A good read

One of the benefits of not having 24-hour internet access - apart from meaning I subject you people to slightly fewer pointless blogs each month (it'll take more than that to stop me) - is that I spend less time at the computer and more time elsewhere.

Although I still invariably end up wasting the precious gift of life, at least I'm wasting it offline and getting lots of reading done.

Dave 2031

What will become of me?

Right now, I'm happy enough visiting new places and writing about brain injury claims and Berlin city breaks for a living (those are just two random, recent examples - I'm not paid to write endlessly about brain injury claims and Berlin city breaks, and never are the two combined). But will that still be the case six months from now? Or in a year? Or 20 years down the line in the space-age sci-fi future dystopia of 2031, when I'm 45?

Do I really want to end up like Graham?

Literally everything I spent last month

There were a couple of reasons why I never travelled before eight months ago.

One was my workaholic dislike of holidays (to me, 'holidays' means that extra money they add to your last pay packet when you quit a job), and the other was that I mistakenly thought travelling had to be expensive. Blame it on all the luxury travel agents I wrote copy for - I started believing my own propaganda.

But I've discovered travelling really isn't expensive, especially when you go somewhere cheap like South East Asia. It costs me less to travel around Malaysia, enjoy life and eat nice food all the time than it did to exist in a miserable flat in the UK, eating whatever crap I scavenged from the Reduced to Clear section of Morrissons and waiting for the blessed relief of death.

You say this a lot, but where's the evidence to back it up?

Oh I see, you want needlessly thorough and intrusive stats on my finances do you? You want the moon on a stick.

Enjoy!

Mouldering in Malacca

A dead stuff special, set in one of the biggest Chinese graveyards outside of China and an old Portuguese church stolen by those thieving, plundering Dutch. God, I hate the Dutch. They should all go back where they came from. Wherever that is.

Malacca - A study in scarlet

Malacca was probably really nice until someone decided it would be a cool idea to paint it a nauseating shade of red. What were they thinking?

Like Georgetown, the historic centre of Malacca is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Because places need to be full of European-style colonial buildings to qualify as significant, obviously. So I wouldn't bother with the rest of Malaysia if I were you - it's all just foreign nonsense.