It’s your best friend’s 16th birthday party. That’s eight hamster lives, and yet she still wasn’t wise enough to realise it would turn into a heavy-petting zoo. Let’s put it this way – you wouldn’t bring the family, and…

  The hotel sat wild upon the hill, amongst snakes dripping, paint, down the strangler figs. We awoke to the croaks of purse-jawed frogs, then breakfast in the green glow of fan-palms: coffee, sun-split yoghurt, an ocean’s wink. Cassowaries, those…

We were alive that evening, on the north Yorkshire moors, in a valley of scuffed hills and smouldering gorse. Pheasants strutted, their feathers as richly patterned as Moroccan rugs, past the old Roma caravan – candles, a rose-cushioned bed, etched…