Sean Thomas

Back in June 2020, I attended a quasi-legal Black Lives Matter protest in London, and a widely reviled counter protest, by hard-right Tommy Robinson-esque ‘football lads’, who were determined to ‘defend’ the Churchill statue and the Cenotaph. As a journalist, I was able to move freely between these two protests: one – the football lads – took place in Parliament Square and lower Whitehall, and the other – BLM – was largely confined to Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross. Mostly, the police managed to keep the warring tribes apart, occasionally the lines broke, and pretty serious violence ensued. I saw this violence from both perspectives.

As we all know, the last few days have been filled with terrible news out of Israel and Gaza, and this news – on mainstream or social media – has been suffused with appalling pictures of cruelty, carnage and suffering. Like many, I have therefore been doing my utmost to ignore all of this, and bury my head in other tasks, lest I expire out of bleak despair. My personal diversion has been exploring the latest evolutions of AI creativity – drawings, designs, cartoons, paintings. I am trying to discover if AI can be serviceably employed as a graphic designer, or maybe an illustrator.

When it comes to British railway history, I can say, without exaggeration, that few places are more iconically located than my own home. This is because I live exactly where Camden Town meets Primrose Hill – and where Britain’s first intercity railway tore through inner London (around 1837), surging out of London’s first mainline station: Euston. Indeed, my own house is visible in one of the famous 1838 John Cooke Bourne lithographs of this transport revolution: Building Retaining Wall near Park Street. The prosaic title deliberately spars with the poetic grandeur of Bourne’s cityscape, as the Camden Cutting slices grimly through the housing. Does any of this bizarre, sometimes-well-meaning nonsense really matter?

I love American roadtrips. They are the ideal way to visit 96 per cent of the country, which is determinedly built (for good or ill) around the desires of the car driver. The brilliant roads, the endless motels, the hideous car lots that blight most of the cities (making parking a doddle, even if they ruin the actual towns), they all ensure that driving is easefully delightful. Even in the most nondescript hotel in the most ahistoric corner of America, you will happen upon the surreal, haunting legacy of slavery A roadtrip is also the best way to understand America, and my recent trip along and around the Mason-Dixon Line – the great geographical/political divide which once (still?

As famous capital cities of world-straddling superpowers go, Washington DC is somewhat disappointing. The grandiose urbanism is surely meant to resemble the boulevards of Paris, with the parks of London, but in reality the dreary post-modern/neo-classical bombast makes it looks like Tashkent married to Milton Keynes. A city that is planned to project power actually projects tedious, if reliable, stolidity.  But that, for my purposes, is the thing. Washington DC is nothing if not boring. And pompous. And self-consciously serious.

The beautiful Siwa Oasis in the far western deserts of Egypt is a remarkable place, for multiple reasons. It’s probably been inhabited, continuously, for 12,000 years. Alexander the Great came here to consult the already renowned Oracle of Amun-Ra in 332BC (some say he is buried here, as he loved Siwa so much). You can swim in Roman cisterns fed by one of the 300 natural springs – which also nourish thousands of date palms and olive groves. The locals have their own Berber language – Siwi – spoken nowhere else on earth.  But there’s one facet of Siwa’s history which is less talked about.

As a travel writer, I can get blasé about many aspects of travel: the free five-handed massage, the private plunge-pool out the back, those odd bits of overchilled orangey cheddar in an average Biz Class lounge. But one slightly childish thing that always pleases me is stamps in my passport. They should be emotionally meaningless: they are, after all, tiny and potentially annoying examples of frontier bureaucracy, ways and means by which a nation keeps tabs on you. And yet the other day I was going through the airport at Ibiza and getting my Spanish exit stamp – a Brexit benefit or drawback depending on how you feel – and the nice passport lady flicked through my passport, seeking a rare empty page, and said: ‘Wow, you have a lot of stamps.