short story project

Travel by air and you’ll see airports, travel by land and you’ll see landscape, travel by sea and you can expect to get a good night’s sleep. For this reason, I take the overnight ferry to Hook of Holland for a weekend in Den Haag. Stena line ferries are not just for cars, they take foot passengers too. I use a rail-and-sail deal connecting Liverpool St station to port in Harwich, where judging by the décor in the waiting area it is still 1982. Not so on the Ferry where a pristine world of swirly carpets and brass handrails spreads over several floors. It’s surprisingly peaceful up high above the waves and the views are wonderful from the restaurant. The people-watching is also rich: travellers I spot fall into two broad camps: hauliers glad of a few hours’ rest and a pint at the bar, and swarms of beige-clad early retirees queuing expectantly with trays at the buffet counter. On the fringes a few backpackers and French families can be spotted. I’m the anomaly. The Stena Britannica an

It's 75 years since The Third Man was shot in Vienna and Orson Welles looked down over the city from the original Ferris wheel and delivered his famous observation about little black dots of people below being insignificant. Now, three quarters of a century later I gaze up at that same wheel in awe as my friend Daniel looks on blankly, “It’s for tourists” he mutters, but I don't care. I want to ride Vienna’s iconic fairground attraction. That film noire classic remains as vivid to me as when I first saw it while playing truant from school. Something about the harsh devastation of post-war Vienna made an indelible mark on my young Betamax-fuelled imagination leading, decades later, to this pilgrimage of a city break. The Austrian capital, with its carefully preserved palaces and much lauded artistic legacy is a quite different place today. Forget post-war; nowadays Vienna is post-gentrification, post-yuppie and definitely post-Lederhosen. Underneath that wheel, for instance, is