Coffee – a pleasure in life
Coffee and I are well-acquainted. We meet often, frequently in a motorway services. The setting is big, like a strange spaceship, but the point is the caffeine – especially in winter.
Winter in the UK is sock damp and everywhere, smudged beyond the windowpane into a world that hides in its own armpit – head down, surviving.
Zimbabwe
A young man, a stranger, asked me about identity, about my identity as a Zimbabwean. His question made me think…am I Zimbabwean?
The further I travel the more elusive the idea of ‘belonging’ becomes, and the more urgent the need for ‘identity’.
Garnerin parachutes into London -1802
That was 1802 – a decade over two centuries later the following happens: a huge gossamer balloon floats into the nothing of the stratosphere. Beneath it clings the tiny dot of a capsule, and inside it is an Austrian, Felix Baumgartner, aged 43.
When the balloon reaches 128,000 feet (24 miles) above the Earth, he will step out and drop into the deep.
The Phraser 