— Pleased to meet you
A writer, a slow traveller, and a permanent tourist with a small canvas bag and bad sense of direction. For the last four years I've been keeping this journal from wherever I happen to be — Setúbal, Lisbon, Kinosaki, Marrakech, the back lanes of Hoi An.
The short version, written from a quiet table at the back of a café in Lisbon.
grew up in a small town near the Welsh border that nobody travelled to and almost nobody travelled from. My grandmother kept postcards in a biscuit tin on the windowsill; I read them like a novel, in no particular order, and decided very early that I wanted a tin like that of my own.
By the time I was twenty-six, I had spent most of my savings on a single one-way flight to Lisbon. I told myself I'd stay three weeks. I stayed eleven months. I started keeping notes on the back of receipts and napkins, and then in a small battered moleskine someone gave me, and then on a small website with a name I am still slightly embarrassed by.
That website is this one. Four years later it is one hundred and forty-two essays long, has been read by people in eighty-six countries, and remains, mercifully, the same battered moleskine on the inside — just typed.
Stories is, in the end, exactly what it sounds like. Long, slow pieces about places I have been.Hotel rooms I did not want to leave. Mornings before the city woke up. Meals that took a whole afternoon. Trains I missed on purpose. The recipes I tried, mostly badly, to bring home with me.
I am not interested in lists, top tens, or the cheapest weekend in Berlin. I am interested in the small, slow, peculiar things — the way the light moves across a tiled wall at four in the afternoon, the sound a market makes before anyone has set up properly, the precise weight of the air in a courtyard in Marrakech in March.
If that sounds like the kind of thing you want to read on a Sunday, with a long coffee and no other plans, then we are going to get on rather well. Welcome.
Sold most of what I owned, packed the rest into one canvas bag, and told everyone I'd be back by Christmas. I was not back by Christmas.
Started the journal on a slow Sunday afternoon, in an apartment with a tiled hallway and a stove that worked only on Tuesdays. First essay: a 2,000-word piece about pastéis de nata.
Spent three weeks at a 200-year-old ryokan, didn't write a word for the first twelve days, then wrote 14,000 words over the following four. The piece that put us on the map.
14 readers signed up the first week. By month three it was 2,400. Today, somehow, it is 14,328 — sent every Sunday morning from wherever I happen to be.
A small, hand-numbered run of 1,200 copies. Sold out in nine days. Made me promise to do another one. (Issue №02 ships this autumn.)
One hundred and forty-two essays in. Thirty-eight countries. One battered notebook. Next stop: Marrakech, on the slow train.
The best stories happen at walking speed. I'd rather spend three weeks somewhere than three days, miss the train than rush the lunch, and skip the highlight reel for the back lane every single time.
No sponsored hotel stays. No press trips with a hashtag attached. If a place is in here it is because I went and stayed and paid like everyone else. The rare exceptions are flagged clearly.
I am not the story. The street, the room, the morning, the woman who taught me to fold tortillas — they are. I'm just the one with the notebook, trying very hard to keep up.
The slim shelf in my bag. Always one of these, usually two, occasionally all five at once.
Join 14,328 kind people who let one slow story land in their inbox each week. No tracking, no plans, plain text.