They don’t eat horses, do they?

The news of beef burgers in several big supermarkets around the UK and in Ireland being contaminated with horse meat is all over the headlines today. It reminded me of this picture that I took in Brenham, Texas, last summer. At the time, I was surprised to see it — I’d never heard of horsemeat being an issue in Texas. I knew from living in France and visiting other countries that people do eat horse but...

Eating at the food trucks in Austin, Texas

Austin has been circling the food wagons for some time – food trucks have become such an institution in the capital of Texas that they’ve prompted innumerable blogs and even a next-generation fashion truck called Bootleg, which is a shoe shop in an Airstream trailer featuring hard-to-find labels.     We go to Austin every summer and every summer I love to visit the food-truck enclave on South...

How to display travel pictures: the Big App

There’s nothing quite like travelling to a new and exotic place, capturing it on film or in bytes, adding it to the 1,768 pictures on your computer and never seeing it again. Or you finally get around to putting it up, then reconsider. Witness: When I first took this picture of a vintage petrol pump in Hico, Texas, I really liked it. I had it printed poster size and framed it. Now, several years later, I kinda...

When it's time to leave the beach

Given the old choice of mountains or beach, I'll choose beach every time. The sun, proper surf for wave-jumping, bodyboarding or surfing, and sand in places my doctor's never seen. Bliss. Every year we visit the same resort in Texas, Port Royal in Port Aransas. I hestitate to even mention it by name. As unlikely as it might seem that a bunch of Brits would turn up on this lightly developed section of...