If you’re new here, welcome.
This publication is in many ways the result of the unmentionable events of 2020-2022(ish). I have thought about something like it for a long time, but these last two years definitely pushed me over the edge, so to speak.
I’m going to spell out a bit about what I want to share with you, and how we got here in the first place. I might change this in the future, but for now, it works.
I was never really sure how to write a bio for myself, because I’ve had a pretty unusual life by any measure, and it doesn’t make sense when I try and explain it to people.
You see, my full-time job for over a decade – which I invented for myself –was to take my clients to some of the most incredible places in Europe. I helped facilitate their experience with every aspect of travel, culture, and history you can imagine, and advised on the same for them globally.
I put years into learning how to know where to stay, how to skip lines and avoid tourist traps, how to find stellar restaurants of all kinds even in places I’d never been, learning how to appreciate art viscerally and intellectually, to recognise beauty everywhere, and how to help people find goods of all kinds that they loved and enjoyed for years afterwards. I never did formally bill myself as a personal shopper, but in retrospect, I subtly did a lot of that and probably undersold my rates for it as well.
On a couple of occasions, I even rewrote dating profiles for clients after hours, helped to save a couple of marriages, and kept the kids of many other couples happy and engaged so they had a fighting chance at surviving themselves. I never mentioned that or charged for it either.
I learned to love the art and craft of cooking all the dishes that I experienced whilst abroad, and began to notice all the interesting crossover between them. I learned the way grandmothers used to (or at least my grandmother), which is to say, without really measuring anything or using recipes.
It was very important to me that I gave my clients the tools they needed to make sense of the often complicated story of how the world tied its various corners together, and how these developed over time, and why, and what, if anything we could all consider keeping as takeaway lessons from it. The job of a historian can be vastly more interesting than the boring way in which it is often presented. Here’s what is worthless about all too many historians, as an example by the way of a man named Seneca, who was one of the stoics born just after the time of Christ:
“The Greeks were afflicted with that disease, which forced them to ask how many oars Odysseus had, whether the Iliad or the Odyssey were written first, and further whether they were composed by the same author, and other things of the same general import. If you hold your peace on these topics, they do nothing to advance your own silent knowledge, or if you bring them up in conversation, you will not seem more learned, but rather, more troublesome.”
It’s not my intention to make this publication particularly high-brow, and you don’t have to like Seneca the man to recognise that he makes a great point here.
Anyways, it’s a giant mess of odd skillsets that I worked together synergistically somehow, and this doesn’t fit the easy formula of ‘pick a niche and write about that’. I’d say about 75% of the incredible people I’ve met aren’t even on Linkedin; I only have their phone numbers. I also don’t know how I’d prove any of this in a job interview.
But here you are anyways. I can do all of these things pretty much in my sleep now. Hopefully that doesn’t come off as arrogant or entitled. It was an incalculable amount of work, all of it, you need to know that.
A part of this experience has been glamorous: taking trains to the wonders of the old world while sitting in the dining car, meeting artisans in hidden workshops with no websites or email addresses, being invited to dine in restaurants touching the divine, and having dim sum on street corners with the light spilling out of a kitchen no bigger than a closet. And the part that nobody saw, the endless admin to make this all happen, that part was incredibly unglamorous. Just so you know.
Covid put an end to all of it with a finality I didn’t anticipate.
During my off-season in the winter, often as an excuse to visit with my mother – who lives on the other side of the world from me anyways – I visited the most spectacular places in the world. We’d meet, and explore, and I’d take more time afterwards alone to dive into what local culture and history and gastronomy meant where I was, and try and cut to the quick of what secrets the world has still hidden in its more interesting corners.
Trust me, there are still many, and they are incredible.
If you do this sort of thing for long enough enough, you really start to get a feel for the pulse of it all, what works and doesn’t, and patterns begin to emerge. I’ve found these patterns transfer wonderfully to all sorts of different fields.
So here’s my mission statement for anyone reading this:
(First about what I don’t want this publication to be)
I’d like this publication to be less about travel specifically, and less about the sort of recommendation list articles which have defined travel writing for the last decade online.
I think there’s enough of the sort of desperately generic territory of yet another ‘Top Ten Best Unknown Places in Italy to Visit’ or ‘Best Restaurants in London’ or ‘My Partner and I Quit Our Jobs to Start a Travel Blog’ advertorial (rubbish) out there.
I’m going to do my very best to keep this from becoming an advertisement for itself, or me, and I’m also going to do my best to keep it from slipping into anything which loses sight of the value I know I can provide here.
Yes, that was me throwing shade, but I’d like to invite you to join me and be better than that together.
(Now what I want it to be)
I’d like to teach you to be an inclusive, welcoming snob, with me. I’d like to teach you what great food really means, what great ingredients mean, and what great cooking really means. How to recognise a killer restaurant just from the menu and a handful of reviews. How to recognise great leather and workmanship in dozens of different arenas, and how to find joy in the beauty of the old masters paintings in every gallery in the world. How to travel simply and beautifully and maximise experience, rather than the number of destinations.
It’s important to me that some of this also include some thoughts on what it means to have a home, and how to decorate that, and how to bring meaningful things into your life that you love and can pass on to someone after you’re gone, and maybe even think a bit more about what you wear and how you present yourself, and why.
And maybe, overall a lot of this is just about how to live a better, more intentional, and more meaningful life.
I hope you’ll come with me.
Love it! Great start...