Sean Thomas

Have you ever heard of Gorizia? Probably not, and yet it is decidedly pretty. It sits in the far north-eastern corner of Italy, where the Latin map frays into the Slavic. The centre is all pink arcades, pistachio green shutters, and palazzi painted in faded yellow. Beyond everything is the great pale wall of the Julian Alps.  The town has had at least three names - Gorizia, Görz, Gorica - because for centuries it was Habsburg, then Austro-Hungarian. That is to say: it was a quintessentially multilingual city, full of Italians, Slovenes, Friulians, Germans and Jews, halfway between Trieste and Vienna. Some called it the ‘Austrian Nice’. Imperial officials came here to die of tranquil old age.

About ten years ago, I realised I had largely forgotten how to write longhand. After decades of Amstrads, PCs, laptops, smartphones, writing more than a few sentences by hand had become genuinely difficult: the muscles had lost the memory, and my signature had decayed into an embarrassed squiggle. A few years later I was obliged to write out an entire cheque, and I found the task so strange and taxing I might as well have been asked to illuminate a medieval manuscript.  Now I suspect the same thing is happening to me with reading, especially the reading of books. This is an awkward confession from a man who has spent his whole adult life writing books.

The most depressing number in Britain right now is not the national debt, small boat arrivals, the IQ of Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, or the price of a train ticket, though all four make one want to emigrate into a compost bin. It is 43.  According to a recent YouGov survey, just 43 per cent of adults in Great Britain have confidence in their nation’s police. This is a tragedy. The British policeman was one of our noblest soft-power inventions. He was unarmed, faintly comic, yet morally reassuring. He had a helmet, a notebook, and he knew the location of the post office. Other countries had bristling polizei, with menacing riot kit. We had Dixon of Dock Green.

It’s a sweet little town, Arcachon. Clinging to the long French Atlantic coast, adorned with Victorian villas and pretty flowerbeds, it reminds me oddly of Bournemouth. By which I mean: Bournemouth before it was ruined. As such, it’s the kind of place that usually calls for a return visit. I am sure for many French people it is a holiday regular – ‘ahh, shall we do Arcachon again? Mais oui, we can try that new oyster cabin.’ But right now I seriously wonder if anyone will want to return to Arcachon, ever.  The reasons are twofold.

For a decidedly short London road, little Store Street in Bloomsbury, which connects the scholarly precincts of London University with the furniture stores of Tottenham Court Road, delivers a pleasant hit of history. In 1791, ur-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft lived here, then wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.  In case you didn’t know, I also lived on Store Street in the 1990s, back when it was, to be honest, a slightly shabby sideroad, with a greasy spoon and grubby offices. Arguably quaint, and definitely honest, but not somewhere you’d want to linger.  Now, all is changed, changed utterly. In recent years Store Street has spruced up and become a destination in itself.

Deep in the honeycombed limestone caves of Slovenia, Croatia, and Friulian Italy, there is a fantastical creature called ‘the olm’, also known as ‘the baby dragon’. It was once an ordinary salamander, which probably fell down into the karstic caverns - where it has evolved into an eerie pink creature that lives for a century, eats once a decade, possesses eyes without sight, lives permanently in a larval condition – called ‘neoteny’ by zoologists – and has been recorded sitting in the exact same place for seven years, without moving.  Why do I mention the olm? Because, as I travel the world, I’m increasingly wondering if we humans, Homo sapiens - have turned into a peculiar higher primate version of the olm.

I am sitting in the Ottoman courtyard at Ruin Adalya in the old town of Antalya, drinking a tulip glass of black sweet tea and munching near-perfect baklava, and twenty feet beneath me the Romans are still there. That is to say, the Ottoman courtyard is paved with Lycian limestone but sections of it are now made of glass, and through the glass I can see the old Roman road.  Which, as metaphorical launchpads go, will do very nicely. Yes, Antalya has, as many Brits know, fine beaches, serious resorts, agreeably cheap food and wine, and the odd Roman temple. But the history of this stretch of Mediterranean coast goes back further than that, and deeper, so much deeper. And I want to trace that extraordinary depth.

It's that time of year again. The giddy middle of May. When millions across the English-speaking world gather to find out who has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.  This year's shortlist, drawn - as ever - from a diverse selection of not-European, not-male authors, is particularly enriching and profound. As the committee itself puts it, the stories ‘bring compelling characters to life in sharply drawn settings, exploring themes of power, family tension, resistance and unheard voices, alongside courage and unexpected connection. Among them are a keenly observant domestic worker, a young woman whose henna art enables silenced women to speak, and a resourceful young sheep farmer’.

Her name, let us say, is Mary Ann McCready. She is eleven-years-old when she first walks through the gate at six in the morning. The hooter has already gone. Her mother walked her to the mill from a kitchen-house off the Grosvenor Road: a two-up, two-down with six children in one room and an outside privy shared with the next terrace. Mary Ann is a half-timer. She does school until noon, the mill until six. She is paid two shillings a week.  By 13 she is full-time.