Edinburgh, UK
Straight answers to ordinary questions
Every itinerary has a weakest link, and it is almost never the flight you worried about. It is the ninety minutes between two of them, at an airport you have never been to, on a day when the first aircraft pushes…
The adoption fee is the number everyone remembers and the least useful one they will ever be told. It is a rounding error against what follows, and it arrives at the one moment when nobody is in the mood to do…
The bad version of this trip is decided long before the trip. The carrier lives in a closet and comes out twice a year, both times to go to the vet. The dog has been in the car maybe fifteen times…
There are two versions of this. In one, the flights were booked in February and by March somebody had met the cat, done a trial weekend, and been handed a page of instructions. In the other, it is four days before…
A search page shows you a ninety-minute flight and a five-hour train and the decision looks made. It isn't, because those two numbers are measuring different things. One of them is the time an aircraft spends in the air. The other…
The instinct when something is chewing a plant is to find a bottle that lists that plant on the back. It is worth resisting for about ten minutes, partly because the diagnosis is often wrong and partly because broad-spectrum insecticides have…
A bag you can carry up two flights of stairs without stopping is a different bag from one you can wheel across an airport. Most packing advice never makes that distinction, which is why so much of it produces a suitcase…
A tire sidewall carries more printed information than any other single part of a car, and almost none of it is explained anywhere the owner is likely to look. Much of it is molded there because a regulator asked for it.…
The bag is the easy part. You can pack a bag in an hour on the night before and it will be fine. What cannot be done the night before is everything that depends on somebody else moving at their own…