Gun enthusiasts flock to Tucson’s annual expo
April 30th 2023 in Tucson, Arizona. Between 80 and 100 gun dealers, gun makers, and sellers of anything and everything associated with firearms, old and new, laid out their wares inside Tucson's Expo Centre at the weekend for the Arizona city's annual Expo Gun Show...
El Paso’s metal fence a monument to Trump
April 25th 2023, El Paso. From a distance, it looks like a thin and very straight black line sitting on the horizon. On this side of it, the Texas side that is, the land is pancake flat farm land. On the other side, the Mexican side, the land is mostly scrub and rises...
A small town in Texas is at the center of a ‘book banning’ row
April 21st 2023, Llano, Texas. Most everything you need to know about Llano can be found in Fuel Cafe on East Main Street. What is seen and unseen, what is spoken and what is not spoken about. The cafe's motto -- coffee + music + community -- sums up how it, and...
LBJ’s huge legacy of reform that would not find in welcome in today’s Texas
April 18th 2023, in Austin, Texas. Sitting at a set of traffic lights in Fredericksburg, another biker pulls up alongside me and we have the conversation -- where from, where going etc etc? "I'm going for a coffee," said the other guy. Can I join you, said I, and with...
Texas lives up to its stereotype . . . so far
April 15th 2023, Bandera,Texas. It was such a relief to leave Mexico and enter the United States. Two nights before I departed Monterrey, a young woman spat at me in the street -- full force so that I felt her spittle hit the back of my neck and head. I can say with...
There are saints at work here . . . I just hope there are no monsters too
April 14th 2023, Monterrey, north central Mexico. Keysí Lano Rivera is sitting in a wheelchair chatting to another man lying on a bottom bunk when Yoennis González bring me over to introduce us. I'm slightly embarrassed to be intruding into their chat but no, no, no,...
A trip to the brothel
April 11th 2023, Monterrey, northern Mexico. I spent the night in a sort-of Jury's Inn type hotel in the middle of Cuidad Victoria, a city in north-eastern Mexico and a decent jumping off point for the Mexico/Texas border, if I decided to head straight for it. Not...
Viva Mezcal!
March 31st 2023, Santiago Matatlán. I suspect that Emelio Mato was catching 40 winks somewhere out back when I called into his roadside mazcal distillery on the edge of Santiago Matatlán. The distillery, a fairly ramshackle affair, was set back from the road by about...
Mexico doesn’t do small
March 30th 2023, Salinas Cruz, Mexico. It's not long after crossing the border from Guatemala into Mexico that it begins to dawn on me that this is a huge, like a massive, massive, country. No great revelation there seeing as Mexico has been more or less as it is now...
A big weekend in Antigua
March 27th 2023, Antigua, Guatemala. The gods have blessed Antigua. Once the capital of Guatemala, they wrecked it in the late 18th century but in doing so, almost certainly stopped it turning into just another sprawling Latin American city, choking with people and...