The Boy and The Coconut Tree

According to our chancellor, the British and our politicians will have some soul searching to do following the government's defeat in  parliament last night. Soul searching to do? The British people have a soul and they expressed it yesterday via their parliamentary democracy. We are not cowards, we are not racists, we are not helping the enemy but we are tired of imperialism masked as intervention, of regime change masked as "emergencies" and we are tired of helping out the USA, being the fig leaf to its naked militarism of recent times. The soul of the UK remembers that we helped create the international laws and conventions that we were about to break. We want international interventions to be backed by the international community, most of it not some of it and we want to do the right thing for the people here and in the world's worst places and our politicians cannot accuse us of being cowards or traitors for not wanting to attack Syria. And since the...

My love affair with budget airlines began and ended in a single day in 2009 when I travelled to Cyprus with Easyjet. My 7am flight was overbooked and me and 20 other people were told to wait for the 5pm flight, losing a day of our holidays and no compensation offered. Gatwick airport is not the nicest airport at the best of times but on a normal day you would rarely spend more than 2 hours there, I had to spend 12 hours there. The Easyjet desk forgot EU rules on delays and tried to shrug it off as as computer error and expected 20 people, including kids, to fend for themselves for 12 hours, little did they know that armed with my LLM in International Law and my law book I had informed my fellow passengers about the rules so eventually we were all given £15 to spend on food and drink and after 2 complaint emails to Easyjet I was offered a free change of flight if I wanted to extend my stay in Cyprus, I didn't, Paphos is a dump. So it has been 4 years since I've used a budget ai...

One of the great things about living less than 3 hours away from home in a major city is the ease at which I can head home if I feel the need (finances willing). There were no direct flights from Madrid to Newcastle and Vietnam to Newcastle would have involved 14 hours of flying and at least 2 changes of plane. No thank you. Having originally planned a 5 day trip to Menorca and realising it would be beautiful but lonely I chose to visit my family instead so rather than not seeing them for  8 months, I would see them twice in 8 months. My niece is now walking and as she has just started to walk I wanted to see her toddle around rather than wait until December when she was walking normally and we all took it for granted.  So I will have a summer holiday in Tyne & Wear rather than Menorca but it is the people you surround yourself with, not the place, that are the most important? Don't you agree.  This song has been playing in my head for a while, long b...