Magazines I have written for, sites belonging to people who have been nice to me, or simply things that I find interesting.
Travel Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s only Ministry of Tourism associated travel organisation.
The Gem Hunter. The excellent site of my friend Gary Bowersox, who has been travelling to Afghanistan for 35 years to buy gems.
Craig Raine's literary magazine Areté, which is read by the Nobel Prize Committee. Accurately described in its own advertising as ‘a magnet for Pseuds’.
A
Martian Sends a Postcard Home
Craig Raine’s most famous and influential poem is a Martian-eye view
of humans, but by no means the only brilliant one that he has written.
Ulysses
by Tennyson
The definitive Romantic answer to the question, Why Travel?
Buy The Gem Hunter books or video
Grass is a cult anthropology film, made in 1924 by the filmmakers who went on to make King Kong. It recounts the migration of the Bakhtiari nomads across the Zagros mountains. It was seeing this film at the impressionable age of 16 that made me want to travel.
Monmouth pottery And this is the pottery run by the wife of the Cambridge anthropologist who first showed me Grass.
Cranborne sausages run by lord Salisbury who as an MP during the Afghan jihad and as chairman of Afghan Aid has been a loyal friend of the Afghan people over many years.
Sir Wilfred Thesiger When he died at the age of 93 in August 2001, Sir Wilfred Thesiger was the world’s greatest living explorer. He was the last man who will ever earn that evocative title by filling in blank spaces on the map previously known only to the people living there. He had been awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, the Lawrence of Arabia Medal, the DSO for outstanding bravery with the Long Range Desert Group in North Africa during the war, had twice crossed the Empty Quarter of Arabia on foot and camel with Bedu companions and been made a Knight of the British Empire. He was an inspiration to practically every young travel writer working today, in many cases in person, and his photographs, writing and achievements remain both his memorial and a challenge to those who come after him.
The Centre for Genetic Anthropology at University College London processes the genetic samples I have taken in Afghanistan. It uses modern science to answer the question all races ask: where did we come from? Soon they will solve the Indo-European problem.
Trevillion picture library Bruce Chatwin’s pictures, including many of Afghanistan, are held by this picture library.
Sandy
Gall's Afghanistan Appeal
There are about
10 million unexploded land mines in Afghanistan. Many of them are designed
to cripple soldiers, not to kill them, in order to slow down a marching column.
In Afghanistan one becomes used to seeing people missing limbs. A distressingly
large proportion of them are children. Sandy Gall, one of the most distinguished
foreign correspondents to cover the jihad, set up a charity that has been
providing artificial limbs to victims since 1983. If you support just one
charity in Afghanistan (or just one charity), make it this one.
Christina Lamb The best journalist writing on Afghanistan
Afghan Logistics Afghanistan’s leading supplier of transport and interpreters
Kabul
Lodge One of the best hotels in Kabul
Craig Raine, who published the first extended piece I ever wrote and without whom I would never have become a writer.
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