Charles Davis
Novelist and writer of walking guides

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Nov.14.2011

N°82 Credit Where Credit's Due

Who pays Credit Rating Agencies? I've been wondering about this for a while. Like many people, I'm mildly pissed off that these organizations, which made such a spectacular cock-up a couple of years ago when the banks went AWOL, are now considered so infallible that they can hold governments...

Sep.23.2011

N°81 Mr. Davis' Marvellous Diet

A little while back, I wrote about how easy it is to give up smoking. Turns out it's so very easy that I've done it twice now and I'm considering doing it again. In the meantime, I have been cheered by the heartening announcement that eating chocolate reduces your risk of having a stroke by...

Aug.23.2011

N°80 Walk the Walk

Walking is important. Coming from somebody who has two novels out with walking in the title and is the author of fifteen walking guides, this is a statement that won't exactly knock your socks off. Yet walking is important, for the way it's done betrays all manner of interesting and occasionally...

Aug.05.2011

Nº79 Three Monkeys

When I was a kid, I had a thing about monkeys. Not Mickey, Michael, Peter and Davy. I loathed them. Altogether too clean. But real monkeys with hair on their backs and slightly different genes from the more puzzling primates governing my more immediate environment. In fact, I wanted to grow up to...

Jul.06.2011

N°78 Smokeless

Stopping smoking is easy. Deciding to stop smoking is not. The prospect is sickening. All those moments of pleasure or pleasure perfected, all those waystages in the working day when concentration is revived and good work rewarded, all those instances of tactile anticipation painstakingly crafting...

Jun.02.2011

N°77 Postcard from the Past #12 OK, Let’s Go, Please

The main -and probably vain- motivation behind this recent series of blogs has been a desperate attempt to flog a few books. However, there was also a secondary impulse, and that was to give something extra, a few bonus tracks if you like, to people who have already been kind enough to read...

May.17.2011

Nº76 Postcard from the Past #11 "I Live On The Black Nile And My Home Is Built Of Death And Bricks"

I have described the Sudanese as being generous, courteous, welcoming, and yet this generous, courteous, welcoming people have contrived to kill two million of their fellow citizens in the Second Sudanese Civil War, and something like a quarter of a million more in Darfur, not to mention the...

May.07.2011

Nº75 Postcard from the Past #10 On The Road Again

There's a scene near the start of Standing At The Crossroads that takes place on the back of a lorry. The details were culled from my experiences in Sudan in the 1980s, when this was the principal means of transport. For the most part, there were no roads, just ways across the desert or qoz (...

Apr.27.2011

Nº74 Postcard from the Past #9 And Drugs And Rock 'n' Roll.

I've done sex in Sudan, or rather not sex in my case, but what about drugs and rock 'n' roll? I mentioned some while back that a large part of my Sudanese experience seems to have revolved around getting stoned, though indulgence in that particular vice was inevitably a delicate matter. Discretion...

Apr.19.2011

Nº73 Postcard from the Past #8 Where There Is No Doctor

The chances are that anyone who went to Sudan as an English teacher in the seventies and eighties will already be overwhelmed with nostalgia just reading the title of this posting. This was a book that did what it said on the cover, listing all the symptoms of all the ailments you were likely to...

Apr.10.2011

Nº72 Postcard from the Past #7 Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? And what the fuck are we doing here?

Char-lez, Char-loos, Channis, and -my favourite- Size Dawwis. These were just some of the transformations to which my name was subjected in the course of my year in Sudan. And I was lucky. There was a guy called Phil who got transmuted into Phyllis. The nature of identity and the ancillary question...

Apr.03.2011

Nº71 Postcard from the Past #6 Oh, My Darling.

"In England . . . you may marry . . . your darling - for love?!" The question was posed with a hesitating, puzzled, almost aggrieved air - time and again in one form or another. Likewise: "So some peoples, boy and girl, live together for one and two year? How can they do this...

Mar.27.2011

Nº70 Postcard from the Past #5 An Island In The Desert

It was him again. I was beginning to suspect Sudan Air only had the one pilot. He was said to have delayed ex-president Nimeiri's return to Khartoum when the last coup got underway, thus guaranteeing its success. Less notoriously, though possibly not for long, he had captained the flight I had...

Mar.19.2011

Nº69 Postcard from the Past #4 Befuddeled

Imad Abdullah kidnapped me on the streets of Khartoum. Nowadays, those words probably conjure nightmare images of an encounter with men who think God has told them to kill other people, always a worrying phenomenon, whatever culture it crops up in. But in Sudan in the mid 1980s, the kidnapping was...

Mar.11.2011

Nº68 Postcard from the Past #3 Do Not Photograph This Wall

The most famous and most photographed wall in Sudan surrounded a military compound near Khartoum, its celebrity founded on the simple fact that it had a sign on it saying, 'Do not photograph this wall.' This was one of the first bits of information I gleaned about the city and it pleased me greatly...

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About Charles

Charles Davis was born and educated, and has travelled and worked. He now lives and writes. That has always seemed to me to be enough biography for any writer, but being an avid reader, too, I appreciate that curiosity demands a bit more, so . . . . Basically...

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Oxfam, Amnesty International, Greenpeace

Charles DavisNovelist and writer of walking guides

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About Charles

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Charles Davis
Novelist and writer of walking guides