This is a travel diary, written from the road* – a digital diary with crumpled corners, filled with scribbles, notes and anything else that catches my attention. It’s a notebook. Actually, it’s a postcard addressed to everyone who cares to read it, and one which doesn’t spend three weeks making its way through international postage systems.

For now, I seem to spend a lot of time in cold places and places in northern Europe, in summer and especially in winter. I keep this blog to show people I’m not dead, for my own future reference and also because apparently people who know me sometimes enjoy reading it.

You may hear about King Olaf Tryggvason occasionally. Good King Olaf was the seventh King of Norway, from 995 to 1000AD, great-grandson of Harald Fairhair and perhaps** not one of the kindliest of kings, but definitely one of the most influential, as evidenced by me coming across him in four different countries so far, more than one thousand years after he died.

*more likely from my hotel, hostel or tent

**definitely