For a few years I lived in the Trastevere district of Rome. I rode a bicycle to work and bought groceries at the market. I lived in a flat at the top of a cobbled alley. All the buildings in the alley were painted a slightly different shade of terracotta; ivy grew on the walls…
The internet is a menacing place for impressionable minds. Once the innocent home of LimeWire and teenage porn discovery, the realm of cyberspace has evolved into something much more sinister. In the midst of a global health crisis, the spread of misinformation has presented itself as a strange and relentless foe.
Instagram has given birth…
Me: Have you ever done cybersex?
Him: If it’s essentially getting freaky on FaceTime, then yes. You?
Me: Nope.
Him: You swear?
Me: Oh, shit. Maybe.
My Hinge match is a year older than me. I’m 23. He has 6’4 worth of body to snuggle up with – his words when I said I was…
2020: global travel bans, entire fleets of commercial airlines grounded, borders shut, entire cities in lockdown worldwide. Not exactly a great year to be planning a big trip. Everyone reading this will have had to cancel some sort of plans this year, and as difficult it is for perennial travellers to stay put, you will…
There is a kind of sexual urgency in the air since human touch became a scarcity. The prospect of a complete lockdown will see single people cooped up with nothing but Netflix and toys purchased from the kind of store you wouldn’t window shop with your grandparents. I can feel it. A glance at the…
Before the Coronavirus pandemic came along and fucked up everyone’s lives, I was living a pretty normal one. I had a full-time job that took up most of my time, I shopped at my local Woolies for groceries every week, and often, my friends and I made plans to hang out, get dinner and catch…
Last night, we heard screaming. Tucked away in our apartment during quarantine, we wondered what people were doing outside clapping and yelling. Upon looking out the window, we could hear our neighbours across the alley – they were sitting on window ledges, hollering and cheering. Shouts from blocks away could be heard echoing through the…
I read an article once, by a man whose name I cannot remember, which attributed the differences between occidental and oriental cultures to the incidence of communicable disease. Asia, he argued, has historically been prone to outbreaks of diverse and deadly communicable diseases. As a result, foreigners were treated with suspicion, since foreigner people often…
It’s 2pm on a Sunday in March and I’m sitting by the windowsill having my morning coffee. Ordinarily, my morning wouldn’t have started at 2pm, but time is different now and there is little ‘ordinary’ left about our world today.
The sunlight streaming through the window that gently kisses my face tells me spring has…
I was prepared for one of them to die.
Before I left the UK to go travelling, I made a list of family members I would come home for if they died. In a single week in October 2016, I lost not one, but two of the most influential men in my life: my granddads.…