The only real mistake is one you didn’t learn from. If you care about improving you have to look back and learn from what was successful and what wasn’t. For reflection to work it can’t be idle chat, have to identify specific changes to try, not vague ‘I should do more of…’ notions. In that spirit I’ve been looking back at my entries for the Istanbul to Bristol trip , which is by far the greatest amount of writing I’ve done since leaving university. This isn’t a generic list of tips on better writing, Google can supply you with a million of those, this specific to what I feel about my own writing attempts.

With a clear sky and the bright sunshine finally arriving in Bristol it feels right to recommend some high energy local pop-punk records. So in the optimism of sunshine our first stop is Caves ’ Homeward Bound ( Spotify ), fittingly covered with an overexposed picture of the lead singer eating an ice cream. The music is upbeat, uncomplicated and races along at a high rate of knots and has all the sing-along “Wooaa Oooo OoooOOos” you could ask for in the short tracks.

You can use the General Purpose IO pins on a Raspberry Pi to easily control an LED. If you choose a three colour red-green-blue (RGB) LED you can mix these colours to create a wide range of colours, in the same way a pixel on your screen does. I used a common cathode RGB LED , wiring the cathode to the ground pin on the Pi. Then the three legs are each wired to a GPIO pin on the board. In this case red to 12, green to 16 and blue to 18.

I’m hunched over and my reaching under the edge of the bed to get to my tablet. The USB cable is short and the only free plug socket was under here, behind dusty suitcases and rolls of blankets, allowing me to eak out the last few minutes of power and WiFi before I have to leave. Pocket is well stocked with interesting looking articles, my RSS reader is up-to-date and the latest podcasts are all downloaded to my phone. I’ve also got four unwatched films and a good book saved.

I’m having an existential crisis, and I’m having it under the bright white lights of a consumer electronics warehouse, surrounded by a thousand glittering tablets, laptops, netbooks, e-readers and headphones. What sort of person am I? In the past this would have been a question to contemplate in the grand spaces of a temple or the vaulted roof of a church. Now it’s happening to me in the corrugated box of an out of town shopping centre.

I recently received a card with the wonderful picture by Scottish painter James Orr on the front. He has a very enjoyable style, not too abstract or too detailed, just an eye for pleasant ways of abridging shapes while still representing the scene coherently. Iona Croft Crinan Crinan Canal Crinan Croft in the Snow House Sadly I could only find a few images of any reasonable size to enjoy. The larger images here come from the McGill Duncan Gallery and Concept Fine Art sites.

If snow rarely visits where you live, then seeing your familiar world becoming white, muffled and pristine is always a pleasure. It’s not just the joy of seeing the everyday become new with the wearing of an unfamiliar snowy dress, but watching the change and knowing that six months ago you were walking the same streets wearing shorts and sunglasses.

Paris, Sunday 9th December 2012. This, racing across the northern flats of France, out of Paris at two hundred kilometres an hour, is the end. I’m dangerously trying to put a meaning, a conclusion, to my trip, a deeper insight attached to the distance covered. Something short I can claim to have learnt, a small piece of personal philosophy to give to anyone who asks: “How was it?”. The problem is the narrative is always written in retrospective. Our minds need a story to link everything together, otherwise you have a random, incomprehensible stream of events; no history, just one thing after another. But this can create cause and effect where there is none, linked lies where there were only scattered truths.

Paris, Saturday 8th December 2012. I’m breathing hard in the cold air, a cloud of vapour swirls in front of me, my footsteps clang and echo on the metal staircase. Sara asks breathlessly “Can we stop here for a moment?”. “If you want.” I try to make it sound casual, like I’d prefer to carry on, but I’m glad of the stop. Sara changes camera lenses to make the stop more than an embarrassing halt because we’re out of breath and unfit.

Zurich, Friday 30th November 2012. Derek and I get to the waiting TGV Lyra in Zurich Hauptbahnhof with five minutes to spare, something I would never have risked with British public transport. Derek has now been in Switzerland long enough to have become used to the more reliable tram network and doesn’t see what I was worried about. The TGV is much more modern and sleek than I expected, having imagined one of the earlier hulking square cut silver models that looks like the sides are made of corrugated steel. The wheels and pipework under the train are covered in curved streamlined chunks of ice. Inside the seats are smaller and more cramped than the other recent trains, the style is more airline style seating, as is usual in Britain. I settle into my seat just in time to wave Derek goodbye as the train starts to pull away.