“Everyone’s changing; I stay the same” – The Corrs (2004). Sentimental journeys are no stranger to my wandering heart or backpack. Neil Finn said it long before I rode my weary soul onto the streets of Bournemouth Town in 1994…my first trip to the iconic seaside town…10 years later I’d be working in a bar…
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** Don’t Stop Living is Fifteen Years Old Today!! ** “Where were you while we were getting high?” – Noel Gallagher. On the 27th August 2007, I wrote the first ever blog post on Don’t Stop Living, here it is. The photo above was also the first ever photo to grace that travel blog. It…
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“God damn right – it’s a beautiful day” – The Eels. Well that crept up fast. FIFTEEN FUCKING YEARS passed you and I nonchalantly by, for better or worse. “And on the streets tonight, an old man prays with newspaper cuttings of his glory days” – Nick Wire. (“And on the streets tonight, an old…
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As 2008 continued, I started backdating a load of stories from my travels. Some of this I had already written on paper, and in my old diaries, some of it was fresh. A lot of this month was focused on my time at Bournemouth University where I did a lot of crazy things away from…
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By March 2008, my broken leg bone hat-trick was beginning to heal and though I didn’t travel much, I was in two countries that month – England and Northern Ireland. I made plans to visit Scotland again in May 2008. I had started to backdate and document my life in more detail by now. As…
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It was in February 2008 that I started to reminisce a lot more and write about glory days, some of these posts were written from memory, many of them them simply from my handwritten diary. Notably I covered a family holiday to Afandou in Greece, where my Dad wrote a poem/song to sing to us…
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“Footloose and fancy free, she comes to rescue me” – Kurt Nilsen. At the start of 2008, I had a broken leg and was housebound. I actually spent most of those days studying and watching Michael Palin DVDs of his global travels. I was preparing myself for bigger and better travels once my leg had…
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“Where it began, woo oh oh oh” – Neil Diamond. Where it began, I know. It began in Toronto in Canada. An unlikely city to inspiring a nomadic Ulsterman’s whackpacking writing dream. It all began in Toronto in September 2001 when I spied the words “DON’T STOP LIVING” on a High School Wall. Nobody else…
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December 2007 was a bit of an odd time for me. Having been really busy in November 2007, December was where it all went wrong. I headed on a rare night out at Christmas to party in the Old Firestation Nightclub in Bournemouth, Dorset, England. It was on that night in this nightclub that I…
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It was in November 2007, my fourth month as a travel blogger that something odd happened. I stopped blogging. That month only has TWO blog posts, yes crazy. The reason for this is very simple. I had just returned to Bournemouth after a long time travelling and I spent 2-3 weeks in a temporary flat…
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