Star Trek is iconic; optimistic; inspirational; moral; humanistic; ahead of its time; a product of its time; pompous; cheesy; serious; witty and subtle; obvious and unsubtle; superficial; deep. It&…

Bute is a small island in the Firth of Clyde: an easy day trip, with a ferry ride from Wemyss thrown in. There’s not a hell of a lot there, but that’s kind of the point. You go there fo…

Sometimes a TV show can be important. It can mean something. And before cable, satellite, or streaming, a TV show could be an event. The first time I saw Roots was a few years ago on DVD, decades a…

Photography has slowly and subtly improved my mindset. I may not be a beginner any more, but I still have the mindset that I can keep on trying out things new to me, and looking for inspiration fro…

City AM's inbox is drowning in AI pitches. Anna Moloney, who spends her days copy and pasting them into detection software, has had enough.

After the last effort from Disney, I can’t say I was brimming with enthusiasm for the latest Star Wars film. Their output since taking over the franchise in 2012 has been a very mixed bag; a …

There’s a popular myth that every seven years, every cell in your body that can be replaced has died and been replaced; therefore every seven years you’re a new person. The truth is a b…

Morocco is a country I’ve known from films since childhood. I’m now in a stage of life where I can properly indulge my lifelong interests, and visit the real-world places that inspired …

Morocco conjures up visions of old medinas, kasbahs, and souks, and desert dunes and mountains. These are mental images of static scenery, which leave room for being surprised by the bustle of mode…

I didn’t plan to visit Morocco this year, but sometimes life comes at you fast. I’m glad I went – it more than made up for a rapid, last-minute change of plans, and I got to see p…

After a few days of driving around Cyprus – a broad but shallow look – I wanted to do a couple of narrower but deeper dives. I took the bus to Nicosia one day, and on another I walked a…

This year my winter escape was to another island: Cyprus is certainly warmer and brighter than Shetland! It was my first time driving on a Greek island since Crete a decade before. It was also the …

“Horse: Everyone can see what a horse is.” (“Koń jaki jest, każdy widzi.”)~ Nowe Ateny (the first Polish encyclopaedia, published 1746) It’s not up to me to announce w…

I’ve reached a point where the thing I want to do most is travel. The world’s surface is already fully-explored, so wherever you go, people have already been there before you. So why wo…

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night (1962) To one degree or another we all take inspiration from other people: maybe we …

Gil Gerard, the star of 'Buck Rogers in the 25th Century' who battled cancer, advised, "Don’t waste your time on anything that doesn’t thrill you or bring you love"

Our final stretch of the Silk Road took us into the desert and the ancient past. We boarded the sunrise train across the Kyzylkum (“Red Sands”). The journey to Urgench lasted four hours…

We arrived in Bukhara late at night. Our time in Uzbekistan so far had been fast-paced, with rail journeys in and out of Tashkent and Samarkand and when I woke the next morning I had no idea who I …

If there’s one name that conjures up the idea of the Silk Road, it must be Samarkand. It’s an ancient city, one of the oldest continually-inhabited on Earth. It contains iconic architec…

When you arrive in Uzbekistan, you can see a clear difference between it and its neighbours, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. For one thing, it uses the Roman alphabet which gives it a more Western feel.…