It’s funny how life works.  How things can come full circle.  I’m standing at the Lucko toll booth on the outskirts of Zagreb.  Exactly the same toll booth I stood at back in May, before embarking on a whirlwind summer of excess.  So – am I going back to Zadar, you muse?  He can’t be! …

I’m back to civilisation.  With a bump.  Sitting alone in an empty hostel dorm while outside a rain-soaked Zagreb shivers in the night.  The sun has well and truly set on the summer.  But what a summer it was. Once again I’ve managed to procure decent internet in order to upload some musings and I …

Here we go eh?  With a title like that you’d expect me to really stick the boot in.  Have a good old gripe and whine about past encounters that have gone wry.  Friends relationships that have gone sour.  Marriages that have gone down the toilet.  Lord knows I could write a book about it (and …

So I have a visitor.  A good friend of mine who I met two years ago on a roof top in Boston as the dawn broke has come to spend my birthday with me, flying in from Lebanon of all places.  It’s wonderful that Elise is here – as it finally gives me an excuse …

Well it had to happen.  After a whirlwind month of debaucherous shenanigans I felt that the only place for me until the summer ends is back in my home from home.  Solace.  I ask Mike and Kathi to drop me at The Wild Fig, Zadar once more to see the season out.  Here I will …

What  do you get when you cross an amateur football team of English drunks, three French girls, a Kiwi and one hot feisty lesbian?  A pub quiz of epic carnage and one crazy night. I’ve been tasked with putting together some trivia for the evening’s entertainment.  I’m slightly disappointed in this, as I regard myself …

Zadar is stunning.  Watching the sun go down across the bay and you know that ol’ hitch was right.  Gloriously lazy skies awash with the brush-srokes of a master painter.  Sun-kissed narrow old town streets with historic charm and intrigue.  Wonderful sea-food restaurants, and of course the finest hostel I’ve ever stayed in.  Oh and the …

Right people listen up.  Get your butts to Zadar.  Live at the Wild Fig Hostel.  Make tons of new mates and stay up every night until the sunrise and then throw yourselves into the Adriatic sea three sheets to the wind, slicing your hands on rocks.  I promise all kinds of fun and debauchery.  Not …

Alfred Hitchcock famously waxed lyrical about the stunning sunsets in Zadar on a visit there in 1967.  I think.  They’re very proud of this fact, and if it’s good enough for Hitch it’s good enough for me.  I’ve not taken one photograph in Zagreb, and a glance at the weather for the week ahead confirms …

World.  I’m sorry.  I’m genuinely sorry for the knuckle dragging neanderthals that infest your beautiful countries and destroy whole city centres in running battles of drunken carnage stag nights.  From the UK.  And Ireland.  Every corner is represented.  And by every corner I specifically mean English.  English animals.  Brits abroad.  We watched in utter disbelief …