted cheese, binding the elements together in golden harmony.

4. "Chunked" - bits of ham interspersed throughout, adding a salty counterpoint to the symphony.

5. "Diced" - tomatoes, bringing a hint of acidity, a reminder of daylight in this nocturnal realm.

6. "Peppered" - a dusting of jalapeños, a spell of warmth and subtle heat.

7. "Capped" - crowned with mushrooms, earthy and grounding.

8. "Topped" - chili ladled over, a final layer of complex, savory richness.

I watch as the young man at the counter places his order, the girl with him watching- "Scattered, smothered, and covered" - the words rolling off his tongue with the ease of long practice.

Just as I was about to order, a large group of college-age boys storm in loudly laughing and screaming at each other - entirely in a world of their own.

“Boys,” Shawna/Shauna says, her voice firm but not unkind. “Keep it down.”

They fall silent, like children called out by their teacher, and slip into their booth.

Shawna/Shauna returns to my table and looks down expectantly, her pen poised: “So what will it be?”

"Hash browns," I begin, the words feeling weighty.

"Scattered, smothered, and covered.”

She nods, I fantasise that it is a nod of approval. "Waffle with that?"

"Yes," I stutter, improvising. "A pecan one."

As she turns to place my order, I watch her approach the open kitchen's threshold. She calls out the order in a singsong chant that seems to hover in the air. The grill hisses as potato shreds hit its surface, the sound like a secret being whispered. onions follow, their sharp scent cutting through the symphony of aromas. Cheese is sprinkled last, cheerfully coagulating the entire meal together.

Shawna/Shauna returns with my food, the plate of hash browns enticingly glistening with spray oil, setting it down gently in front of me. For a moment, she lingers, her tired eyes studying me. "First time here?" Shawna/Shauna asks.

"Is it that obvious?" I laugh.

She smiles. "Your accent gave you away. Where you from?"

"England," I reply. "I have to ask – which name is correct?"

"Oh, both of them, honey," she says with a wink before disappearing once more.

I look at my two plates. The waffle, golden and warm, is gridded like the streets of an unknown city, pecans peeking through. On another plate beside it, the hash browns gleam, a palette of browns and golds that would make Rembrandt weep.

The first bite of waffle is a revelation. Its crisp exterior immediately gives way to a tender interior that melts on my tongue. It's sweet, but not cloying. I close my eyes, savouring the moment, and I swear I can taste not just imitation butter and batter, but the essence of countless dawns, of weary travelers finding solace, of night owls seeking sustenance. Waffle House famously never closes and is open 24/7, 365 days a year, come rain or hurricane. Many branches even do not have keys as their doors are never locked.

I turn my attention to the hash browns – scattered, smothered, and covered, as I'd ordered by copying my fellow diner. The first forkful is a symphony of textures and flavours. The potatoes offer a satisfying crunch that gives way to a soft interior. The onions, caramelised to perfection, provide a sweet counterpoint to the savoury potatoes. And the American cheese, now cooled just enough to have reached that perfect state between molten and solid, binds it all together in a cohesive whole.

As I lean back, full and satisfied, I realise there is a strange comfort in the stillness here. It’s broken only by the occasional clatter of plates and the low murmur of conversation. The fluorescent lights buzz softly, creating a cocoon of warmth against the dark night outside. In this moment of contentment, my mind drifts to other late-night havens I've encountered on my travels.

The Waffle House's yellow glow reminds me of the harsh fluorescent lights of a bus station on the outskirts of Delhi, where weary travelers dozed across hard plastic seats, waiting for dawn. The sizzle of the grill echoes the sounds of a 24-hour food court in a rundown Dubai mall, where homesick migrant workers gathered over steaming bowls of comfort food from their home countries. Even the worn vinyl of the booth beneath me feels familiar, like the seats of an all-night diner in Tokyo where salarymen sought solace in bowls of ramen after missing their last trains home.

Each of these places, I realise, is its own little sanctuary—a space where time seems to bend and the usual rules of the world don't quite apply. Like this Waffle House, they offer refuge to night shift workers, early risers, and everyone in between, creating pockets of shared humanity in the quiet hours when most of the world sleeps

Shauna/Shawna appears, as if summoned by the completion of my meal, to refill my coffee cup one last time. "Anything else?" she asks, and I shake my head, still too wrapped in the lingering afterglow of this late-night sacrament to form words.

There’s something about the midnight hours that pulls people together, even in our solitude. Maybe it’s the shared sense of being awake when most of the world is asleep, or maybe it’s the quiet understanding that, in places like this, everyone’s looking for something—whether it’s a meal, a moment of peace, or just a brief escape from the road.

For me, Waffle House is like a familiar face in a strange town. It’s a place that asks nothing of you except that you sit, eat, and exist. No questions, no expectations. Just a booth, a cup of coffee, and the unspoken knowledge that you belong here, even if only for a short while.

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What I’ve been reading:

How pour-over coffee got good: By my friend Nick Whitaker, who knows more about coffee than anyone else I know. It convinced me to finally get a real coffee machine and while the machine annoys me on a daily basis, the coffee is so much better.

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West: I found this in a second-hand bookstore last week and have been enthralled by it ever since. A biography of one of the most interesting men the West has ever produced.

The Alteration: I actually read this several years ago but have recommended it twice in the past fortnight to others. By Kingsley Amis, it is a novel set in an England that never experienced the Reformation and as a result no Industrial Revolution.

He had joined this monastery as an 18 year-old when King George VI was still on the throne. He is now 89 and has no plans to be anywhere else. In the intervening 71 years, he has edited multiple translations of the Bible, written more than 20 books, and taught thousands of pupils. With little of value to add, I largely listened. He eventually told me he had to go as he had some mowing to do and, hitching his black cassock, wandered off.

I had come to Ampleforth Abbey for two reasons. The first was to have an adventure with some friends I was visiting nearby and the second was because my father had been to school there for five years of his life in the late 1960s. Ampleforth is a Benedictine monastery in North Yorkshire that sits in its own valley overlooking fields of sheep dotted like they are in a John Constable painting and stands as a living testament to a tradition that once blanketed England. Created after the 19th Century Catholic Emancipation, the monks for many years ran a school of several hundred boys, a school which is still on site but now both legally separate from the monastery and co-educational.

Yet, as I watched the elderly monk amble away to his gardening, I couldn't help but reflect on the vast tapestry of knowledge, culture, and spirituality across England that was torn apart by King Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s. For those unaware, this was part of the English Reformation and the king’s desire to raise money to fund his many wars and even greater debts by selling the monasteries’ lands and valuables.

The monk's casual mention of mowing seemed almost comically mundane, yet it echoed a truth that has persisted through centuries: monasteries were not just houses of prayer, but vibrant communities that shaped the very landscape around them. As I stood there, I tried to imagine the country as it once was, a land where every few miles you might encounter a monastery, each a beacon of learning, spirituality, and economic activity.

Each of the marks on the map above represents a monastery in England and Wales that existed prior to their dissolution. Each point represents not just a building, but a centre of knowledge, economy, and spirituality that anchored local communities for centuries. Hundreds of such places disappeared almost overnight.

Desperate to grasp the magnitude of this loss, I forced my friends into their hatchback, and we set off for Fountains Abbey, just a few miles from Ampleforth's doors and for centuries a large Catholic monastery. As we approached, the ruins loomed before us, a skeletal reminder of former glory now accessed through a cheerful visitor centre that sold merchandise and fresh sponge cake.

Standing amidst the crumbling walls, I nearly stumbled over a plaque that read: "CAUTION - ECHOES OF THE PAST CAN BE HEARD HERE." The irony wasn't lost on me. These stones, once witness to centuries of chanted prayers and scholarly discourse, now stood silent. Yet, in that silence, the weight of loss seemed to press in from all sides.

The abbey wasn't merely built; it was strategically placed within this valley, part of a sacred geography that once blanketed England. Monasteries like Fountains were often situated in remote locations, their very isolation serving both practical and spiritual purposes. They became transformative forces, taming wilderness both literally and symbolically, turning undeveloped land into centers of learning, spirituality, and economic activity. The monks who chose this spot didn't just build an abbey; they cultivated a unique spirit of place that continues to touch visitors today, even as nature reclaims the ruins.

Yet, as I turned from the crumbling walls to check my smartphone and look at the photos I had taken, I was reminded of the stark contrast between this rooted, place-bound existence and our modern, increasingly placeless world. Where monks once spent lifetimes in one valley, many of us now flit between cities, countries, and virtual spaces, our sense of place becoming completely fluid. Even for this email, I have edited it as a draft in at least four different countries. Standing in Fountains Abbey, or walking the grounds of Ampleforth, offered a poignant counterpoint to this sense of placelessness. These sites remind us of the power of a life deeply connected to a single place, of the richness that can accumulate when generations pour their devotion and labor into one spot. In a world where we can virtually visit any place on Earth, these ruins and living monasteries call us with their energy back to the profound importance of being present, truly present, in a place dense with history and meanings.

I closed my eyes, trying to imagine the refectory bustling with activity - the scrape of pewter plates, the murmur of conversation in both deep Yorkshire dialects and in Latin, the rustle of robes. Here, in this very spot, monks once pored over manuscripts, preserving and advancing knowledge that spanned from theology to herbal medicine, from agricultural techniques to architectural innovations.

The dissolution didn't just silence prayers; it silenced a vast library of practical and spiritual wisdom. Monastic gardens, once laboratories of early pharmacology, were left to grow wild. Agricultural techniques, honed over centuries, were lost as lands changed hands. The very stones of the abbey, once a testament to architectural expertise, began their slow crumble into romantic ruins.

But the loss extended beyond the tangible. As I wandered through the nave, its soaring arches open to the sky, I thought about the concept of sacred space. For medieval people, these monasteries were more than buildings - they were thin places where heaven and earth seemed to touch. We see our urban skyscrapers now as normal buildings we walk past, but imagine to the eye of a rural English peasant that an abbey like Fountains would almost certainly be the grandest structure they had ever seen. The dissolution didn't just change who owned land and fields, it fundamentally altered how people interacted with the divine and saw God.

The economic impact of the loss of such a place must have been seismic. Fountains Abbey, like many others, was once the heart of a complex economic ecosystem. It provided employment for hundreds, drove trade, and offered a safety net for the poor and sick. As the abbey fell silent, so too must have the bustle of commerce and industry that once animated the surrounding countryside.

Returning to Ampleforth, the contrast was stark. Here, the tradition lives on, adapted for the modern world but still recognizably part of that ancient lineage. I thought of my father, who had walked these same grounds as a schoolboy in the late 1960s, and I thought of Father Adrian Convery.

When my father had been terminally ill, I had an email correspondence with Father Adrian, a monk at Ampleforth. Father Adrian had written to me and said that he had been my father’s housemaster many decades prior. He promised he would pray for my father, and when he died he made that promise again. When I was invited up to North Yorkshire, I had hoped to meet Father Adrian but I learnt he had died earlier this year. The sense of connection across time and space was palpable. Before leaving, I made sure to say a prayer for Father Adrian, completing a circle of spiritual care that spanned generations and tied me, however tenuously, to this place and its enduring tradition.

As I walked to our car, I caught sight of another monk, reading a book in his hand and striding along a path and somehow not stumbling once. For a moment, superimposed on this scene, I saw an echo of countless monks who had walked similar paths over the centuries - at Fountains, at Glastonbury, at hundreds of other sites now reduced to picturesque ruins.

The dissolution of the monasteries was more than a political act or a religious schism. It was the unraveling of a way of life, a network of knowledge, and a destruction of a concept of sacred space that had defined England for centuries. Yet, standing in Ampleforth's peaceful valley, watching the elderly monk on his slow perambulation, I was struck by the resilience of tradition. Though diminished, it endures - in places like Ampleforth, in the ruins that still dot our landscape, and in the subtle ways it continues to shape our understanding of community, learning, and the sacred.

As I left the grounds, the words on that plaque at Fountains echoed in my mind. Indeed, if we listen carefully, those echoes can be heard not just in the ruins, but in the living traditions that have survived against all odds. They remind us of what was lost, but also of what endures - a testament to the indomitable nature of faith, place, and human connection.

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What I’ve been reading:

The Narrow Corner: I actually read this last year but never recommended it at the time. It is one of Maugham’s lesser known stories but is a very well written account of a South Sea voyage and perfect if you are travelling to Indonesia or the Spice Islands any time soon.

The Surfer's Journal: While not anything approaching a serious surfer, the Surfer’s Journal has become one of my favourite magazines. It is beautiful and tells stories from how the tuna has inspired the shape of surfboard fins to interviews with musicians and artists. I highly recommend a subscription.

Tributes were paid to the man who had helped fight Napoleon before going to South America to help lead Venezuela’s war of independence in the 1810s.

What’s doubtful, however, is that the funeral’s eulogy mentioned Gregor MacGregor’s other claim to fame. In 1825, his over-active imagination and desire for money single handedly caused a run on the Bank of England and the closure of dozens of other banks across Britain.

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It all began in 1820 when MacGregor, on his way back from Venezuela, stopped off in Honduras to speak to the local king. Following an exchange of rum and jewels, MacGregor was given 8,000,000 acres of prime Honduran swampland.

Safely back in Britain, MacGregor had used his journey to conjure his newly found land into the form of a country he called Poyais and made himself its king. Despite there being no real settlements there, he told all of London society that his palace sat in a capital of 20,000 citizens and that his farmers had three bountiful harvests each year. To accompany a constitution and book of laws was even a 355-page guidebook to Poyais that included advice to travellers and sketches of this fantasy.

An excitable British public fell for it all hook, line, and sinker, and rich off the Napoleonic wars they saw an opportunity to get even richer. With promised interest rates of 6 per cent, MacGregor quickly closed a £200,000 bond issue in 1822. Hundreds of others bought up land in Poyais, which went for four shillings an acre.

Not only was there fictional land on offer, but MacGregor and his friends had generated an entirely fictitious society. Poyais had a tricameral parliament, its own titles of nobility, and a remarkably secure banking and financial system. It all went so far that an ambassador of Poyais, who did not even know it was a fantasy, presented letters of credence to King George IV.

The problem with selling thousands of acres of a country’s prime colonial land and selling commissions in its army, is eventually they will want to see it. In 1823, four ships filled with settlers, soldiers, and civil servants due to run the administration of Poyais set off for its supposed capital: St Joseph. Most were fellow Scotsmen of MacGregor and were excited to be heading to land where there were said to be “globules of gold” scattered on the ground. As the settlers lined up at the docks to say goodbye to their king, MacGregor had them hand over any British currency for which he gave them completely worthless Poyais dollars.

When the first ship docked, the inhabitants did not find the promised opera house or royal palace but instead a local tribe and two American hermits who had come to this empty land for solitude. The colonists on the first two ships were eventually rescued and the remaining two diverted on hearing the disappointing news, while the Royal Navy intercepted a further five ships filled with settlers

By 1824, a few dozen of the surviving colonists began to trickle back to Britain and the truth emerged. Conveniently, MacGregor had already fled to France where he was conducting the same scheme there but with suspicions rising the French would-be settlers of Poyais were not allowed to leave and MacGregor disappeared once more.

He would later be arrested in France and, after a trial, be acquitted due to claiming that he himself had been the victim of a fraud and embezzlement and that the settlers had gone to the wrong place. He returned to England and was once more arrested and released after making similar claims. The public did not forgive him and he became a figure of ridicule. Even the local king in Honduras revoked his original land grant.

As the truth emerged and it became clear the Poyais bonds would never be redeemed, the London market went into chaos, now known as the Panic of 1825. 12 major banks in Britain closed and in total 70 collapsed thanks to MacGregor’s fantasy and a general over eagerness for South American government bonds.

The country banks that had helped finance the Industrial Revolution went under. Many successful middle class Britons had invested their life savings in land they had never seen and the effects were disastrous, with bankruptcies doubling that year alone.

With no hope in Europe, MacGregor fled to Venezuela where his misdeeds in England were unknown and he was given a pension for his revolutionary service and where he died peacefully in 1845.

To this day the Poyais affair serves as a stark reminder of the enduring human susceptibility to grand promises of easy wealth. While financial regulations have significantly evolved since MacGregor's time, modern investors still face the appeal of an old-fashioned bubble.

Readers may be interested to know that in 2024, what would have been the land of Poyais in Honduras remains undeveloped.

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For most of humanity’s history, our tallest mountains have been in realms entirely separate from those on earth. In ancient times, gods were believed to reside on these peaks.

On the summit of Mount Everest is said to live Miyolangsangma, the Buddhist goddess of inexhaustible giving. The idea of gods hanging out up there is not absurd, given that it was physically and technically impossible for anyone to reach such summits until recently. Mount Olympus, believed to be the home of Zeus and his family, wasn't summited until 1913 and it wasn't until 1953 that Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary reached the peak of Mount Everest.

The expedition Sir Edmund took part in was the culmination of years of planning and required the efforts of hundreds of porters and staff all to support just 10 climbers. This ancient perception of these peaks as sacred spaces contrasts sharply with today's reality. In 2019, a record-breaking 891 people trampled through Miyolangsangma’s palace, with some days seeing over 200 climbers attempting the summit.

Beneath these explorers’ layers of North Face jackets are, without any ill intent, some rather ordinary people. The typical Everest climber today is not the intrepid explorer of yesteryear but rather a wealthy amateur with a penchant for adventure.

The average climber is 44 years old and spends between $30,000 and $100,000 on the expedition. This shift has brought in a new demographic that views Everest as a status symbol rather than a sacred challenge. Wealthy surgeons from places like Sioux Falls in South Dakota will join Wall Street investment bankers in booking their annual leave with HR to climb Everest and once returned, the fact will likely become one of their most often repeated anecdotes for the rest of their lives.1

Watching the video reminded me of a remark by Sir Wilfred Thesiger. Sir Wilfred Thesiger, a British explorer and writer born in 1910 and known for his travels in the Arabian Peninsula and Africa. All along the way, he took both mesmerising photographs and wrote several books. In 1999 he spoke to the Washington Post and said something that haunts me:

“The biggest misfortune in human history is the invention of the combustion engine. Cars and aeroplanes diminish the world, rob it of all its diversity. Young men who meet me want to know how they could do what I've done. But all they can be is tourists now.”

Take for instance our imaginary surgeon from South Dakota who wants to climb Everest. A quick search on Google Flights tells me that he if drove to the nearby Sioux Falls airport on Monday after work, he’d be able to get an American Airlines flight to Dallas at 7pm that evening. He’d then be able to catch the 11pm Dallas to Doha Qatar Airways flight landing the next evening.

After a short layover in Doha, he’d be able to catch another Qatar Airways flight and be in Tribhuvan Airport in Nepal just less than 100 miles from Mount Everest on Wednesday morning. A 30 hour journey across the world, all for the price of $1,000.

The aeroplane has destroyed the concept of distance for us in the way that motor cars destroyed the concept of distance for people of Wilfred Thesiger’s time.

It is obviously undeniable that in the same period of time as distance’s destruction, humanity has seen history’s greatest increase in quality of life and development by any reductive measure. But as the famous French criminologist Edmond Locard taught us, “Every contact leaves a trace.”

In 2001, just two years before he died, Sir Wilfred gave a television interview in his nursing home which can still be watched on YouTube. In it, with shaking hands and a quiet voice he reflected further on the shrinking of the planet over his lifetime:

The world has now been diminished completely. There is no variety anywhere. You go off to the Congo and in the forest will find an advertisement for Coca Cola.

It is not just speed and distance. I've found that the influence of globalisation and modern transportation has made its mark on our experiences no matter the destination.

I recently travelled to San Sebastián in Spain with two friends Nick and Zach. Nick is a coffee obsessive and you can put him in any part of the world and he will be able to find what he calls a speciality coffee shop.

I have been to several countries in every corner of the world with Nick and as a result to several of these coffee shops, and they are all exactly the same. On walking through the door, whether it is in a dingy Chengdu street or a quiet corner of Beirut, you enter a consulate of coffee hipsters.

Minimalist design with climbing plants adorn the sidelines as baristas in Carhartt workwear dial in their grinders to ensure your ‘Kiwi Bikini’ drip coffee is as good as it can be.

These shops are meant to be manifestations of a rejection of the “second wave” of coffee and its chains like Starbucks but in reality they are just as homogenous as what they rebel against, outposts of western culture in remote corners of the world. For tourists it allows them to feel at home and for locals it lets them replace their culture with a global one. For Nick it’s joyous, for me it’s depressing.

The ubiquity of specialist coffee is just part of the substitution of experiences in place of travel. In a world where journeys that took even our ancestors weeks of planning and months of travel, being able to accomplish the same with a click and a short flight prevents us really from being able to travel at all.

It feels unfair to gatekeep our imaginary surgeon from Sioux Falls from doing what he wants, but it should be up to us to actively cultivate a sense of awe and an appreciation for the unknown. We have been so successful as a human race that we have made so much not only easily achievable technologically but also affordable.

Petra, the ancient Nabatean city in Jordan and a wonder of the world, was once lost for almost 2,000 years. Now, just two centuries on from being discovered by a wandering Swiss explorer, it can be accessed by anyone able to pay the £52 that a WizzAir flight from London to Amman costs.

Since Petra’s rediscovery in 1812, tourist numbers have grown exponentially. In the early 1900s, only a handful of intrepid travelers visited the site each year. Today, it welcomes more than a million visitors annually.

In the shadow of the famous Treasury you will find crowds of tourists being shepherded into the ideal spot to immediately take the best photo to inform their Instagram followers. Petra has always been a place for travellers, having become wealthy as a Silk Road hub, but it was just a small part of a long and treacherous journey.

I am glad so many can see the beauty of Petra but its transformation from a lost city to a mass tourism destination is a stark example of how increased access and commercialisation have changed the nature of travel.

Thesiger himself only explored Arabia because he was disgusted by what he saw as the modern world in Europe. However, unlike in Thesiger’s time, there are no corners of the world left to find and few places for anyone of his mindset to escape to other than totalitarian hermit states like North Korea or Turkmenistan.

Something fundamental has been lost in the process of travel. The experience is safer and more accessible but the thrill of setting out into the unknown, of immersing oneself fully in a new culture and way of life, has been replaced by a superficial sampling of experiences.2

For instance in Indonesia you can spend time with the Mentawai people, an indigenous tribe who from photos posted on social media by intrepid travellers appear to wear loincloths and live on an island like the uncontacted tribes last seen in your parents’ faded copies of National Geographic.

At first glance it would seem that despite my complaints, there really are cultures still out there that exist for themselves as opposed to the eyes of outsiders.

Instagram captions describe the Mentawai as one of the planet’s “last hunter gatherer tribes.” One visitor even proudly said online that during the trip he felt it was like “living thousands of years ago” and that he met a shaman who revealed the tribe do not even know about the western concepts of polyester or even sexuality. Remarkably, however, they do know about the western concept of websites and advertise an “immersive experience” for just $500 per person on theirs with an included “photo session.”

With no hopes even in the remote islands of Indonesia, I remain curious as to where and under what conditions we can actually travel somewhere and not be tourists? Please do get in touch with any recommendations by emailing or by commenting on this post.

In 1938, my grandfather got a job in East Africa working for the oil company Shell. It took him two weeks to travel from London to Mombasa, calling along the way at Marseilles, Malta, Port Said, Suez, Port Sudan, and Aden. Aged 22, he was due to be out there for three years and would have been unlikely to see Britain before then. Half a century later he reflected on that journey out to Africa in his book Going Solo.

Nowadays you can fly to Mombasa in a few hours and you stop nowhere and nothing is fabulous anymore.

Nothing is fabulous anymore, all we can be is tourists now. But at least we’re tourists with good coffee.

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What I’ve been reading:

A Kind of Anger - Eric Ambler: As many of you know, I am partial to a vintage crime thriller. This 1950s story weaves in tales of sensationalist magazines and washed up journalists hunting the ghosts of Arab spies and American conmen in glamorous European settings.

Coast to Coast - Jan Morris: Written just after accompanying Sir Edmund Hillary’s Mount Everest expedition, this tells a story of an America that no longer exists and is simply really good fun.

At the cashier’s desk, Arnold flashed his tobacco-stained grin and said they needed a safety deposit box for some “property of great value.” With some skepticism, the two were shown into the bank’s vault and there produced a pouch of stones and gems – mostly beautifully rough diamonds. Slack remained silent as Arnold explained they had found a section of the plains in the American west covered with diamonds and other stones, and they had simply scooped them up and now needed somewhere to keep them safe. The man from the Bank of California gave the pair a receipt and the stones were locked away, with Arnold and Slack disappearing back into the busy San Francisco streets.

The Initial Pitch

Arnold and Slack, Kentucky natives, each bore an adventurous and somewhat notorious past. Philip Arnold, a former miner and bookkeeper, and John Slack, a former soldier turned gold prospector, were well-equipped for a scheme of grand proportions. Before the end of the day, the branch’s manager had got in touch with the founder of the Bank of California, a man called William Ralston. At the time, the gold rush mentality had hooked America and now the promise of the West had come to life. Here was a tale of untold riches made manifest in the heart of the city. Ralston had invested in anything that made money, from the railway to hotels to mining and the pouch of gems sitting in his bank’s vault sounded like the perfect opportunity.

Arnold and Slack found themselves summoned to Ralston's plush office. There, the banker subjected them to a thorough interrogation. At first it appeared the two prospectors were frightened and didn’t really want to talk, but eventually with Arnold once again as the spokesman, they began to discuss their find. Arnold said the field was in “Indian country” and was littered with everything from diamonds to rubies, so prevalent even someone digging with their hands would come home a millionaire.

One thing Arnold was clear on was that the pair would not reveal the field’s location, even within the nearest thousand miles. Word quickly spread California and before long groups of diamond hunters were, to no avail, digging across all of the southwest for this apparent field of gems.

In the meantime, a valuer was brought in and said that the stones deposited in the bank were worth around $125,000 ($3 million today1). Realising he was onto something potentially massive, Ralston needed help and for that he turned to an old friend, Asbury Harpenden.

Assembling the Investors

Asbury Harpenden was a bizarre character with a tumultuous past. As a teenager he had run away from home to join an ill-fated invasion of Nicaragua in 1856 led by a mercenary group dedicated to turning the South American state into a privately owned pro-slavery colony of the United States. Harpenden eventually returned home and his father, keen for his son not to invade anywhere else, sent him off to California. Before long, Harpenden had become wealthy from mining but by 22 had decided he would go back to his old ways.

In 1861 the American Civil War between the United States and the Confederate States had begun over the issue of slavery. Harpenden saw an opportunity and joined a group planning to seize San Francisco from the United States and turn it into a breakaway country which would be called the Pacific Republic, where slavery would be legalised and span the western coast from California to the border with Canada.

The Pacific Republic plan was disrupted at the last minute and Harpenden fled, with the assistance of a secret society known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, to the east coast where he found his way to Richmond in Virginia, the capital of the Confederate States of America. There he obtained a letter of marque, a document that allowed him to become a privateer at sea for the Confederacy. With this letter he planned to return to San Francisco and take a ship into the Pacific and wreak havoc on American shipping, sending loot back to the Confederacy and help them win the war. On the very first night aboard his ship, Harpenden was boarded and captured by the US Navy and quickly sentenced to 10 years in Alcatraz for treason.

Luckily for Harpenden he only had to serve a few months in prison before Abraham Lincoln’s amnesty for Confederate traitors was put into force and the failed pirate gained his freedom. He returned to mining and grew his fortune, eventually moving to London in 1871 to set up a financial newspaper called the London Financial Review. While with the pretence of a newspaper, really it was dedicated to getting investment from British banks and financiers in American mining schemes, many of which lacked any credibility. It was at the newspaper’s offices that Ralston wrote to him. In his (unreliable) memoirs2, Harpenden states that the urgent telegram Ralston sent cost $1,100 ($30,000 today) and that it begged him to come to California:

He said that diamonds of incalculable value could be gathered in limitless quantities at nominal expense; that they could be picked up on the ant hills; that at a low estimate it was a $50,000,000 proposition; that he and George D. Roberts, a well-known mining man, were in practical control. Finally he almost demanded that I should drop everything, take the next steamer and act as general manager.

The extravagance of his language alone seemed to me to indicate that he was laboring under some strange delusion. However, diamonds or no diamonds, I was in no position to stir. I cabled him briefly that my business in London was of too vital importance to admit of considering other engagements.

George Roberts was another San Francisco businessman who had been approached by Arnold and Slack, Arnold had told Roberts that the discovery must remain a secret but all that did was ensure it spread farther and wider.

However, despite his initial reluctance, Harpenden could not ignore the lure of a potential fortune. He wrote that despite his refusal to help, expensive telegram after expensive telegram began to arrive. If you consider $50 million from 1872, today it would be be worth billions in terms of economic value, and the only people who knew how to find it were Arnold and the silent Slack. The word spread in London and America, with many calling on Harpenden to find out more. In his memoirs, Harpenden claims that even the world-famous financier Lionel de Rothschild asked to see him:

Baron Rothschild sought an interview. He asked me what I knew about the diamond fields, and I frankly showed him Mr. Ralston's cables. He read them with interest and asked me what I thought myself. I told him that while I had great confidence in Mr. Ralston, I thought he must have been imposed upon in some way, and that in due season the bubble would burst.

Baron Rothschild mused a moment. "Do not be so sure of that," he said. "America is a very large country. It has furnished the world with many surprises already. Perhaps it may have others in store. At any rate, if you find cause to change your opinion, kindly let me know."

This remark, made by perhaps the keenest financier in the world, was enough to set any one thinking hard.

Before long, Harpenden had given in and was on his way to San Francisco, arriving in May 1872. Their Arnold and Slack met with Ralston, Harpenden and Roberts. The three offered to buy out Arnold and Slack, but as they refused to share any details of the location nor let anyone go with them, the deal would be contingent on Arnold and Slack bringing more diamonds from the same location as a feature of good faith, to which the pair agreed.

Within just a few months, Harpenden met Arnold and Slack at a railway station in the small Californian town of Lathrop. Slack was asleep while Arnold guarded a large buckskin package, when Slack woke the two told Harpenden that they had found a huge quantity of stones that they reckoned to be worth $2 million ($51 million today). So many, in fact, that the diamonds had to be put into two separate sacks, with one unfortunately lost in some river rapids despite their best efforts. Despite this, Arnold hoped, Harpenden and his business partners would be happy with the sack full of just $1 million worth of diamonds in it. Harpenden thanked the pair and said he would be in touch, when he got home he cut open the sack and poured it over his billiard table, which was quickly flooded with sparkling diamonds and rubies.

The very next day Harpenden and his fellow investors gathered together, along with a few other mining investors. The group agreed they needed to act fast and came up with a plan. A sample of the diamonds would be sent to New York, to be examined by Charles Tiffany, the founder of Tiffany & Co. The group also sketched out the corporation they would establish, and what laws would need to be changed to guarantee the rights over the location. They also told Arnold and Slack that the time for secrecy was over, and that they would have to agree to a visit to the diamond field with the investors and a diamond expert, to which the pair reluctantly agreed in return for $50,000 each (over $1 million today) – paid upon a satisfactory report from Mr Tiffany and the site visit.

The Appraisal

The excitement was palpable as Harpenden took the sample gems in a bag to New York, to a house in the city where Mr Tiffany and other notables like congressmen and bankers were eagerly waiting. Harpenden opened the bag and offered to the world’s greatest authority on precious stones. Tiffany quietly began to remove the gems, a few diamonds, then some rubies, emeralds, even sapphires. He sorted them into little piles on a table, holding some up to the light with his expert eye. "Gentlemen," Tiffany said, “these are beyond question precious stones of enormous value … I will report to you further in two days."

Two days later, Tiffany wrote to Harpenden with the official report of his gemologists. The small selection of stones from the Arnold’s second expedition were, Tiffany wrote, worth $150,000 ($4 million today), meaning that the sack Arnold handed over at the railway station would be worth well over $1 million. The report spread like wildfire and every investor in America wanted a piece of the pie. The next stage was a site visit for the investors with Arnold, Slack, and the mining expert - Henry Janin.

The Site Visit

At Omaha, in Nebraska, Harpenden and his New York investors met Ralston and Roberts coming from San Francisco by rail. Before the two groups could carry on, Arnold began to cause problems, furious that he and Slack would have to reveal the location of this wealth to all and sundry. While the investors were cynical, they relented and the San Francisco bankers were sent home. Harpenden, Janin, Arnold and Slack, got off at the end of the railway in Rawlins, a settlement in southern Wyoming. There they set out with an expeditionary group, led by Arnold and Slack. Harpenden writes the journey was erratic, walking up and down hills for four days in search of landmarks. Eventually Arnold declared they had arrived. Harpenden was sure he heard a train whistle, impossible given how long they had been walking and Arnold smiled and said it couldn’t be as they were more than 100 miles from the nearest railway.

The group secured their horses and Arnold and Slack shrugged and said they could look wherever they wanted; the whole place was filled with diamonds. With a few shovels, everyone split up to try and be the first to find a gemstone. Within just a few minutes, one of Harpenden’s friends yelled, holding up a large diamond. For the next few hours, such finds of diamonds, rubies and emeralds were unending. For two days the group camped and worked the field and by the end of it Janin had decided it was the real deal and endorsed Arnold and Slack’s finds. This field, Janin said, would control the entire world’s gem market. Janin would later write in his report that with just 20 workers, the field would generate $1 million ($26 million today) of diamonds each month. The investors returned home while Arnold and Slack went their own way, waiting their payment.

By late summer 1872 and with Tiffany and Janin’s reports in hand, it was not long before the “San Francisco and New York Mining Company” had been formed with share capital of $10 million ($4 billion today when considered as wealth), $2 million of which was offered out and immediately snapped up by some of New York and San Francisco’s wealthiest as well as Baron Rothschild. Ralston and Harpenden set up offices across the country, and newspapers around the world were filled with excitement.

The investors were left with the matter of Arnold and Slack, in addition to their original payment of $100,000, the pair were convinced to sell out their remaining interest for a further $300,000 which was cashed immediately by Arnold. Having given Harpenden the true location of the fields, Arnold and Slack said they would return to Kentucky. It was at this point Harpenden realised that the four day zig-zag journey from Rawlins had only taken them 25 miles, not the 100 Arnold had claimed.

The Unravelling

It was to the field, 25 miles from Rawlins, that the US Government sent a man called Clarence King in November 1872. King, a geologist, had been despatched to examine the small corner of America that could become one of the most valuable places in the world. One of King’s colleagues had been shown the diamonds Janin found, which seemed unusual for the area. King could not get the exact spot out of Ralston and Harpenden but was able to engage the same guides they had, who took the geologist to where the expedition had been. There, King and his group began finding gems just as Harpenden had a few months before. It was agreed after several days that the discovery was genuine and the group would go to San Francisco and talk with the company’s executives. Just before they left, a German member of King’s group who had been pocketing a good number of the diamonds found held one up to the light and yelled for King.

“Look here, Mr. King," the German said. “This is the bulliest diamond field as never was. It not only produces diamonds, but cuts them moreover also.”

In his hand he held a great diamond, found in a hole in the ground but half of which had been obviously tooled and polished by a diamond cutter. King grabbed the diamond out of the German’s hand and realised that everyone from Ralston, to Baron Rothschild, to Charles Tiffany, had all been duped. The group began looking harder and realised that the “anthills” that many of these stones had been found in were carefully constructed set pieces where exactly eight inches down a single uncut diamond sat. Similarly rubies and emeralds had even been jammed into the crevices of boulders and all designed to be found. During this, a smartly-dressed city man approached King’s party and asked if they had found any diamonds. He turned out to be J.F. Berry, an investor in Ralston’s mining company that had followed King and watched him with a telescope to try and see the diamond field for himself. Being told of the fraud, Berry, a wealthy New York diamond dealer, told King how glad he was to have the chance to sell the stock short and quickly left the scene.

Realising the impact his discovery would have on the market, King dismissed the idea of a meeting with Ralston’s group and rushed to the railway station where he immediately sent a telegram to the company, the field had been “salted” - a term to refer to the planting of precious metals in an otherwise empty place. It had taken off as a trend in the gold rush to sell empty mines to speculators, and had even brought down a governor of a western state who had salted diamonds to try and bring in investors. Dozens of America’s richest and most powerful men had all fallen for Arnold and Slack’s ruse and the shares of the San Francisco and New York Mining Company weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. But how had they done it? The embarrassed investors hired an agency of private detectives and soon the story began to emerge.

The Salting

In 1870, Philip Arnold and John Slack had made a bit of money opening and selling mines in the American west. By that year, the pair had $50,000 in ready cash and with that money Arnold took a boat to Europe. He never travelled through American ports, departing and returning instead from Canada. In late 1870, Arnold appeared in the diamond markets of Amsterdam. Sellers there were shown Arnold’s photograph by the detectives, they remembered him. He was a flashy American who had come and bought cheap and inferior rough diamonds in large quantities as well as a few other gems. With these, he returned to America and with Slack went to the Bank of California in San Francisco.

When Ralston and the others took the bait, the pair realised they needed more stones as the investors would expect to see an actual diamond field. While Slack remained in America and Harpenden was in New York, Arnold returned once again to Europe via Canada, but this time sailing to London. In London, the detectives learnt, he toured all of the largest gem dealers buying up huge quantities of rough stones. He insisted he was only interested in extremely low quality diamonds and gems, the type used for drilling. The largest dealer showed him a pile, expecting Arnold to select a few but the American turned and asked “How much for the lot?”

Arnold handed over $15,000 in cash - a sum equivalent to $400,000 today. Pocketing the packaged diamonds, he set off for America. Arnold met Slack in Rawlins and from there they selected that little field 25 miles from the station. Content with the spot, they used metal rods to make long holes in the ground where they would then drop a diamond or two before using their feet to refill it, making the ground seem untouched. From there the pair met Harpenden in Omaha. As we know, Arnold and Slack disappeared once the investors had the satisfactory reports in hand and weren’t present when the entire scam came crashing down. With expenses and other payments included, the pair had made a profit of more than $600,000 ($15 million today when considered as wealth).

The Hunt

Harpenden and the detectives tracked Arnold to Hardin County, Kentucky. There, they found him living on a sprawling 500-acre estate, complete with a massive house and a custom-built, impregnable safe. It was in this safe that Arnold had stashed his ill-gotten gains. Once the salting had been uncovered, several of the investors sued Arnold but he denied he had ever salted the field, submitting as evidence the reports of Tiffany and Janin. Arnold fought the legal battle for a time. Eventually, though, he settled with one of the investors: $150,000 in cash, drawn from his great safe, in exchange for immunity from further suits. Arnold would later open a bank in Kentucky, eventually getting into a dispute that had him shot and left him with a wound that left him vulnerable to illness and he died from pneumonia in 1878. Slack, meanwhile, had totally vanished and likely only taken a small portion of the takings before moving to New Mexico to become an undertaker, where he died peacefully in 1896.

The other members of this bizarre cast had no stranger endings to their stories. William Ralston, the first to fall for the ruse, would be found dead in the Pacific Ocean just three years after the Diamond Hoax. He had put all of his money into the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, leaving him vulnerable after the crash of stock in his bank in a market panic. Meanwhile Clarence King, his expedition complete, went on to a distinguished career. He would later serve as the first Director of the US Geological Survey and curiously also by night pretend to be an African-American railroad worker3. Harpenden went to New York where he continued to drive market speculation. Embarrassment drove many of the other investors into a quiet retirement from public life.

As the dust settled on the Great Diamond Hoax, the nation was left to marvel at the sheer audacity of Arnold and Slack's scheme. In an age of rapid industrialization and boundless opportunity, the notion of vast, untapped wealth lying just beyond the horizon had captivated the American imagination. The diamond fields of Wyoming, though ultimately a mirage, were but a glittering embodiment of this dream.

For a brief, shining moment, Arnold and Slack had stood at the pinnacle of society, feted by millionaires and celebrated in newspapers across the land. Their ruse had exposed the gullibility and greed of some of America's most prominent figures, men who prided themselves on their business acumen and judgment. In the end, the prospectors had walked away with a fortune, leaving behind a trail of shattered egos and emptied wallets. The Great Diamond Hoax would go down in history as a masterclass in deception, a grand illusion conjured up by two unlikely sorcerers of the American West.

Today, the site of the diamond fields, once the epicenter of one of the greatest swindles in American history, sits quiet and largely forgotten in the Wyoming wilderness – with the only hint of it being named Diamond Peak. But the legacy of the hoax lives on - in the enduring fascination with tales of cons and schemes, in the hard-learned lessons about the perils of easy money, and in the uniquely American dream of boundless wealth waiting just over the horizon.

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What I’ve been reading:

1. The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard - This is a very short book, translated from the original French, set in the context of the Austrian Anschluss. Really it’s an essay but with the tempo and the readability of a really good novel.

2. The Battle for the American West by Oliver Roeder - It was this recent FT piece that actually inspired this week’s post. It tells the story of the checkerboard of public and private land that spans Wyoming and how ladders are causing federal court disputes.

3. A History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge - Jonn is a friend and we share an interest in the absurd social and political geography of the modern world. If you have this sickness too then I highly recommend his latest book.

Hush. On the threshold of the forest I do not hear words you call human, but I hear newer words spoken by droplets and leaves far away.

 - Gabriele d’Annunzio, La pioggia nel pineto (The Rain in the Pine Wood)

As naval shells exploded amongst the terracotta tiles of Fiume’s roofs, throwing red dust and debris across his little Adriatic paradise, Gabriele D'Annunzio likely wondered where it had all gone wrong.

Just one year before the Italian poet, aristocrat, and soldier had created what he thought was Utopia nestled amongst the blue shallows and rolling green hills of what is today the Croatian coastline. His country had been born of the chaos of the aftermath of the First World War and the disintegration of the empires that had for centuries made up the old world of Europe.

When the war began, Italy had been neutral but in 1915, the King of Italy had been convinced to join in the war against Germany and her allies and so signed the secret Treaty of London with Britain, France and the other members of the Entente. In return for Italy’s support, the Entente would ensure, if victorious, that the Italians were handed much of what was the Austrian coast on the Adriatic. Other Austrian land would, by the treaty, be set aside to create an independent kingdom for Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes - later Yugoslavia.  

Forgotten Fiume

However, the little city of Fiume was not mentioned in the treaty. Fiume was a port on the Adriatic Coast with several thousand residents, almost half of whom were ethnic Italians that had been under Austro-Hungarian rule for several hundred years after it once having been a Venetian trade port. By some quirk, Fiume was missed in the Treaty of London, probably because it had never been envisioned by the Allies that the Austro-Hungarian Empire would ever truly disintegrate and the rump of it that would remain required a sea port in some form. The city’s other residents were ethnically Serbian and Croatian, who knew the city as Rijeka (as you will find it named on a map today). All of this complexity meant that the fate of Fiume became a major topic of controversy during the Versailles Peace Conference. President Woodrow Wilson had become so unsure of what to do that he proposed the place become a free city and the headquarters of the nascent League of Nations, under the jurisdiction of no country.

By September 1919 there was still no conclusion as to the fate of Fiume. Events had overtaken the place and through the Treaty of St Germain, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been dissolved after the abdication of the final Habsburg Emperor Charles I. Once again, Fiume had not been mentioned in the treaty and the country it had been set aside for no longer existed. The city’s fate was still at play. 

Enter Gabriele D’Annunzio, an aristocrat from Abruzzo on the eastern coast of Italy. Born in 1863, he was a handsome and intelligent child and was nurtured by his family to be exceptional, with a predictable side effect of immense selfishness. As a teenager, he had begun to dabble in poetry and it was praised by authors unaware of his age. At university he began to be associated with Italian irredentism, a philosophy that yearned for all ethnic Italians to live in one country – by retaking places under foreign rule like Corsica, Malta, Dalmatia and even Nice.

He began to be published as a writer, starting with novels that were soon forgotten and largely inspired by other European authors. In fact an early 20th Century edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica rather scathingly states the novels had “little fundamental originality.” But as he grew older he began to transition to poetry, and Italy began to pay attention and he would end his days as the most revered Italian poet since Dante. That same Encyclopaedia Britannica entry, that so rudely described his novels, says of his poetry that “he opened up the closed mine of [Italy’s] former life as a source of inspiration for the present and of hope for the future, and created a language … a thing of intrinsic beauty.”

His poetry was heavily dominated with patriotic and classical tendencies by taking on inspiration from poets like Ovid but transferring them into the modern age by imagining bucolic Italian countryside filled with modern farms connected by telephones and filled with other exciting technology. He sought a futurist Roman Republic where all Italians were united under one flag to live out his ideals. It was not for no reason that Mussolini would later commission a biography of D’Annunzio that called him the “John the Baptist” of Italian fascism.

Not content with being just a literary hero, he also became a war hero during World War I. Having encouraged Italy into joining the conflict through his writing, he later joined the Royal Italian Army before training as a pilot and losing an eye while flying seaplanes. Late in the war he is famous for leading 11 aircraft from Italy across the mountains to Austria where they dropped 50,000 leaflets over the city of Vienna in a propaganda raid. The leaflets had been written personally by D’Annunzio but curiously had not been translated into German for their readers. If the recipients had been able to read them, they would have read the heavy patriotic style he had become famous for before the war:

 “On the wind of victory that rises from freedom's rivers, we didn't come except for the joy of the daring, we didn't come except to prove what we could venture and do whenever we want, in an hour of our choice ...The rumble of the young Italian wing does not sound like the one of the funereal bronze, in the morning sky … Long live Italy!”

In addition to the 'Flight Over Vienna,' D'Annunzio led the 'Bakar Mockery.’ Long before the war, D’Annunzio had become obsessed with the machines of war, and was particularly obsessed with torpedoes. In a characteristically overblown operation, the poet took several torpedo boats in 1917 into an Austrian bay on the coast of modern-day Croatia and evaded coastal batteries and patrols to be able to get more than 80 kilometres inland. Eventually, D’Annunzio and his ships reached their target and let off six torpedoes, with only one scoring a hit and scratching a freighter. The Italian flotilla quickly fled and it ended up being turned into a great propaganda victory and by the end of the war, D’Annunzio had been showered in medals and decorations. 

In adulthood, his childish beauty had disappeared, the boyish curls replaced with a bald head atop a skinny frame and marked out by appalling teeth. His wartime blindness was coupled with a poor constitution that left him often ridden with fevers. His biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett writes that one observer described D’Annunzio as “a dwarf of a man, goggle-eyed and thick-lipped, truly sinister in his grotesqueness, like a tragic gargoyle.”

With the war over and peace supposedly beckoning for Europe, this tragic gargoyle needed a new focus and that was Fiume. It would, D’Annunzio said, be a “searchlight radiant in the midst of an ocean of abjection.”

The Regency of Carnaro Arises

During the negotiations over the city’s future, the Italian government was not prepared to take any proactive action to annex the city and it would almost certainly become part of the new Yugoslavian monarchy. In the meantime it had been garrisoned with troops of the Entente, led by Italian officers.

The Italian government’s lack of interest was unacceptable to D’Annunzio and he made clear he would take action to prevent it becoming part of Yugoslavia by default. With his fame and pedigree he was able to quickly assemble a small private force of ex-soldiers, who he quickly took to calling his “legionaries'. In September 1919 after the Treaty of St Germain was signed, his small legion of a few hundred marched from near Venice to Fiume in what they called the Impresa - the Enterprise. By the time he had reached Fiume, the ‘army’ numbered in the thousands, the vanguard crying “Fiume or Death” with D’Annunzio at its head in a red Fiat. 

The only thing that stood in his way was the garrison of the Entente, soldiers who had been given orders to prevent D’Annunzio’s invasion by any means necessary. But amongst the garrison’s leaders were many sympathetic to D’Annunzio’s vision, some even artists themselves and before long most of the defenders had deserted to join the poet’s army. On the 12th September 1919, Gabriele D’Annunzio proclaimed that he had annexed Fiume to the Kingdom of Italy as the “Regency of Carnaro” - of which he was the Regent. The Italian government was thoroughly unimpressed and refused to recognise their newest purported land, demanding the plotters give up. Instead, D’Annunzio took matters into his own hands and set up a government and designed a flag (below).

The citizens of what had been a relatively unimportant port quickly found themselves in the midst of one of the 20th Century’s strangest experiments. D’Annunzio instituted a constitution that combined cutting-edge philosophical ideas of the time with a curious government structure that saw the country divided into nine corporations to represent key planks of industry like seafarers, lawyers, civil servants, and farmers. There was a 10th corporation that existed only symbolically and represented who D’Annunzio called the “Supermen” and was reserved largely for him and his fellow poets.

These corporations selected members for a state council, which was joined by “The Council of the Best” and made up of local councillors elected under universal suffrage. Together these institutions were instructed to carry out a radical agenda that sought an ideal society of industry and creativity. From all over the world, famous intellectuals and oddities migrated to Fiume. One of D’Annunzio’s closest advisers was the Italian pilot Guido Keller, who was named the new country’s first “Secretary of Action” – the first action he took was to institute nationwide yoga classes which he sometimes led in the nude and encouraged all to join. When not teaching yoga, Keller would often sleep in a tree in Fiume with his semi-tame pet eagle and at least one romantic partner. 

If citizens weren’t interested in yoga, they could take up karate taught by the Japanese poet Harukichi Shimoi, who had translated Dante’s works into Japanese. Shimoi, who quickly became known to the government of Fiume as “Comrade Samurai” was a keen believer in Fiume’s vision and saw it as the closest the modern world had come to putting into practice the old Japanese art of Bushido. 

The whole thing would have felt like a fever dream to an outsider. If a tourist was to visit the city, they would have found foreign spies from across the world checking into hotels and rubbing shoulders with members of the Irish republican movement while others did copious amounts of cocaine, another national pastime in Fiume. The most fashionable residents of Fiume carried little gold containers of the powder, and D’Annunzio himself was said to have a voracious habit for it. Sex was everywhere one turned and the city had seen a huge inward migration of prostitutes and pimps within days of D’Annunzio’s arrival. Almost every day was a festival, and it was an odd evening if the harbour of Fiume did not see dozens of fireworks burst above it, watched on by D’Annunzio’s uniformed paramilitaries. 

D’Annunzio himself lived in a palace overlooking the city, Osbert Sitwell describes walking up a steep hill to a Renaissance-style square palazzo which inside was filled with plaster flowerpots the poet had installed and planted with palms and cacti. D’Annunzio would cloister himself in his rooms for 18 hours a day and without food. Immaculate guards hid amongst the shrubs to ensure he would not be disturbed. In D’Annunzio’s study, facing the sea, he sat with statutes of saints and with French windows onto the state balcony. When he wanted to interact with his people he would wait for a crowd to form over some issue, walk to the balcony and then ask what they wanted.

The Dream Turns into a Nightmare

Within a few months of Fiume’s annexation, the Italian government had failed to dislodge D’Annunzio and so instead came with a simple proposal. The city should have a referendum that would ask its residents whether Fiume should join Italy as a protectorate or continue to exist in its independent state. After his initial desire for it to be part of metropolitan Italy, D’Annunzio did not want to lose this enclave of radicalism to normal government. Eventually the matter was passed by the city’s councils and a plebiscite on a modus vivendi (mode of living) was scheduled for December 1919. 

D’Annunzio, despite his anaemic appearance, was a powerful speaker and he took to the stage in Fiume to convince the population to vote against the proposal. It is likely that despite his charisma, the residents had probably become bored of the cocaine-fuelled yoga sessions and state-funded fireworks displays and voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Italian government by a margin of four to one. The votes had happened against a backdrop of sectarian violence between Italians and Serbs as well as other bullying methods from both sides to try and secure their ideal result. 

D'Annunzio, furious, promptly nullified the result, refusing to acknowledge that Italy could do for Fiume what he had done. He took to his balcony and proclaimed to the citizenry that “We came here to win, we have sworn to win … Must we leave the axe embedded in the tree of destiny? No.” D’Annunzio was to go nowhere. 

He set about trying to legitimise Fiume’s status in the world instead of handing over its keys to the Italians. Why join the League of Nations, D’Annunzio argued, when countries could instead join the newly created League of Fiume. The League had been set up as an alternative to the more well known League and was aimed at non-aligned nations. It was headed by Fiume’s Foreign Minister, who Sitwell calls “the only bore in [the country].”

One of the first prospective members of the League was the newborn revolutionary Irish Republic, and while their parliament pondered joining it was ultimately worried that doing so would anger the United States. Curiously, the League and Fiume were the first to officially recognise the Soviet Union with the hope that the USSR would join its “oppressed brother” on the Adriatic. While Lenin demurred on joining, he did send D’Annunzio a pot of caviar and a charming letter that described D’Annunzio as the “only revolutionary in Europe.”

There is an old British Pathe silent newsreel from 1920 that survives today and one can watch online; it shows D’Annunzio reviewing his soldiers in Fiume. D’Annunzio, dwarfed by his lieutenants and the surrounding buildings, struts down a street saluting almost continuously as he passes some of his legionaries ready with their military bicycles. At the end of it he makes a speech from a balcony, waving his hand before making straight armed salutes, copied by his entourage.

We cannot hear what he is saying, but it likely included the national cry of Fiume: “Eia, eia, eia! Alala!” The first three words are the Sardinian equivalent of “hip hip” in “hip hip hurray” and “Alala” which D’Annunzio had taken directly from the Iliad, in which Achilles uses it as a war cry. Benito Mussolini, a friend of D’Annunzio and long-term correspondent, visited Fiume, and there gave inflammatory speeches. It is not hard to understand, watching the newsreel and its black-clad paramilitaries with lightning flashes on their sleeves, where Mussolini may have got much of the inspiration for his Blackshirts. D’Annunzio was even referred to as “Duce” (Leader) in Fiume, a title that just two years later was adopted by Mussolini. 

Man Cannot Live by Cocaine Alone

Fiume, which had once seen good trade as an Austrian port, saw a sharp decline in traffic with an international embargo led by the Italians. As a result shipbuilding and manufacturing, two of D’Annunzio’s pillar Corporations, became shadows of their former selves. With a lack of raw materials and an economic policy based on poetry and put into action by some of Europe’s strangest radicals, there was not much productivity.

The city acquired its own currency, the Fiume Krone, which were Austro-Hungarian banknotes with “CITA DI FIUME” stamped over them. In theory a Fiume Krone was worth 40 Italian cents, but with no gold reserves or strong economy to back it up, a Krone sold on the black market for around 20 cents. The currency rapidly inflated and was devalued, leaving little trust in the government of Fiume by its people. The black market grew and grew, providing supplies held back by the Italian blockade and organised crime began to take hold. With the whole world turned against Fiume, D’Annunzio could not access international credit or sign free trade agreements. To combat this, D'Annunzio instructed Guido Keller to obtain crucial supplies for Fiume through piracy and theft. Keller used his aviation skills to conduct daring raids on farms in Italy and Austria to steal livestock, on one occasion a pig broke through the bottom of his plane and he landed with its trotters sticking out. 

Law and order in Fiume was managed by D’Annunzio’s enforcers, the Arditi – The Daring Ones. Most of the Arditi had been members of the Italian Army in the war but many were younger ideologues captivated by the poet’s vision. The Arditi wore smart black uniforms and their elites would be reviewed by D’Annunzio daily while their bands marched through Fiume’s streets playing neverending patriotic music all day long. During the plebiscite, it was the Arditi that roamed the city beating up any of D’Annunzio’s opponents and it was the Arditi that ran the polling stations, but even with these enforcers the people voted for the end of the Fiume regime.

As the economic situation declined, the Arditi brought more and more troublemakers before Fiume’s slightly esoteric criminal justice system created in the city’s charter that was called “The Court of the Cursed”. 

By mid 1920, the Italians had begun to lose patience. The election that year had seen the installation of Giovanni Giolitti as the Prime Minister, a liberal who despised D’Annunzio’s vision and proto-fascist ideals. In 1915, D’Annunzio had called Giolitti a traitor, which didn’t help Fiume’s hopes. 

Over the summer Italy began to negotiate with Yugoslavia to determine a final settlement on the matter of Fiume, to fill the loophole still left by the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In November 1920 the two countries signed the Treaty of Rapallo, which was remarkably unpopular amongst both Italians and the people of Yugoslavia. However, it did categorically address the issue of Fiume. Gone would be the Regency of Carnaro founded by D’Annunzio and in its place “The Free State of Fiume” which would be governed not by a poet and his karate sidekick but by a bureaucratic government acceptable to both countries. 

Predictably, D’Annunzio was furious. To protest the Treaty, Keller once again took to the air on a daring mission authorised by his Duce. He flew his aircraft from Fiume to Rome, where he dropped flowers on the Vatican before bombarding the Italian parliament with a chamber pot filled with turnips and carrots. A note was attached to the vegetables addressed to members of the Chamber of Deputies: “To the parliament and government based on lies and fear, the allegorical embodiment of their value”.

Meanwhile, sectarian violence had completely taken over the streets of Fiume. Croatians had bombs thrown at them by Italians and Serbs were locked up without trial and their homes handed over to supporters of D’Annunzio. In response, Italian soldiers would be picked off by Serbian guerillas and it quickly descended into a cycle of pointless retribution. Crime soared, and fearful citizens slept with their livestock in their bedrooms to prevent theft. In terms of economy, the only lively industry became the production of ammunition and hand grenades. 

By this time, D’Annunzio had become even more reclusive and spent much of his time with his pet parrot given to him by Keller. His cocaine habit grew and grew, it having begun during his wartime flying and he would communicate with his officials by letters while his idealistic young legionaries continued to practise yoga in the city centre. 

The End

To protest the Treaty of Rapallo, D’Annunzio sent soldiers to occupy two small islands off the coast of Fiume that had under the treaty been assigned to Yugoslavia. This was the final straw for Giolitti and the Italian government. In short order, the Italian military retook the islands for Yugoslavia and tightened the naval blockade on Fiume to prevent any more such antics. 

In the week of Christmas 1920, The Italian Government dispatched 8,000 soldiers led by one of Italy’s most famous generals, Enrico Caviglia. Caviglia presented D’Annunzio a simple ultimatum, hand over Fiume, recognise the Treaty of Rapallo and walk away. D’Annunzio refused and on Christmas Eve, Caviglia launched an attack by land. For hours the two sides were engaged in fierce fighting, with D’Annunzio’s legionaries, many of whom had served during the First World War, using machine guns and explosives to fight back. For Christmas Day, the two sides agreed a truce and the fight began again on the 26th with significant bloodshed. Caviglia had enough and used something the Regency of Carnaro could not afford: battleships. For three days, two Italian dreadnoughts bombarded Fiume furiously and still D’Annunzio held out even after a shell was put through his own office window. 

Caviglia sent a message once more, surrender or the shelling will obliterate what is left of Fiume. The town’s notables came to D’Annunzio and begged him to accept it and finally he agreed, although some suggest he may have even tossed a coin to make the decision for him. He had eventually been defeated by the very country he created Fiume for, by the government he hoped to embolden to take what he believed was Italy’s by right. But there was to be no punishment for D’Annunzio, his troops laid down their arms and he simply went back to Italy a few weeks later. While he would never be as powerful or as relevant as when he was driven to Fiume in his red Fiat, he never disappeared.

As Benito Mussolini rose to power, a new Duce, D’Annunzio remained in touch. Against the backdrop of being a threat to Mussolini’s success, D’Annunzio had a mysterious accident where in 1922 he fell out of a window just before he had arranged to have a meeting with Mussolini on the future of Italy. Theories still abound that Mussolini had arranged the defenestration to cripple him. For the remaining 16 years of his life, D’Annunzio lived in relative peace and was even made a Prince in 1924 by the King of Italy. He received regular bribes from Mussolini to supposedly prevent him re-entering politics. He would not live to see the Second World War, or the fall of Italy and Mussolini as in 1938, D’Annunzio died after a stroke, on the shores of Lake Garda where he had retired to.

The Regency of Carnaro, though short-lived, remains a fascinating and significant chapter in European history, like a half-remembered dream. This fantasy of a poet, with its dizzying spectacle of fireworks, corporatist futurism, and cocaine-fueled excess, may have been crushed, but its impact resonated far beyond the sapphire-blue coast of the Adriatic. The black-clad Arditi who marched through Fiume's streets would become the model for Mussolini's Blackshirts, and the title of "Duce" that D'Annunzio bore would be inherited by the future dictator of Italy from a man he believed to be as significant a prophet as John the Baptist. Irredentism would shape Italy’s next few decades. The Regency of Carnaro was a strange and captivating prelude to the rise of fascism and the flames of another world war.

Today, Fiume is Rijeka, a city inherited by Croatia from Yugoslavia - a transfer made in the aftermath of Italy’s defeat in the Second World War. Around 100,000 people live there and in 2020 Rijeka was even the European Capital of Culture. While there is little evidence now that this port town had once been the world capital of radicalism, D’Annunzio would have been pleased that in 2018 it was declared that Italian would be one of Rijeka’s official languages and bilingual signs now fill the streets – although none direct residents to publicly funded yoga.

As I stared at what were just the outskirts of the thousands of kilometres that make up the rainforest of Pahang in the east of peninsular Malaysia, my eyes began to adjust. What had been a two-dimensional backdrop of blending trees and foliage began to distinguish themselves. The intricate patterns of light and shade revealed that the burst of colour was in fact a remarkable bird, or a slithering reptile. And yet, I could still see the surface with even just a few metres deeper in seeming impenetrable, there could be anything back there.

My guide, a local friend, told me that many believed there was something hidden in that sea of earth tones: Gold.

He told me the tale of General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Yamashita had been the commander of the Japanese invasion of what was then British Malaya in 1941, conquering the country in just 70 days. By the time his 30,000 troops had reached Singapore, they had captured more than 80,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers while tens of thousands of Malayan and British civilians lay dead. On his way it is said that the Tiger of Malaya, as Yamashita came to be known, had looted huge amounts of gold and valuables worth billions.

Yamashita would later be sent to command the Japanese army in the Philippines, where after Japan’s surrender he was put on trial and executed in 1946 for war crimes due to the atrocities carried out by his forces in the islands1. When he was hanged, with him died the location of his supposed loot. Much of it was thought to be in the Philippines but it was thought the rest could have been stashed throughout Malaysia, to await the war’s end and to allow its safe passage to Japan by sea.

Even today, amateur treasure hunters set out to find Yamashita’s Gold, and every now and again an old Japanese bomb or booby trap will kill them. Despite 80 years passing and countless “maps” changing hands, not a single ingot has been found.

Explanations suggest all sorts of theories, from the US Government secretly removing it, to Imelda Marcos and her husband putting into a Swiss bank account. But when I visited Pahang last year, it didn’t seem entirely absurd that it could still be out there in the jungle somewhere. Pahang is the third-largest state in Malaysia and is full of dense rainforest, almost 2.5 million hectares or so of it. In short, there’s plenty of space to hide it, or so my imagination told me.

For the rest of my time in Pahang, I couldn’t help thinking about the legendary treasure that could be there. But I realised that while it was unlikely to be hidden in some long-lost jungle cache, it was all around me. At the National Tiger Conservation Centre, I saw the real Tiger of Malaya staring back at me with its pair of golden eyes. This was not a long-dead Japanese general back from the grave but an adult female tigress there to be rehabilitated after being injured in a poaching accident, and as she paced back and forth in its enclosure chuffing indignantly at me, I wondered if she had ever come across any of Yamashita’s Gold.

Not much more than a century in the past, the Malayan Tiger roamed the entire peninsula from the border with Thailand and up into Burma and down to the Straits of Johor, but today almost all of their natural habitat has been destroyed by poachers, loggers and palm planters, with their population in the wild being reduced to just a few hundred.

In Pahang there has been significant efforts by the royal family to reverse this trend, with the Save the Malayan Tiger campaign launched by the state’s crown prince, Tengku Hassanal Shah. The campaign has worked to scout out the remaining tigers and find the best ways to protect them through habitat conservation, counter-poacher patrols and getting the Malaysian federal government to contribute by paying for things like the National Tiger Centre.

Driving through Pahang, I saw in the midst of the trees a new concrete canopy emerging high above them. It was the skeleton of the East Coast Rail Link, designed to connect the two coasts of Malaysia on a high-speed electric Chinese-built railway. Perhaps it shall be the workers that lay 1.5km of track a day that will be the first to stumble on Yamashita’s Treasure almost a century on from its supposed loss.

It reminded me that is not just in the southeast Asian jungle that we are hunting for phantom gold bars - the idea of hidden treasure is a human obsession as old as time.

When I lived in India and spent much of my time in Rajasthan, I was told the tale in Jaipur of the treasure of Jaigarh. Jaigarh is a sprawling early 18th Century fort built during the Mughal era that sits in the hills above Jaipur. It was once the city’s strongest defence – with thick walls and views of all the surrounding country. Underneath the fort run miles of tunnels, many still unmapped. It is here that it is said there is a vast store of gold and jewels put there by the city’s ruling family many years ago, or so the old Persian book Haft Tilismat-e-Amberi says.

An obvious myth one would think, but during the Indian Emergency in the 1970s, the country’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi took it so seriously that she arrested senior members of Jaipur’s erstwhile royal family and ordered a series of raids and searches of the castle. For three months an entire division of the army searched Jaigarh and Jaipur’s other forts, accompanied by a huge team of archaeological experts armed with metal detectors.

So real was Mrs Gandhi’s obsession with the treasure that her counterpart in Pakistan wrote to stake a claim in any wealth that was found, based on agreements made at the time of India’s partition by Britain regarding any assets discovered after independence. By the end of 1977, Mrs Gandhi had given up, writing to the Pakistani prime minister: “I had asked our legal experts to give careful consideration to the claim you made on behalf of Pakistan. They are of the clear opinion that the claim has no legal basis. Incidentally, the treasure has turned out to be non-existent.”

The most curious footnote to the above story, and one that is still muttered in the liquor stores of Jaipur today, is that after Indira had ended the search she mysteriously ordered the highway between Delhi and Jaipur closed for three whole days. The road was filled with soldiers to keep away onlookers but it was said that trucks rumbled past endlessly and many believe that she had in fact found the gold, and hurried it away to the capital to help out the Indian economy.

Yamashita’s Gold, the Jaigarh Jewels, there are endless other legends just like them. Even today, people search The Wash of eastern England where it is said King John lost his Crown Jewels in 1216 crossing the notoriously untrustworthy waters.

The idea of treasure is understandably fascinating, in an instant one can transform their lives, bypassing the traditional route through which humans are otherwise expected to acquire wealth.

Not many have been able to take the shortcut but in 1762, two British naval ships captured a Spanish frigate that was found to be carrying so much treasure (£500,000 then) in gold, silver and cocoa that in today’s money it would be equivalent to £10 billion2. Each British sailor received 30 years worth of wages as a prize and the two ships captains went from being perfectly ordinary sailors to receiving the equivalent of £150 million in cash overnight.

I am sure the tiger I met has gone back to her habitat from the Conservation Centre and I hope she will see amateur treasure hunters trample through her habitat for many years to come, setting off long-forgotten Japanese hand grenades in the process. But the real tragedy is that in this obsessive quest for hidden gold, we risk losing sight of the invaluable natural treasures that are rapidly disappearing before our very eyes.

The Malayan Tiger, like so many other endangered species, is a living treasure far more precious than any legendary hoard. Its value lies not in its potential to enrich a lucky few, but in its role as a keystone of a complex and interconnected ecosystem, and in the awe and wonder it inspires in all who are fortunate enough to glimpse its majesty.

What I’ve been reading:

Japanese Detective Stories: If you have an interest in Japan, detective fiction, and trains then I think you will probably enjoy Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto. It’s a tiny book and I read it in two nights, but is an entirely gripping crime novel set in late 1950s Japan amidst major disquiet over government corruption. Amusingly, every single train mentioned in the book is accurate to the timetable of the year it was written.

30 Years of Identity Theft: In what could be total nightmare fuel for most of us, this remarkable article tells the story of a man in Iowa in the US that has been indicted for living with the identity of someone else for three decades, getting married and having children in the process. His victim was even thought to be a fantasist and initially placed in a mental hospital after kicking up a fuss.

Ones and Twos: For months now I have been captivated by the efforts of Russ Cook, a ginger man from West Sussex who calls himself “The Hardest Geezer” and has been running from Africa’s southernmost point to its northernmost – the first person to do so. Along the way he has run more than 16,000 kilometres and dodged bandits, disease, and being deported from Angola. By the time this newsletter is out, he will have finally reached the finish line in Tunisia and raised more than £500,000 towards charity.

I look out and I see a particularly beautiful carpet of white clouds, but at what I first thought was just a continuation of their patterns I realise I am in fact looking at the roof of the world.

“Count one, two, three and that is Mount Everest,” he says before returning to the galley. I do as he say, counting the peaks and there it is, the highest peak in the world.

For as long as I can I stare at the mountains, watching them fade as our aeroplane begins our turn towards Delhi. As they disappear to be replaced by the ever present Indian haze, I look back on short time I have spent in the Kingdom of Bhutan in the foothills of those mountains. I come to realise that while I have learnt a lot I didn’t actually understand it any better than a week earlier when I stepped off the flight to Paro, our DrukAir Airbus having negotiated the narrow passes and turns that lead to an airport that has only 24 pilots qualified to land or take off there. The final turns are made by the pilots spotting a particular house’s red roof, a house passengers can easily see into as the plane swings to approach the runway.

Bhutan has long been a place I had wanted to visit, but it isn’t as simple as booking a ticket.

It would be remiss not to quickly situate Bhutan and its history for those unaware. It is a small kingdom east of Nepal and nestled between India and China. It has a population of around 750,000, almost all of whom are devout Buddhists. It was once a land of feuding Tibetan chieftans who were united in the 1630s by a remarkable warrior and Buddhist lama called Ngawang Namgyal. Namgyal died in 1651, but his death was kept a secret from the country for more than 50 years, with officials simply saying that the king was “on an extended retreat” and continued to keep Bhutan together by issuing decrees in his name.

While Namgyal was seen as the spiritual leader, he also established a temporal monarchy which in a slightly modified form still exists today under the leadership of the Wangchuk dynasty. The King of Bhutan’s title is the Druk Gyalpo, which literally translates to Dragon King. Over time Bhutan, being small but strategically located, faded in and out of the spheres of influence of the day from the Mughals to the British Raj. It would have been subsumed into the latter like other princely states, but in the 19th Century a British civil servant placed some files relating to Bhutan into a folder marked “External” instead of “Internal,” a small decision that ensured it remains an independent country today, albeit one “guided” on matters of defence and foreign affairs by a treaty with India.

The country only opened its borders to foreigners in 1974, to mark the coronation of the Fourth King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck. His Majesty saw the opportunity to take advantage of his accession to showcase Bhutan and its unique culture and traditions to the world, but was also aware that unrestricted tourism would put those at risk. Over time, this developed into a vision known as “High Quality, Low Volume” tourism. All visitors must have a guide and driver and also pay a daily fee - currently $100. In 1974, 287 foreigners visited Bhutan, and in 2019 more than 70,000 fee paying tourists came.

As a result of this policy, the trips are largely cultural. You take hikes in unimaginable scenery, watch local festivals where masked creatures tell villagers morality tales, and sit with locals to eat dishes made up mostly of chilis. For fun people relax with the national sport of archery, singing deliciously rude songs to put off their friends while they take shots. Tourists get to have a go but the target is brought closer and you get to use the same kind of bow young children do. Civil servants go to work in traditional dress and robe-clad monks pepper society. In the five days I spent there, much was spent talking to our compulsory guide who was a lovely man named Yarab, who had once been on the Bhutan national football team. One story Yarab told me was that of Bhutan’s transition to democracy.

The previously mentioned Fourth King oversaw Bhutan’s transition into the modern world - but with a catch. Bhutan’s development could not come at the cost of its people’s happiness. Thousands of kilometres of roads were built, free at point of use clinics quickly filled the country, and electricity and telephone hookups turned King Jigme Singye’s isolated kingdom where almost no one had access to healthcare or education into a remarkably healthy and literate little state in the space of just a few decades. Much of the money to make this possible came from selling hydroelectricity generated by dams that are powered by Himalayan glaciers. The Fourth King explained that: “water is to us what oil is to the Arabs.”

Despite the rapid economic growth, Bhutan’s culture and traditions were protected. By 2006, the Fourth King believed his job to be done and he announced his abdication, passing power to his son Jigme Khesar Namgyel who became the Fifth and present King of Bhutan. One of his father’s last acts was to finalise a draft constitution for Bhutan, one that would take away the monarchy’s absolute power and turn the country into a constitutional monarchy with parliamentary democracy.

But first the Bhutanese people, largely rural and disconnected from the outside world, had to be taught what democracy was. Yarab told me at first it was seen with immense distrust, and it fell to the father and son kingly duo to make a tour of the country to convince them otherwise. In 2007 this culminated with the population getting to try it out in two nationwide mock elections where voters could pick from abstract ideas rather than candidates.

Ballot papers had four imaginary parties on them, each named after a colour (Blue, Green, Red, and Yellow) and with local high school students chosen as constituency candidates. Later there was then a mock runoff and the Yellow party swept to victory in 46 of the 47 constituencies on a 67 per cent turnout. It is no coincidence that the colour yellow in Bhutan is the colour symbolic of the monarchy and the king.

By mid 2008, the first real elections had been held and an Upper and Lower House elected for Bhutan and in July the draft constitution was enacted by the kingdom’s first democratic government.

I thought the story was remarkable, but it got even more interesting when a senior Bhutanese official casually told me that Ngawang Namgyal had also been informed about the elections. Namgyal was that first ruler of Bhutan I mentioned earlier who was meant to have died in 1650 and whose passing was hidden for 50 years. I asked them to explain in case I had misunderstood. It turned out that it is believed that Namgyal is still very much alive, having self-mortified himself in the ancient Buddhist tradition and now he resides in a monastery. Very few are permitted to see the great Lama, but each day he is brought food and water and the King and highest monks will often go to him to consult on important issues. “He’s simply resting,” my new Bhutanese friend told me, smiling.

While I only spent time in the north of the country, I learnt that the King had recently launched a project in the plains of the south of Bhutan near a place called Gelephu where he plans to build a city the size of Singapore that will be a “mindfulness city.”

The city, designed by a Danish firm, will feature an airport that doesn’t require the hairpin mountainous turns that the country’s only current international airport in Paro and would be capable of taking wide-body aircraft. By it being in the south, it will allow the rest of Bhutan to be insulated from both foreign interference and cultural damage. But even in Gelephu, buildings will strictly limited in size and design and nature will be left to thrive amongst the buildings while its hospitals will be able to bring the best of eastern and western medicine to bear. Situated between India and China, Gelephu will be a key economic hub but it is also important to the King that any development doesn’t betray the unique character and history of Bhutan that makes it so special, but this would be impossible as once again Ngawang Namgyal is being kept up to date on plans and consulted on Gelephu.

Back on the plane, Mount Everest disappeared and I shut the window blind again, sad to have left the sense of peace and calm that Bhutan allows to percolate through your entire self. But as I said, I still did not understand it. These days we are all obsessed with travel, and have largely unfettered access to the world to exercise it. Many of us go to places our grandparents could barely imagine, and yet we all have the same experiences. We take remarkable pictures of wonders across the world and share them on social media but manage to avoid capturing the other thousand people queuing up behind us to take the same photo. Much travel today is replicated and homogenised, I can for instance say that I have had the same Caesar salad in Four Seasons hotels on four different continents.

In Bhutan there was not a Caesar salad in sight and it was made clear that I was a welcome guest passing through but it was not expected I come away with even a basic level of understanding because why should I? There are few places I can think of that will give you such a wonderfully enlightening sucker punch and months later it still feels refreshing.

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Every fortnight from 1921 to 1926, passengers would squeeze themselves into the cargo bays of two RAF biplanes in Cairo for a journey to Baghdad, via Amman. The first leg was easy enough with plenty of landmarks to navigate by, but on reaching Amman, these guests would discover that for the next leg onto Iraq their pilots had to fly over 500 miles of hard rocky desert, completely blind. With no reliable compasses available for pilots and no obvious landmarks below to make maps useful, it was just endless sand and rock. They could not ask their base for directions, as all the radio could manage was Morse code messages tapped out painstakingly letter by letter, but even those could only reach 180 miles and it was 470 miles to their next stop in Iraq. For all intents and purposes, they were heading into the unknown.

Yet somehow, despite all these limitations, just 12 hours later those great Vernons touched down at the aerodrome in Baghdad and their passengers disembarked, mystified as to how they got there. The fortnightly runs owed their success to a 1921 demand from a frustrated Winston Churchill.

The then Secretary of the State for the Colonies had demanded of officials an explanation as to why it took 28 days for him to send a letter from London to Baghdad, the capital of the Kingdom of Iraq, a post-Versailles British protectorate. At the time, the British Empire was at its widest territorial extent and speed of communication mattered. The recent invention of the aeroplane was seen as the solution with an airmail route quickly proposed that would reduce Churchill’s letter’s journey time to just nine days. From Baghdad, mail could travel onward to India and beyond to the empire’s farthest corners.

There was a significant issue with the plan, and that was the 860 miles between Cairo and Baghdad. Until the airmail route, letters travelled laboriously by train, car, and on occasion even camel. The problem was the 500 or so miles of hard rocky desert, largely between Jordan and Iraq.

As you can see, this stretch of desert is largely flat and featureless, a nightmare for pilots in the days before satellite navigation and effective compasses. It was in such a desert, in Libya, that my own grandfather crashed his biplane in the early days of World War II while trying to find his airbase and becoming completely disoriented in the process. If a plane got lost and went down in this kind of desert, it could take months to find it with few residents and even fewer travellers.

To come up with a solution, the RAF turned to a man who spent much of the 1920s mapping the Jordanian and Syrian deserts, Major A.L. Holt of the British Army’s Royal Engineers. Major Holt had a particular obsession at the time with creating a railway that would run from the Middle East to India1 and connect what he predicted would be two of the world’s most important regions. He saw the RAF mission as a chance to work on that passion project and while proposed railway was never built, Major Holt did design an ingenious plan to solve the issue of aeroplane navigation over the desert.

The engineer took two convoys of Rolls Royce armoured cars and supply trucks, each of about 10 vehicles, and set them each off from Amman and Baghdad respectively with the two set to meet halfway. The two convoys were given the objective of plotting a route for the RAF aircraft for them to follow from above. For months the two convoys worked surveying and mapping what features they could get out of the dry land, from highlighting thorn bushes to specific puddles of mud. By the end, Major Holt’s team had created 12 maps of the route and also found strategic water locations along the way. These maps were compiled into a handbook and issued to pilots to follow.

But even with maps, how could the pilots follow along in case they managed to lose the few landmarks they had? Major Holt decided to not just label the map but also label the ground itself. Every 20 miles on the route, soldiers and workers cleared a 20-yard circle and the circle labelled the ground by digging out large symbols - the Amman convoy used the letters A to R and the Baghdad Convoy the Roman numerals I to XI. Each of these both functioned as route guidance but also as landing sites. Aeroplanes then were not as reliable as today and would often have to land to fix mechanical faults or sit out nasty weather. Arrows even helped pilots make sure they were heading the right way and on target.

After Major Holt’s team was finished, tractors were brought in to dig the whole route as a deep furrow visible from above and entrenched enough to not be blown away. For ground too rocky to be dug out, it was marked with white paint. The route quickly acquired the nickname of “Flying the Furrow” and the furrow is still visible today both on the ground and from the air and satellite.

With the route mapped out, the service began in late June 1921, with the RAF charging 1 Shilling (around £2 today) per ounce2 of mail. The route was always operated by a pair of biplanes, if one had to land then its consort could pick up the passengers and mail and continue, sending help on arrival at the destination. If a plane needed to land, the pilot would use a pistol to fire a flare from the cockpit, with colours indicating the issue. Each aeroplane was loaded with several days worth of rations, blankets and 18 gallons of water just in case the 12 hour journey turned into something much longer.

The creators such as Major Holt and the RAF made clear that even with their hard work, it was now out of their hands, the Pilot Handbook3 reads: “The success of the route rests more in the hands of the pilots of aircraft operating on it than in the hands of those who are responsible for its inauguration and maintenance.”

It was a notoriously unpopular route for pilots, with the endless straight flying over featureless ground and regularly having to make desert lands becoming repetitive quickly. Wing Commander Roderic Hill, who wrote a book on the Furrow, kept himself going with pheasant and ham sandwiches washed down with a thermos of lemonade. The Pilot Handbook advises pilots that while they will be unlikely to find a bath or shower if forced to land, that instead a “brisk rub down with a dry towel (or shirt) at dawn will prove surprisingly refreshing.” Passengers were similarly uncomfortable, juddering along in the rudimentary cabin for 12 hours was quite the experience, probably compounded by the RAF guidance that paying customers should receive a “full saline and calomel purge,” to make them vomit.

The Pilot Handbook provided all sorts of guidance, from information on where emergency fuel caches were kept and how to deal with any interested locals, including some phonetic Arabic phrases. It insists that “No offer of food from Arabs should be refused, as such refusal is considered unmannerly,” and that “if a large body of Arabs insists on relieving you of arms or ammunition, the only course is to give them up with good grace.”

Besides carrying mail, the route had other benefits to the British Government. Much of its imperial enforcement in the Middle East was conducted from the air, due to the ease compared to road travel. Rebellions were put down in bombing runs and borders patrolled by aircraft like the Vickers Vernon cruising above the desert. The flights also trained RAF pilots and navigators in long distance flying without visual landmarks, a skill that came in use during the Second World War when some veterans of the Furrow, including Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris held high office in wartime deciding overall strategy.

Regardless of its benefits, however, the Cairo to Baghdad Air Mail route was a phenomenal money loser for the RAF and in 1926 they handed over its administration to Imperial Airways, the predecessor of British Airways, who operated it as a weekly service. By then, there were more than 25,000 miles of air routes across the British Empire operated by the airline, but the Furrow remained crucial to those 500 miles between between Jordan and Iraq till technology caught up. While today it remains visible if you look hard enough, aeroplanes now travel far above it, following instead a virtual furrow on their navigation screens.

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I am very grateful to my friend Colonel Will Davies MBE, the UK Defence Attaché in Amman, for first alerting me to the existence of the Furrow and also for photographs from his visit which he has kindly shared.

Realising it may be of interest to my readers and in the context of the failed Trident test this week revealed by The Sun, I thought it might be useful to republish my piece here and also keep it preserved online.

Somewhere out in the North Atlantic, every hour of the day, every day of the year, a lone submarine glides through the ocean with no real destination. Since 1969, one of the four boats of the UK's Continuous At-Sea Submarine Deterrent has always been on patrol. Its location is known to only a handful, even many of her crew will have no idea where they are.

While many Royal Navy captains hold responsibility for their crew, Trident submarine commanders also bear a far more macabre role: the duty to play Britain's final political and diplomatic hand possible. Within the bowels of each boat lays two safes, an outer and an inner, and within that inner safe sits the letter of last resort.

One of the first tasks of the Cabinet Secretary on the appointment by the Queen of a new prime minister, is to have the new leader write that very letter.

After the elation of an election victory, the civil servant informs the politician that this letter will lay out the action the prime minister wishes to take, should the government and chain of command be totally destroyed by nuclear attack. Tony Blair, according to his cabinet secretary, was said to have gone "quite white" on being told of his options.

Options do allow a great deal of latitude, with varying degrees of widespread destruction of human life:

1. Retaliate with nuclear weapons without prejudice.

2. Do not retaliate at all.

3. Allow the commander to act within his own discretion.

4. Place the boat under the control of an allied navy, specifically the Royal Australian Navy or US Navy.

Given some time alone, the prime minister is requested to decide and write it in a letter addressed to the commanders of each of the Vanguard-class submarines in the navy. The message is then sealed in an envelope and sent to be placed into the boats' safes. So far, none of these missives have been opened, and the letters are burned at the end of each premier's term.

The only prime minister to comment openly on their orders was Lord Callaghan in an interview with historian Peter Hennessy:

“If it were to become necessary or vital, it would have meant the deterrent had failed, because the value of the nuclear weapon is frankly only as a deterrent. But if we had got to that point, where it was, I felt, necessary to do it, then I would have done it. I've had terrible doubts, of course, about this. I say to you, if I had lived after having pressed that button, I could never ever have forgiven myself.”

To get to the stage where the letters can be opened is a long and purposefully difficult journey. First, the prime minister must have perished or become incapacitated in some way. Then, his proposed alternate decision makers would had to have met the same fate. It is only after that point that the submarine commanders go anywhere near their safes.

If the prime minister or his alternates survive an attack, they will likely be conveyed to a secure bunker underneath the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, without their families. From there, what remains of the government will issue orders to retaliate through the headquarters of Royal Navy Taskforce 345, based in a bunker under the Chiltern Hills.

In a room described as "quite bland" by a previous commanding officer, two people are on watch 24/7 and are in constant communication with the submarines at sea. It is they who pass on all messages, including those to fire.

If the prime minister decides to do so, he will submit a code which will then, similarly to the submarines, be confirmed by information contained in the bunker's safe. Should the authorization be authenticated, the submarine commander is then given permission to fire.

However, the above scenario relies on a crucial aspect: the centre of government surviving the opening plays of an all-out nuclear war. Which is where the letters of last resort then come in. Should a submarine commander not receive contact from his superiors for some time, he will execute a number of checks.

One of which famously is to attempt to listen to the Radio 4 Today programme for several days. The latter requirement caused a scare in 2004 when the station went off air for 15 minutes.

If the tones of Britain's most beloved radio show do not drift into the control room of the submarine for three successive days, the commander and his executive officer will use their individual keys and unlock the outer and inner safes, and find the fate of Britain resting in a No. 10 Downing Street envelope instructing them exactly what, or perhaps not, to do.

Four strange sail in the southwest. That is what Nathaniel Dance saw on the morning of 14th February 1804 off the island of Pulo Aura on the east coast of Malaysia. Dance was the commodore of a fleet of 30 ships owned by the East India Company in convoy from China to Britain – known as the China Fleet. The China Fleet carried over £8 million in goods from Asia in its ships’ holds. I should be clear, that is £8 million in 1804 money, which would today be around £750 million.

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When Dance had left China just a few weeks prior, he did so with the news that Britain was at war with France. While the Napoleonic Wars had started in May 1803, the news only reached the ports of Asia months later. It put the commodore in a difficult position. Britain’s economy relied upon the China Fleet’s commodities and their timely arrival; even a few weeks’ delays could cause widespread chaos and speculation in London. But it would also mean running the gauntlet of sailing without any escorts as reinforcements from the Royal Navy were yet to arrive from India.

Dance had reason to be afraid. Napoleon, foreseeing the war, had sent a squadron of crack ships to the Indian Ocean in 1803 under the command of the famous Admiral Linois. Its purpose was simple, to disrupt and destroy British trade, ideally with as much as possible captured and brought back to France. Over the next few months, Linois scooped up ships and set fire to British factories and warehouses across Asia. Unhelpfully, the China Fleet sailed to a very specific schedule, and so the moment it left the estuary of the Pearl River, the world knew. By the 14th of February, it had almost entered the Indian Ocean and was close to Singapore.

It will not be surprising to any reader that the East India Company was arrogant. A company that, as William Dalrymple describes, had become “an empire within an empire.” It controlled much of India, had its own army, and its revenues kept Britain afloat. Its navy was also not to be sniffed at, made up of large, well-built ships (known as Indiamen) capable of being as armed as any British warship, but its commercial arrogance prevented this. Rather than fill these Indiamen with cannons and the hundreds of sailors needed to man them, it instead filled its gun ports with dummy cannons and its decks with luxurious cabins and storage for trade goods, maintaining crews only large enough to sail these ships and be stewards to its paying passengers.

Commodore Dance would have been pondering those dummy cannons as the ships he had sent to look at the four strange sail in the southwest reported back that it was four French warships, Linois’s squadron. He was practically defenceless. To protect his 30 ships and their precious cargo, he had one small armed brig named the Ganges with around a dozen guns. Up against him were the 186 guns of the French squadron, 74 in Marengo, 40 in Belle Poule, 36 in Semillante, 20 in Berceau and 16 in Aventurier. As Dance watched through his telescope, the French ships hoisted their colours, and the admiral’s flag of Linois broke out above Marengo. He needed a plan. Fast.

After a night of cat and mouse between the French and British, Dance ordered his convoy into a long single line and at the front put four of the largest Indiamen – the Royal George, Earl Camden, Warley, and Alfred. He then commanded that these four hoist blue ensigns, the sign of Royal Navy ships. This wasn’t the most absurd plan; the East India Company, in their arrogance, had a policy of painting their Indiamen to look like Royal Navy ships – as Dance records in his despatch: “We hoisted our colours and offered him battle.” But Linois and his ships continued to approach the convoy slowly, with Dance realising that the French intended to separate the convoy and take it apart piece by piece. It was now or never, and Dance took the initiative. At 1 pm, he ordered the Ganges, Royal George, Earl Camden, Warley and Alfred to turn and intercept the French. All the ships turned perfectly and crossed Linois, and at 1:15 pm, the French opened fire on the Royal George. In the preceding night, the convoy had put all the guns they had on these five ships and filled them with as many brave volunteers as they could. All five returned fire on the French warships, and one sailor on the Royal George was killed. I will let Dance take over here:

“But before any other ship could get into action, the enemy hauled their wind and stood away to the east under all the sail they could set. At 2 pm, I made the signal for a general chase and we pursued them until 4 pm.”

In around 40 minutes, Dance and his handful of real guns and dummy cannons had forced the French warships to withdraw under the belief it had engaged an elite squadron of Royal Navy ships. Not content with this victory, he then ordered his ships to chase the French down and stop them from returning. By the later afternoon, it was clear Linois had run, and Dance ordered his convoy to regroup and make for the safety of Malacca.

In the Straits of Malacca, Dance met the ships the Royal Navy had sent to escort him on the outbreak of war but would have been too late had the commodore not thought fast. The China Fleet passed the rest of its voyage without incident, returning to Britain in the summer of 1804.

To say the country was ecstatic would be an understatement. If the China Fleet and its £8 million had been taken, as Linois would have been perfectly able to do, it is evident that both the East India Company and Lloyds of London would have faced bankruptcy and collapse. Nathaniel Dance was knighted by George III and given a fantastic sword by Lloyds worth 100 guineas. With the sword came £5,000 (£403,000 today) from the Bombay Insurance Company and £500 a year (£40,000 today) from the East India Company, along with a share in the £50,000 given to all who sailed in convoy. Sir Nathaniel retired immediately and never took to the sea again, dying peacefully in 1827.

Linois would claim for the rest of his life that Dance’s fleet was, in fact, filled with real British warships, writing letters claiming this for many decades after the action, to the belief of no one.

Napoleon himself was distraught. If Linois had courage, the Napoleonic Wars could have ended differently. India would have been in chaos, the banks of London would have been run, and Britain would have been left in a very precarious position. He wrote to his Minister of Defence in a fury:

“All the enterprises at sea which have been undertaken since I became the head of the Government have missed fire because my admirals see double and have discovered, I know not how or where, that war can be made without running risks ... Tell Linois that he has shown want of courage of mind, that kind of courage which I consider the highest quality in a leader".”

It is worth remarking that following the defeat at Pulo Aura, Linois had a similarly pathetic rest of the war that ended in a wonderfully ironic way. In 1806, the admiral was captured when he mistook a British squadron of warships for a merchant convoy.

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References:

Dance, N. (1804). A Letter from Captain Nathaniel Dance. European Magazine and London Review. Volume 46.

Dalrymple, W. (2019). The Anarchy - The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Bloomsbury.

James, W. (1827). The Naval History of Great Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Clowes, W. (1900). The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to 1900, Volume 5.

O’Brien, P. (1973). HMS Surprise. Collins.

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The chances are you could not pick out Vanuatu on a map, but for the sake of placing this story, it is an island republic between Australia and New Zealand, more or less on the same line of latitude as Papua New Guinea. It has around 300,000 residents, most of whom are indigenous Melanesian people and have likely been there for a few thousand years. Europeans first discovered what is now Vanuatu in 1606 when it was ‘claimed’ for the King of Spain by a passing sailor who named it Espíritu Santo. No European returned for almost two centuries, but in the late 18th Century, a succession of French and British explorers from Captain Cook to Captain Bligh passed through, the former renaming the islands the New Hebrides, a name which stuck.

It was soon discovered that the New Hebrides had a plentiful supply of sandalwood, coconuts, and land perfect for cotton plantations. As a result, over time there was a massive influx of settlers on the island, primarily British and French planters hoping to make money from farming cotton by using cheap Melanesian labour. By the turn of the 20th Century, while there were hundreds of these planters were on the islands, there wasn’t a single bit of formal governance and, as a result, pure anarchy.

With growing concern at the exploitation of indigenous labour and lack of authority, the British and French governments eventually agreed to formalise the administration of the New Hebrides, but neither wished to give up their perceived rights to be responsible for it. As a result, a condominium was formed, where both Britain and France had equal roles in government with separate legal systems, separate police forces and even separate financial set-ups.

Someone in the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides could decide they wanted to be governed by British immigration rules but be tried in the French criminal courts while setting up their business according to the British registration system. All documents had to be signed by the Resident Commissioner appointed by each country, who operated out of their separate compounds marked out by their respective flags that flew at the exact same height – until a junior British official on their first day was tricked into letting the French one fly higher.

Every colonial bureaucrat on the island had a mirror equivalent opposite number, while postage stamps had the emblems of both countries and were payable in two currencies. Moreover, Islanders had the citizenship of neither Britain nor France and were not issued passports but ‘travel documents,’ signed by both nations’ commissioners and largely invalid for travel.

Bemused Australians in the New Hebrides renamed the Condominium “the Pandemonium” – which was understandable when one country has two police forces with different uniforms, two health systems and two entirely distinct systems of law. To add confusion, the two police forces would regularly swap duties to not give any impression of seniority.

If there were any disputes, there was a Joint Court with judges from each country and a President appointed by the King of Spain - because why not. This became an issue when Franco abolished the Spanish monarchy, and for the rest of the islands’ existence, the Joint Court had no president. When passing judgement, the Joint Court would decide if the conviction should be British or French, depending on the circumstances.

Even the anti-colonial movements and political parties existed in pairs; groups were dedicated to fighting French rule and others to British government, with entirely different philosophies and objectives. This reached a head in the 1970s when independence discussions began regarding the New Hebrides.

The British Government was unopposed to the idea, providing stages to self-government through local elections and eventual independence, supporting political parties. However, the French Government, prompted mainly by European business owners, disagreed with this premise and wanted the New Hebrides to become a permanent overseas colony as New Caledonia and other French Pacific islands remain to this day. While Francophone parties attempted to boycott elections and the independence referendum, moderates were able to win by a significant margin, and independence was scheduled for the summer of 1980. Father Walter Lini, an Anglican priest and head of the moderates, led the new republic, which was to be called Vanuatu.

This all occurred against the backdrop of a significant economic boom on the New Hebrides, prompted by its strange legal status allowing all sorts of tax loopholes and encouraging the establishment of banks and financial companies aiming to provide tax haven services to Europeans. With that came tourism and a growing awareness of the unique situation on the island, including from the American libertarian organisation – the Phoenix Foundation. For some time, the foundation had been dedicated to creating a libertarian nation-state backed by millions of dollars from donors. Having failed elsewhere, the group set its sight on the New Hebrides/Vanuatu and its upcoming independence. It provided one of the leading anti-government activists, Jimmy Stevens, with a large amount of cash, weapons and military radios to launch a rebellion in return for promised concessions such as casino rights. Stevens claimed to be a second Moses and had 23 wives and many more children. Thus in June 1980, the so-called Coconut War began when Stevens declared he had achieved the independence of his own country, the Republic of Vemerana.

In the bizarre conflict, Father Lini appealed to Britain and France to send troops to put down Stevens’s libertarian rebellion; however, once the French paratroopers arrived, they refused to act against the rebels under secret orders from President Francois Mitterand.

It eventually fell to the British Army and Royal Marines, whose officers believed while en route that the New Hebrides was in Scotland not the Pacific, along with troops from Papua New Guinea to put down the rebellion. By the end of August, the farcical revolt had ended quickly because the rebels were largely only armed with bows and arrows.

It was only at Jimmy Stevens’s trial that the truth emerged that the Phoenix Foundation and French landowners had promised him $250,000 for launching his rebellion. Instead, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison and was released in 1991.

Today in Vanuatu, there is only one police force and one currency. It is a diverse paradise, with almost every religion on earth represented, including some who even worship Prince Philip. These days, you do not need to go and get permission from an Englishman and a Frenchman to leave the country, and nowhere does a judge appointed by the King of Spain get to interfere with your life.

References:

Woodward, K. (2014). A Political Memoir of the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides. ANU Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13wwvr8

Shears, R. (1980). The Coconut War: The Crisis on Espiritu Santo. Cassell Australia.

Guthrie, General Sir C. (2000). Desert Island Discs. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00949n6

“Diplomat who fought 'Coconut War' for Vanuatu independence.” (2014). Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/national/diplomat-who-fought-coconut-war-for-vanuatu-independence-20140216-32u3a.html

"British Answering New Hebrides Call; Company of Marines Being Sent 'to Provide Stability'". (1980). New York Times.

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Why do fire departments exist? It’s a relatively simple question you might assume: something catches fire, and the firefighters come and put it out within minutes of you dialling 999/112/911/111/or in the out-of-sequence place that is Guinea 442-020. The problem is that things don’t catch fire anymore.

Last week I was in New York, one of the most exciting places on the planet. Over the few days I was there, I heard a lot of sirens and saw a lot of fire engines zooming off to emergencies. Curious if this was because New York is inherently more flammable than other places, I looked up the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) statistics. They surprised me

According to the 2021 statistics of the FDNY, they attended 1,213,750 incidents. That’s a lot of fires. But when you take those incidents apart, it emerges that ‘Fire Incidents’ make up less than 25 per cent of those 1,213,750 total calls. Even then, the 290,643 ‘Fire Incidents’ cover things from actual fires to malicious false calls, with structural fires being 10,639 – the vast majority are more medical incidents. In much of America, the fire departments often take up the role that ambulance services would in Europe. For example, 65 per cent of ambulances in New York are run by the fire department, with the remainder from hospitals. 

The disparity wasn’t always so vast. In 1980, fire departments in the United States attended almost 3 million fires. In 2020 that had halved to 1.4 million. The reason is simple, with the proliferation of smoke/fire alarms, reduction in smoking and the increase in fire safety for buildings and things like furniture. Similarly, in 1980 fire departments in the US attended 5 million calls for medical aid, but in 2020 attended 24 million. There are now so few fires that there is double the number of false alarms each year in the US than genuine fires. The number of firefighters, however, has skyrocketed – primarily to meet medical demand. 

The trend in fire emergencies doesn’t change across OECD nations. The only difference is that fire departments outside the US tend to do much less medical work. Following the heatwave last week, the London Fire Brigade reported they had the busiest day since the London Blitz in the Second World War. The Brigade said they had received 2,600 calls, five times a usually busy day. Not every call was its own incident, with many calls generally being made for each fire. Extrapolating the Brigade’s statement, it means that on an average day, they get 520 calls. In contrast, the London Ambulance Service receive around 8,500 calls daily. London’s Metropolitan Police Service receive a similar number. Curiously, the disparity in calls is not reflected in the respective budgets.

The London Ambulance Service have an annual budget of around £160 million, while the London Fire Brigade receive almost £400 million. Recent years have taken a toll on the former. The NHS targets immediate medical emergencies in London, such as cardiac and respiratory arrest, with 7-minute ambulance response times. These are mostly met, but as the call volume has risen, so has the response time. Where things get dangerous is in Category 2 calls, where patients are experiencing severe issues like a heart attack or stroke, which the NHS believes require a response within 18 minutes. In data from 2022, the average response time for a Category 2 medical emergency was 52 minutes. This is shocking, but it’s hard to blame the Ambulance Service. They simply don’t have the resources.

The London Fire Brigade, meanwhile, have no such issues. The average response time from call to the first fire engine’s arrival is 5 minutes and 10 seconds (the target is 6 minutes), a response time unchanged in almost 20 years despite the closure of many fire stations and budget cuts in the millions of pounds during the same period.

You might be starting to see where I am going with this. 

The need for fire departments will never go away. But as trends have shown, the fire risk faced in the UK is not what it was and is projected to continue to drop even with the increased fire risk from climate change. Conversely, emergency medical and mental health needs in the UK are trending upwards, with some NHS regions seeing 25 per cent increases on pre-pandemic levels. So, where does that leave our established, respected, brave fire brigades? In my mind, the answer is obvious: to upskill and give them the equipment to dual-role as a reserve medical emergency service as has been done in the United States.

Firefighters are already instructed in emergency first aid and trained in the use of defibrillators as well as oxygen. These skills would allow existing firefighters to assist as first responders, as the overburdened police in London do for cardiac arrest, while others could be trained with more advanced medical skills. For instance, in London, if fire stations were each given an ambulance or hybrid fire-medical vehicle, it could be put to use to relieve the NHS and would also be helpful if there was a fire that needed medical assistance. The London Fire Brigade is paid to be on call at all times; this could be used to help the surge in medical needs across the capital without impacting response times and, when necessary, prioritise fire emergencies.

Not a single part of this blog is to criticise the phenomenal work done by firefighters and the rest of the emergency services. The problem is firefighters are too good at their jobs. Not many professions have managed to put themselves out of business in the way fire departments have through their advocacy for fire safety, but maybe there could be some use in a broader focus on their future. It feels like a waste of valuable resources and skilled firefighters when there is low-hanging fruit waiting to be plucked at little cost to the public and with potential to continue their tradition of saving lives.

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When I first began this blog in 2020, it was a combination of immense boredom with being stuck inside and the idea that it would not be long before regular international travel restarted and I could write about my adventures. Before the Pandemic, I travelled a lot. After the Pandemic, not so much. It has meant most of these (irregular) posts have been journeys from my desk at home.

However, over the last few months, I’ve got back into travelling and once again started to think about the places I visit and hope to continue this as time goes on.

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Before even attempting to begin this article, I need you to understand how large 4 million square kilometres is. If it helps, that’s the size of about half of the USA, or around seven of France. If, as many newspapers believe, you can only quantify size through the medium of football pitches, it’s around 560 million of them.

With that number in mind, imagine that it is entirely administered by your local supermarket. The Tesco Express down the road that does meal deals for £3.50 and doesn’t clean their fridges very well in charge of an area roughly the size of Western Europe. Except, you don’t need to imagine it. It happened. And the store that did it is currently doing a flash sale on living room furniture. But before we discuss sofas, let’s go back a few centuries and discuss hats.

At the turn of the 17th Century, felt hats were all the rage and felt hats are made of beaver skin. At the time, this relied on Russia’s long-established fur trade. But as demand grew, quality dropped significantly as the native European beaver population began to be hunted out of existence. Within decades, it was very difficult for merchants to find high quality felt from Russia, and customers in England were complaining that they were having to wear felt made from rabbit instead.

But around the same time, irregular and rare shipments began to arrive from the European colonies in North America where beaver – mostly trapped by French settlers and Indigenous Americans – was still plentiful and of very good quality. In 1669, the ship Nonsuch dropped anchor in the Thames with a large shipment of some of the highest quality furs London had ever seen, selling them immediately for £1,233 (equivalent to around £1 million in 2022). The Nonsuch had led an expedition invested in by some of London’s richest merchants and sponsored by Prince Rupert, a first cousin of King Charles II. It had done its trapping in Hudson’s Bay in the north of what is now Canada. The purpose of the expedition was to demonstrate that the issues with fur supply could be solved if its trapping in North America could be optimised, leaving behind the slow and traditional approach of the French and First Nation trappers.

This was not the first time Prince Rupert had seen to make money from exploiting colonised lands, having poured large amounts of his wealth into the slave trade from West Africa and sitting on the board of the Royal African Company. With this financial success made from trading in human lives, he turned his interest to North America and helped put together the syndicate that sent the Nonsuch to Hudson's Bay. In 1670, his cousin King Charles II granted the syndicate a royal charter to form the Hudson’s Bay Company, giving the company a monopoly over ‘Prince Rupert’s Land’ made up of the land drained by rivers and streams flowing into Hudson’s Bay – or 3,861,400 square kilometres.

In short order, the company had established trading posts throughout its monopoly, known as factories (as each was controlled by a company official known as a factor). The only thing that mattered to these factories and its parent company was beaver. Nothing could stand in the way of ensuring the safe passage of furs and pelts to Europe. By 1690, the demand in England for hats and caps was five million per year – or one per person. Hundreds of thousands more would be exported onwards from England to Europe such was the demand for the well-known quality of the Hudson Bay beaver. For example in 1756, Portuguese customers spent more than £20 million in today’s money on English beaver felt hats.

As Prince Rupert’s Land was largely still wilderness, besides company staff it was inhabited only by European and First Nations trappers and as a result there was only a barter economy, to both subjugate indigenous residents and prevent private wealth. There were standardised prices throughout Prince Rupert’s Land and instead of a normal currency, the company instead pegged everything against the unit of 1MB (1 Made Beaver). For three made beaver pelts, you could be given one clay pot in exchange at a company store, or for 10 you could get a gun. Private trading was outlawed and all beaver pelts that left Prince Rupert’s Land traveled through the warehouses and accounts of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

By the end of the 18th Century, the company had long outstretched its original borders, controlling what is now the Northwest Territories of Canada as well as what is now Oregon and it even had a presence in the Pacific Ocean.

The company’s only focus was to trade fur. It did not want to be a government, but it became one, eventually issuing its own money and running what was practically a navy on the lakes and rivers of North America. In the early years this was not controversial, as only the coasts of the continent had been occupied by colonial settlers and the inhospitable interiors were left to the company, and it liked it that way. It was so terrified of settlement that the Company spent almost two centuries spreading falsehoods that their lands were completely barren and impossible to live in.

But by the 1830s and 1840s, the company had to compete with settlers on the Oregon Trail moving across North America. At first, any attempts to settle were crushed as the company would simply not allow them to trade in their stores. But over time, the eventual number of settlers moving through company land eventually broke their stranglehold, forcing the company out of the USA in 1846. The monopoly in Canada evaporated shortly after in 1849. By then, private trade in furs was beginning to challenge the company’s authority, mostly led by members of the Metis People. These are Indigenous Canadians who have mixed European-First Nations origins. The Metis made up most of the trappers supplying the Hudson’s Bay Company and them taking trade into their own hands, along with a decimated supply of beaver, undermined the Company’s monopoly.

The propaganda spread by the company that their land was horrible and deadly also began to be challenged. It took a military expedition and a Parliamentary inquiry for the Hudson’s Bay Company to finally admit that for centuries it had been lying that its land was inhospitable and that in fact it was one of the great prairies of America with some of the continent’s most promising agricultural land. The psyop was over.

All of these challenges coincided with the emergence of Canada as a national entity and the establishment of its borders. With the fur trade drying up, the company was in financial crisis and in 1863 the majority of shares were acquired by the International Financial Society. As a result, the Company’s shares were offered for purchase by the public, marketed on the idea that now the truth was out, the Company’s land would be perfect for agriculture and mining. In 1867, three British provinces in North America confederated and formed The Dominion of Canada. The new country was bordered by the Hudson’s Bay Company to its west and the United States to its south, placing the financially struggling Company in a very advantageous position.

In 1869, the United States offered the Company $10,000,000 for its land. If it had gone through, it would have meant that the USA would today control the vast majority of what instead became Canada. Under political pressure from Britain, this very generous offer was rejected and the Company agreed to cease to be a geographical entity, transferring all of its land to the British Government.

On June 23 1870, Britain approved the deal and transferred Prince Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territories to the Dominion of Canada. In return, the British government distributed £300,000 (£30 million today) to the Company’s shareholders as compensation.

But the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company doesn’t end there. Remember the stores across Canada where three beavers got you a pot? Those became department stores, and remain so today where you can still buy pots, but for real money. It runs a website called The Bay, the one offering a flash sale on sofas, but the brick and mortar shops still bear the original name of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Even now on their website, you can buy a Hudson’s Bay point blanket with the same design as you would have found in one of the company’s factories in 1779.

The stores have struggled over the years, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic but the Hudson’s Bay Company is still going strong with around 30,000 employees and almost CA$10 billion in revenue. In 2020 it ceased to be a public company and is now in private hands. There is, however, still the odd relic of its past hiding among its balance sheets, its CEO today is known as the Governor, a role that has existed in the company since 1670 when the Governor was Prince Rupert.

It doesn’t own 3.9 million square kilometres of land anymore though, it instead controls 3.7 million square metres of commercial real estate.

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The tired trope of India that somehow still persists for those abroad is that of an exotic land filled with snake charmers, elephants and maharajas. The fact that India is now one of the world’s largest economies and a centre of tech innovation seems to have passed many people by.

But that does not mean it has lost all of its historical peculiarities. Snake charming was banned in 1972 but can still be found throughout the country, working of elephants has been heavily restricted but still occurs, and in 1971 the titles of all of India’s princes were all abolished, and yet one still exists.

I have been fascinated with this anomaly since some years ago I was in an Indian airport and saw a list of names at the door of a VIP lounge. It was the government lounge, and everyone entitled to use it was on this list, to be used in case of any dispute. It began in an expected way with the President and Prime Minister of India and made its way down to various Ministers and heads of Indian non-governmental bodies but one name stuck out at me: “His Highness the Prince of Arcot”. No one else on there seemed to be a royal or prince of any kind.

It’s worth pointing out that India has hundreds of titular royals, who ruled over large parts of the country for hundreds of years. Most were figures of religious or cultural importance as well as being secular leaders, and the foreign empires like the British and Mughals who conquered India retained many of the princes, giving them limited autonomy in return for support. At the independence of India from Britain, there were almost 600 princely rulers, covering almost 40% of the land that became India and Pakistan. Each varied massively in size from the largest states that were almost 100,000 square miles with millions of subjects down to the smallest kingdoms which often were no more than a few miles across.

A significant amount of effort was taken during the process of independence to integrate these princely states into the newly independent countries. Almost all of the rulers acceded quickly and peacefully in return for recognition of their symbolic status and titles by the new republics who also promised perpetual large annual payments to sweeten the deal. A handful of princely states were stubborn and were integrated by force, with issues as a result to this day, such as Jammu and Kashmir.

As a result, for the first few decades of independent India, there existed a class of royals recognised within the republic, with privileges and financial support not that different to what they received during the period of British rule. But in 1971 this came tumbling down.

The then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi amended the Indian Constitution to abolish all privileges and titles, along with any financial subsidies. She believed the whole system to be at odds with the secular socialist republic she was attempting to perfect. The move also had financial benefits: the large princely subsidies stopped being a drain on the Indian treasury while much of the royals’ gold and property were seized by the Government in the process. In 1972, Pakistan followed suit and similarly abolished its remaining princes’ titles.

So overnight the almost 600 Maharajas, Maharanas, Rajas, Nawabs, Khans and so on disappeared. Each His Highness became plain old Mr in the eyes of the Indian Government and those that still claim royal status are often met with government punishment. All except His Highness the Prince of Arcot.

Arcot is a town of about 150,000 on the road between Madras and Bangalore in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. It was once the seat of a powerful Muslim dynasty that ruled as the Nawabs of the Carnatic from the 1690s until 1855. At their peak, they controlled much of the southeastern coast of India. By the early 19th Century the invasion of British and French imperial forces had removed much of the Carnatic’s power and they became heavily indebted to the colonial trading companies. In 1855, the 13th Nawab of Arcot died without children. The British, influenced by the East India Company, declared the kingdom had lapsed as a result and annexed it entirely. As a token compensation, Queen Victoria in 1870 gave the last Nawab’s uncle a pension and the title of “His Highness the Prince of Arcot” for him and his descendants in perpetuity. This was granted in a type of royal charter, known as letters patent.

As there was no land still to rule, the Princes of Arcot existed in a strange realm of being kings without a kingdom but with significant influence and prestige. The title continued to pass down through the original holder’s family and they built a large palace, Amir Mahal, in Madras that became a centre of culture instead of one of government.

But what became of the Prince of Arcot in 1971? The constitutional amendment deprecating princely titles was unambiguous, it abolished all privileges of those who had been rulers of states, but the Nawabs of Arcot had no state. It applied to rulers who had joined India in 1947, but the Nawabs of Arcot had done no such thing. Their title came from the letters patent issued a century beforehand by the British, a charter automatically inherited by the Republic of India at independence. As legal successors to the British Empire in India, many similar letters patent were taken on by the newly independent country in this way, but only one had granted someone the title of Prince.

There was not much that could be done. To abolish the Princes of Arcot would require an Act of the Indian Parliament to override the letters patent. So instead the Government did what they were forced to by the original document, and so the President of India recognised the Princes of Arcot. The policy continues to this day, confirmed by a presidential decree in 1994 and a court case in 2019.

As a result, if you consult the Government of India’s Warrant of Precedence you will find His Highness Nawab Mohammed Abdul Ali, the current Prince of Arcot, nestled after the Governor of Tamil Nadu and before the state’s cabinet ministers. He inherited the title in 1993 and is entitled to a police escort, a state funeral upon death and various tax exemptions. He still hoists a royal standard above his home and has a grand letterhead with his princely coat of arms.

The Prince stays out of politics, but it is traditional for foreign diplomats and Indian government officials to pay courtesy calls on His Highness if visiting Tamil Nadu and the state’s Chief Minister is received for regular audiences. The pension agreed by the British is even still paid by the government in Delhi, although with inflation it’s only around £1,500 per year these days.

The present Prince of Arcot spends much of his time dedicated to cultural and religious causes and was asked by the Indian Government to lead the country’s Muslim pilgrims on Haj in 2019. Should you ever be passing through Tamil Nadu, it is worth stopping by the family’s palace as the Prince’s heir, Asif, is a keen quizmaster and regularly hosts quiz nights at the palace for local societies and dignitaries.

“I love being the Quiz Master,” Asif told a newspaper. “I learn myself from every question I ask. According to me, it is one of the finest ways to improve your general knowledge.”

Perhaps one question in the quiz might even be: “Can you name the only remaining Indian prince?”

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