Soapbox

There isn’t much talk about holidays going on at the moment as the entire world – well quite a lot of it – is actually stuck indoors, locked down or social distancing or whatever the local discipline is called.  But maybe many of those people are already beginning to get the urge, possibly stronger, a […]

Having shared his thoughts on preparing Bali for when travel re-opens again in his last article, “After Covid-19: What Next?“, Alistair Speirs shares another idea. With Bali empty right now, it gives the island an opportunity to reinvent itself when it welcomes visitors again. Now is the time to say, “Hey, who do we want […]

Semua krisis pasti berakhir. Biasanya, krisis yang terjadi malah menimbulkan krisis lainnya karena kemampuan kita untuk kembali pulih hampir sama dengan kemampuan kita untuk merencanakan, ujar Alistair Speirs, yang telah melalui berbagai krisis di Indonesia: mulai dari kerusuhan hingga gempa bumi, hingga resesi finansial dan tsunami. Seandainya kita mau jujur untuk membandingkan durasi dan program […]

Some background and some ideas from Alistair Speirs OBE, Managing Director of Phoenix Communications, who has spent many years in Post-crisis action and wants to make sure we do better this time around.  The crisis will end. They all do. And usually precipitate another because our ability to recover is pretty much equal to our […]

There has never been a better time to be a conscious of ‘wellness’ than now while we are facing a worldwide pandemic of a new and exceptionally virulent virus: COVID-19. While here in Bali we have been – up to now – less affected than many places, the simple fact is that no–one and nowhere […]

It’s funny how some people just can’t enjoy the delights of food and drink. They are only interested in the nutritional value, the calorific value, the balance, the origin and the composition of their food. “Sustenance” rather than food, just fuel to keep the body going, but increasingly fine-tuned to all the critical factors above: […]

“Love is a Many-Splendoured Thing” I’m pretty sure that expression came from a gooey Hollywood movie but it says it – all tongue in cheek! The love that St. Valentine expressed back in the 1st century, was actually one of sacrifice and that’s a very hard thing to do or  even to contemplate. But is […]

One hundred years ago the world was still celebrating peace in Europe after the devastation of World War One; America was in its first flush of modern lifestyle and invented the speakeasy, filled with dance, sing and happiness, fuelled  by the beginning of a huge booze trade. It was the ‘Roaring Twenties’ when anything was […]

Many years ago in Europe, but it was probably the same all over the world, festivals were very much centred on religious celebrations. Many of them were agriculturally based too like  ‘Thanksgiving’ for a good harvest (or sometimes a human sacrifice because the harvest was bad!), and were usually at very fixed points of the […]

There was a time, not that long ago, when it was really possible to get lost in Bali. To wander down unmarked roads and lanes and sit quietly under banyan trees in unnamed villages. There was nature in Kuta and fields in Seminyak, there wasn’t a single building in Nusa Dua nor a villa on […]