1-Way Ticket

MY GRANDSON AND HIS WIFE had long been trying to persuade me to go south and pay them a visit. “You need to get away from the cold and the dark,” they said, “and the sooner the better.” Meaning: before it’s too late. I don’t particularly like travelling, but I thought it best to accept their friendly offer and get it done. Moreover, they wanted to

‘streets constitute the vast majority of public space in a city’. Visit some parts of the world, and you’ll routinely see streets as places for play, conversation, chess, dominoes, singing and dancing, sleeping. Enrique Peñalosa, a former mayor of Bogotá, believes that children playing in the street are actually an ‘indicator species’ for the well-

I joined a walking group. I’d always loved nature, but I’d kept it a closely guarded secret. Just the idea of being seen in an anorak! But I started going out with this group every Sunday. Sometimes during the week too. They were mostly retirees, and really there was no point me trying to impress them with my repartee because half of them had heari

Maria was eager to get home to see her two other children and husband for the first time, but she didn’t know how to get back. She had heard that there was a white sign in the ditch of the road near her shamba, the patch of earth where her family lived, but the place did not have an address.