James Jeffrey is an editor for the Catholic Herald, a writer and a Camino guide.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start. So wrote William Shakespeare in Henry V. He could well have been writing about the British Army’s main battle tank, the mighty 62-tonne behemoth that is Challenger 2, which is now being sent to Ukraine. The Challenger 2 is a weighty sort of
Let’s just simmer down about Prince Harry, at least when it comes to his comments about the Taliban. In his memoir Spare, released this week, the Prince writes that he killed 25 people in Afghanistan and thought of ‘Taliban fighters not as people but as chess pieces.’ This wasn’t the best choice of words. He shouldn’t have
No disrespect to the hotel industry: staying in a hotel room, especially when there is someone nice with you, can be exciting and sexy. Staying in a hotel room on your own, though, can be exceedingly sad, boring and unsexy. Unfortunately, I’ve experienced more of the latter type of hotel stopover (a squalid hotel room
Combat food seems to prove particularly divisive. It is the Marmite of culinary preparation:you either love it or loathe it. I’m firmly in the former camp. Combat food isn’t specifically military, though there is a link. It refers to simple, no-nonsense, hearty fare, whose ingredients – typically from tins – can easily be thrown into
Every Remembrance Day, the anti-poppy naysayers pop up to criticise those who commemorate our war dead. As a former soldier, you might think you can guess my view on these people. But, in fact, I do have some sympathy with those who are uncomfortable about the way we mark 11 November. Some years ago, shortly
It was starting to feel rather spooky on the pathway to Finisterre. Only two days before I’d been in the celebratory environs of Santiago de Compostela with its endless arrivals of jubilant pilgrims. Now dark clouds were scudding across the Galician hills in the distance and the only sound I could hear was the wind
Surely no other city can claim to have so many backpacks and walking sticks on its narrow cobbled streets. In Spain’s Santiago de Compostela it always looks like there is a giant hiking convention going on. These aren’t your average ramblers, though. They are pilgrims, as the city marks the end of the famous Camino
Ask a Spaniard where they vacation, and you may get a touch of the Matador effect in response. The chest lifts, the head is tilted up with the bottom lip pushed out accompanied by the reply: ‘España! My country.’ For like the Greeks, when you have so many domestic splendours to choose from, why would
Mixing red wine with Coca-Cola would have the great Roger Scruton turning in his grave. He wrote the wonderful book I Drink Therefore I am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine about the purity and life-enhancing joy of drinking wine properly. ‘It enacts for us the primal unity of soul and body—the heart-warming liquid stirs us to meditation,
On the eve of Ramadan at the start of this month, the epic Waaheen market at the centre of Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, caught fire. The flames engulfed the entire market and took 12 hours to put out. There were no fatalities—it was Friday, the holy day of prayer for Muslims, and the market
One of Austin’s monikers is the City of the Violet Crown. It comes from the beguiling atmospheric shenanigans known as the Belt of Venus that casts a bar of pinkish, purplish haze above the horizon at sunrise and sunset when the city’s Mexican free-tailed bats — about 750,000 of them — are either returning to or leaving from hanging
Britain’s greatest war poet Siegfried Sassoon was well aware of the idiocy of those who cheered the deaths of soldiers. ‘O German mother dreaming by the fire/ While you are knitting socks to send your son/ His face is trodden deeper in the mud,’ he wrote in his World War I poem Glory of Women. His verse
I’ve long been drawn to sketchiness. In the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, I always preferred the dodgy and slightly dangerous old-town Piazza area to the trendy and sanitised Bole area next to the international airport. But even by my sketchy-embracing standards, it was hard not to find the grim state of Athens deflating. After all,
Those looking for ancient culture will find it in abundance on Fuerteventura – a canary island known more for its beaches than its heritage. I’d ended up in a hostel run by an Italian couple deep in the island’s outback. Looming over the hostel was the holy mountain of Tindaya, on whose summit indigenous islanders once left
I never realised Lanzarote was such a weird place. During an extended Camino de Santiago pilgrimage to escape UK lockdowns, various pilgrims I met urged me to visit the splendours of the Canary Islands as a natural sequel to the splendours of the Iberian Peninsula we traversed. But Lanzarote was rarely mentioned. As soon as
There have been stunning developments recently in Ethiopia’s grinding conflict between the national government and Tigrayan rebels in the north. Last November, the news was all about the government’s invasion of the Tigray region by federal forces. When the government claimed victory after capturing the regional capital Mekelle, Tigray was firmly on the ropes and
The sweet salvation of the summer recess over, we returned to Sandhurst for our final term of officer training. It was 11 September, 2001 – a day that started with a hike in the sunshine and which came to define my time in the British Army. The events of 9/11 would lead to my own deployment
Ex-veterans minister Johnny Mercer appears to have launched a one-man frontal assault on the UK government. Rarely a day goes by when he isn’t voraciously criticising their shoddy treatment of veterans. Speaking as a veteran and ex-British Army officer like Mercer, I can’t say I blame him. One tour of Afghanistan was enough to break
My trek along the entire length of Portugal began on a small boat with Captain Juan standing beside the outboard. Accompanied by five other rucksack-laden pilgrims who I met during an extended Camino de Santiago pilgrimage to escape UK lockdowns, we were crossing the Minho River that serves as the border between Spain and Portugal’s
A few of the hip young things sitting along the Lisbon quayside turned their heads my way as my walking sticks scraped along the pavement. I didn’t slow down, though, because I was self-conscious about how I looked. Hiking 2,000km along an extended Camino pilgrimage from the French-Spanish border through northern Spain then down through
