The Cave The fierceness of the midday sun wanes into a balmy afternoon haze as I lock my bike at the foot of the escarpment. Picking my way among the gritstone boulders as I near the top of the ridge, my pannier straps gently cutting into each side of my neck, I steady myself against the easterly wind, and look out over the Derbyshire Dales below. Perfection. Half-remembered shards of childhood days: sheltering under rocks among the heather; the snare-roll of waterproofs flap

Note to self: the term ‘fall’ here refers to both a waterfall and a potential fall to the death if attempting to traverse carrying a large, unwieldy bicycle. Hindsight, they say, is a beautiful thing, but I can’t concur. Two things I find endlessly fascinating and beautiful are deserts and maps. So to look at a map of the Negev, a desert or semidesert covering 4,700 square miles and 55% of the country’s land area, was, to be my dramatic self, rather exciting. I spent weeks po

It’s been a while. Working a 9:00-5:30 job means there’s not always as much opportunity as I’d like to escape what feels like the hurly-burly of stress and computer screens that constitute much of working life. But when that chance comes, I’d like to think I try with the best of them to make that escape interesting, for my own amusement if not for anyone else’s. I’ve noticed that many of the writers whose works I’ve read recently (Alastair Humphreys, Tim Cole, Leon McCarron,