anatomy · of · distance

My most recent Amazon Marketplace purchase arrived this morning: a copy of a book titled The Teatime Islands. It's written by a chap named Ben Fogle, who apparently was a minor reality-TV star (apparently, he spent a year on a Scottish island for a TV show named Castaway), and seems to cover the same territory as Simon Winchester's Outposts, only more recently; in other words, it's a travelogue around some of the remaining parts of the British Empire, minus the relatively uninteresting Caribbean millionaires' playgrounds.

I've just read the first chapter, about Tristan da Cunha (that's the world's most remote island, in the South Atlantic, and five days' sailing from South Africa, or, to Royal Mail, TDCU 1ZZ), and am, so far, really enjoying it. He writes quite entertainingly, and gives quite vivid descriptions of the various places, their inhabitants, and various fellow travellers and what brought them to these odd destinations.