Features Archives - Blethers from Afar

Secret Santa: A Short Film about Christmas Cheer

It’s December 2020 and Santa finds himself at a loss after being told to take the year off. His dilemma; how to spread Christmas cheer in the midst of a pandemic? This festive short was co-written and filmed...

Celebrating Kindness: Different ways kindness is shown around the world

If ever there was a year to celebrate the importance of kindness, 2020 takes the prize. The covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on our world, washing across the continents like a tsunami. Debris stretched as f...

Pitch perfect: How to approach hotels and secure press stays as a travel blogger

As much as I love writing about travel, there’s a lot of misconceptions about what it takes to be a blogger. The line I hear most often is: “It must be nice getting all of those free holidays!”. Cue my resting...

How to be a mindful traveller

A thought or two on mindfulness "There's no time like the present." It's a phrase we hear a lot. Funnily enough, it can be taken one of two ways. These days, it's often issued with a dose of pressure - th...

The Interval: A Short Film by Izzy Gray

After seven months of lockdown, in October 2020, I was delighted to be able to write, direct and film The Interval. This short film was made on behalf of Capital Theatres, to help raise awareness for the diffi...

10 easy tips to help you travel greener

It’s a fact; the concepts of Travel and The Environment have not always had the smoothest of relationships. If they were to be cast as characters in a film, the plot would probably fall along the lines of Gone...

What the pandemic has taught me about my feelings towards travel

In 2020, the world as we knew it came crashing down. It started with flames. Wildfires swept across Australia. The rest of the world watched helplessly, horrified by the satellite images which began ...

The Times It All Went Wrong: Take Two

Five years ago (...how?!) I shared an article called ‘The Times it All Went Wrong’, with the hope of showing the, erm, slightly less glamorous side of travelling. Surprisingly, it went down a storm. What do...

Smile, you’re at Auschwitz! The troubling reality of visiting a concentration camp in the modern age

The frost-laced winds swirled in slow, solemn waltzes. My gaze lay straight ahead. I stared, shivering, trying to contemplate the length of the tracks ahead; of where they began, where they led, where they en...

My Top Travel Experiences of 2018

As my pals down in Leith would say, 2018 has been a beezer of a year for travel. As well as several trips abroad, one of my missions for the year was to spend more time exploring my home country. Turns out, S...