Category: The Margin
15 Geography Facts That Sound Completely Made Up
Geography facts are usually the kind of thing you memorise for a school test and forget three days later. These are not those facts. There is a country named after Jesus Christ. Another country has no land below 1,000 metres. France’s longest border is with Brazil. And Australia is wider than the Moon. All of those…
You Can Leave a Place and Still Know the Way Home
Why do we miss places we once couldn’t wait to leave? There is probably a street somewhere that means almost nothing to anyone else. No famous building. No historic plaque. Nothing happened there that would ever make the news. Maybe there was a grocery shop at one end, a pharmacy across the road, a few…
She Let the World Call Her Ugly to Feed Her Children
Mary Ann Bevan spent years being advertised as “the ugliest woman in the world.” People bought tickets to stare at her. Newspapers joked about her. Circus posters turned her face into entertainment. The strange part is that Bevan had once worked as a nurse and lived a fairly ordinary life. Then her body began to change.…
Can You Grieve Someone Who Never Existed?
AI companions have created a very strange problem. Imagine talking to the same chatbot every day for months. You tell it about work, relationships, things you are embarrassed about, things you have not told anybody else. Over time, you get used to the way it answers. Its jokes. Its warmth. The little patterns that make the…
Google Search Is Broken
Google Search is Broken, Not in the obvious sense. You can still check the weather, find a restaurant, look up a football score or discover the name of an actor you recognise from somewhere. The trouble starts when you actually need Google to search. Try finding an old forum post. A photograph of something slightly…
People Are Seeing Ads in Their Dreams.
Ads in dreams sound like something somebody made up for a meme. I first saw people joking about them on Instagram. Proper advertisements, they said. Brand names, logos, products, even dreams that seemed to stop for a commercial before continuing. The comments were exactly what you would expect. Apparently sleep has a premium version now. Someone…
What I learnt from getting Chiang Mai completely wrong
Chiang Mai travel was not what I thought it would be. And I had been in Thailand long enough to think I knew what to expect. I had done Bangkok. I had survived the Grab bike situation, the ATM fees, the Khao San Road at midnight, the specific education of Soho Square that Bangkok has…
What living in London actually feels like. Nobody warned me.
London arrived in summer and it did not apologise for itself. Everything was alive and loud and slightly too much. The streets felt like they were performing. The parks were full. The pubs spilled onto pavements. Everywhere you looked, something was happening that you had not been invited to but were somehow already part of.…
What Thailand quietly teaches you when you finally stop being a tourist
Everyone you speak to in Thailand seems genuinely delighted to see you. Cheerful. Warm. Excited. The smile arrives before the conversation does. It took me longer than I would like to admit to understand what I was actually looking at. Not fake. Fake is the wrong word entirely, and too easy. What I was looking…
Thailand travel tips that nobody writes about but everyone needs
Thailand travel tips that actually matter are not the ones in the guidebooks. Not the ATM fees. Not the fruit boxes. Not the Grab bike at midnight on a wet road in Chiang Mai. It will smile at you, hand you a menu, and let you figure it out. I stayed long enough to figure…
