Contorting into a backwards bend in 43 degrees Centigrade humidity, inhaling a rancid-insole smell and concentrating hard on just trying not to vomit, faint or topple into the person next to me... my first Bikram yoga session was shaping up to be an all-out BLAST.

I'd seen Bikram as the...

I'm very eager to meet Mr Mohammad Jawad, the British reconstructive surgeon who performed pioneering treatment on the budding television presenter Katie Piper, after a jealous boyfriend arranged for a cup of acid to be thrown straight into her face. So eager, in fact, that I accidentally turn...

I'm ashamed to admit that I have never, ever taken part a protest. My mother once showed me a cluster of anti-apartheid badges, souvenirs of a youth spent regularly on the march, and I thought that one day I would do the same. But from the Iraq demos to the...

Charles Dickens is seriously bothering me at the moment. Not, you understand, because the demonstrably dead genius has decided to mark the bicentenary of his birth by coming to twirl his ghostly moustaches at me in the middle of the night.

It's because amidst the glut of documentaries, exhibitions and...

Today I found myself the laughing stock of an entire Rwandan village. I'd agreed to pose for a photo with an adorable looking piglet, but as soon as I got close it began squealing at a traumatising pitch, and I lurch-hopped away ungracefully with a shrill, panicked yelp.

At this...

Today we travelled to Kitare parish in the Northern Mousanze district, close to the border with Uganda. If possible, the scenery was even more spectacular than yesterday, treating us to the impressive vista of a trio of smouldering volcanoes. We stopped en route at a market, where me and Esther...