warwick cairns

If Travel Broadens the Mind…

Travel, they say, broadens the mind. Adds perspective. Opens up the outlook and so on. Makes you sophisticated and cosmopolitan. If you’ve been nowhere other than where you’re from, except on holiday; if you’ve lived in no place other than the place you know, what does that make you? What is the word for it? [...]

Read more →

In A Perfect World It Would Be Spiders For Lunch

Why being irrational saves us from a life of Bush-Tucker Trials Why Not Eat Insects? Not my question, by the way, but the title of a book. It was a book first published in the 1880s by a man by the name of Vincent M Holt, and it’s not been out of print since. In [...]

Read more →

Odin’s Police Force

Or… What life might be like today if the Vikings had won? The problem, I think, is that we are suckers for novelty. It gives us a frisson of cosmopolitanism to use words like frisson. We are suckers for words like suckers. It gives us an air of imagined sophistication to walk boldly into the [...]

Read more →

Two Thousand And Twelve

2012 puzzles me – as did 2008, and 2004 and just about every Olympic year. Once every four years something seems to happen to all these minor sports, and all these boring sports, and all these sports that most normal human beings don’t normally give a damn about.

Read more →

Warwick Cairns – The Book Swap Interview

Warwick Cairns lives in Windsor with his wife, two daughters and two dogs. He is the author of 3 books. About the Size of It is about how the world’s systems of weights and measures have been shaped by the fact most of us have better things to think about. How to Live Dangerously is [...]

Read more →