Home is where I park it

Here in full is the first part of the article I wrote for Gonzo Weekly magazine that was also taken up by International Times and Peppermint Iguana Zine: I’ve lived in vehicles for the past ten years, for the twenty years before that I’d had links to the New Traveller scene through friends, festivals and raves. In this thirty years I’ve seen this lifestyle become trendy, become criminalised, become unpopular and become trendy all over again with a new wave of travellers that call themselves vanlifers as well as far more retirees in motorhomes, some worth in excess of £100,000. This article is about my personal experience during the Coronavirus crisis and about how the wider New Travellers, Vanlifers and Motorhomers reacted to it and are coping with it, it is not about gypsies as I have no links personally to that way of life or its people. In the last decade there has been a sharp rise in people living on wheels again, some of these people would identify as New Travellers ...

A recent report by Cléo Marmié highlights how the Coronavirus lock-down has forced some of the tourists and foreigners stranded in Morocco, to adopt a special rhetoric. According to the researcher, thousands of these people stranded in Morocco turned to social media, using a discourse of border, migratory injustice and discrimination. Thousands of people discover, dazed, the reversibility of the migratory situation and the temporary disappearance of their travel privileges. The situation has pushed those who are yet the privileged ones in this world, with passports authorising entry, without formality or with a simple visa, to act like vulnerable migrants, the same source added. European citizens experienced being kept waiting, as well as uncertainty and a feeling of dispossession in the face of diplomatic and administrative decisions, whose impact on their lives and their freedom of movement spark their outrage. The study concludes that the Covid-19 crisis has highlighted it...

Like a lot of people at the moment I have more time on my hands. Time that I can only spend at home in my van. Also like most people I have a pretty constant internet connection.  I have tried to be productive with my screen time, I have spent time writing, updating the band website, making a website for our record label and updating my very very out of date website. My website was across two separate servers which worked well at first with my newer part linking page by page with my old website. At some point a couple, (few?) years ago the old part vanished and I couldn't recover it. I had all the pages saved to a hard drive so I have started moving most of the old pages across. I couldn't find any easy way of doing it and so there has been lots of copying and pasting and adding photos. I have 90 odd pages to get through and I've done 4 so far 😔 I have started with the most complex ones though and am hoping that once I have done them it will get a little easie...

I have just had an article I wrote published by two online magazines. The first is Gonzo magazine, click HERE and you can read the article. It is in the latest issue, #385/6. Here are a couple of the pages...   Next up it was also featured in International Times, you can get to it HERE . It's the first time I have had an article published in this magazine, hopefully there will be more! Thanks for reading :)

Isolation, distancing, lockdown, call it what you will but as we know it basically means staying at home all day every day and only going out for essential things. The biggest issue with this is what's essential? Governments around the world have given different advice and have rushed through various new laws. Police forces are interpreting the advice differently as are the general population. I'm in Morocco where the advice is to stay in all the time except going out for essential shopping, work and medical needs. We are in a small village where lots of people are out on nonessential trips.  We have had no advice from the government that we can go out for some daily excersise like in the UK and Ireland. We have been taking a short walk most days as there is so much open space here that it is easy to avoid someone in the unlikely event you see someone. It has now been made compulsory in Morocco to wear a face mask when outside. Most people in the village are onl...

As I said in my previous post, I have been in a band for the past two years. I started behind the scenes for the first year and then started performing as well. I have cheated and copied and pasted most of the rest from our website! Undying Heads are Frank Ryder, Sam Wilkinson and occasional member Kev Saunders, playing an eclectic mix of original music. In 2019 Undying Heads played many venues across the Algarve and West Coast of Portugal. During this time they recorded their first album between gigs. They have their own solar powered recording studio, Ryder Road and run their own record label, Ryder Road Records. They are strong believers in a DIY ethic. The album ‘Can’t Be Late’ is available now on their website and Bandcamp as a digital download and hard copy CD. Frank is a singer songwriter from Dublin, Ireland who plays guitar and mandola. Frank says “I remember being fourteen years old and having a copy of a Lynyrd Skynyrd album, and seeing this gang of l...

Below is a list of recent posts, there is a menu on the left where you can choose to see older posts by date or by the labels (tags) I have given them. This means you can easily find all my posts about a specific subject. I hope you you enjoy my blog, if you do you can subscribe by using the button above. More about me... ♥ I left behind life as I knew it and started on a journey. The journey in a physical sense has seen me living on the road for ten years now travelling in the UK, Ireland France, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Portugal and Morocco. This journey has and continues to be amazing, discovering new places and meeting new people who constantly inspire me. On an emotional level this journey has made me re-evaluate everything I believe in, made me question today's society and helped me to become more open hearted and honest about myself and with others. I am learning to love myself more which in turn has let me love others more. ♥ ♥ I have respect and love for the earth ...

So the world has gone crazy and everyone has time on their hands again including me! Just a quick post to say I will be posting some news and views from here very soon. I guess for my first post though I better give a bit of a insight into the last couple of years since my last post was at the beginning of January 2018! I had travelled down to spend some time on the Algarve and in Andalusia after the breakdown of a 10 year relationship. While there I had some great adventures and met some wonderful people. The most wonderful being my current partner. That's us there in the picture below. Along with another friend we started a band called Undying Heads , more on them in a seperate post another time. I was behind the scenes at first as the manager, booking agent, press officer, merchandise seller, general dogsbody, basically I was the whole management team in one person! From June - October we toured the UK and Ireland and then we took a break.  During this time ou...