My friend Helen messaged me. “They’ve got the vaccine in Tuscany!!! I managed to get on the list!!! Here’s the link, don’t be put off if you can’t get an appointment, it took me three goes!!!”

Helen likes the idea of the vaccine as much as she likes exclamation marks. She was surprised when I told her I wasn’t keen and wouldn’t be rushing to make the list. To her credit she didn’t try to persuade me otherwise or really pursue any kind of discussion about it, which I was very grateful about, because most people are quite the opposite.

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I’ve had a thing about pyramids ever since visiting Mexico in the early 1980s. I went to Teotihuacàn, location of an ancient complex dating back to 200 ACE which contained the third-largest pyramid in the world, the Pyramid of the Sun. In those pre-digital camera days, I documented the event on my Brownie 127 camera which had a roll of film that took just eight photos. These had to be delivered to a developer and collected a week later, while you kept your fingers crossed they had all come out. I had brought one roll for the whole of my…

Covid-19 has brought our modern world to its knees. There is barely a country, town or village on the planet that has not been affected by the disease and its restrictions. For over a year now we have been engaged in a global battle against an invisible enemy with no respect for human life, institutions or borders.

The trouble with the Coronavirus is that it is what it says on the tin — a virus. Life would be so different if the spiky invader was a bacterium.

Bacteria are microscopic single-celled organisms, which vary in shape and structure. There are…

Florence is drenched in art. It is on every corner, down every cobbled street, in every piazza and palazzo. Never mind Tony Blair’s genteel “hand of history” on your shoulder. In this Tuscan city, history pulls you into her arms, kisses you passionately, then swings you around and around until your head spins.

For some people, this is more than a metaphor. The myriad masterpieces in Florence actually make them ill. Symptoms of “Florence Syndrome” include nausea, dizziness, fainting, panic attacks, hyperventilation, tachycardia, temporary amnesia and disorientation. Some hallucinate. Some end up in hospital, literally overwhelmed by beauty.

Despite sounding…

When award-winning Dutch innovation expert Henk van Oosten retired, he wasn’t interested in taking up golf or bridge. Instead, he decided to solve one of ancient history’s most enduring mysteries.

Using skills acquired over many years in foresight studies and his experience as a sailor, he took on the knotty topic of the Trojan War and Odysseus’ travels. Were they just myths conjured up by Homer to entertain his Greek audience or could they be something more?

He treated the search as if it were one of his innovation projects, using wide spectrum thinking and knowledge from diverse fields. And…

On February 24 this year, I wrote one of the first articles about the Coronavirus as I watched dramatic scenes unfold from our apartment in the historic centre of Florence, Italy. In front of my eyes the city closed down, changing from a bustling, vibrant, tourist-filled Tuscan icon to a ghost town in a matter of days. On February 24 the death toll in the whole of Italy was two souls. It was pre-lockdown, but I knew from the unprecedented events I was witnessing that something very big was happening.

Apart from describing the situation on the ground from what…

The legendary lost island of Atlantis. Everyone’s heard of it and everyone’s got an opinion.

Was it just an elaborate fiction given to us by the Greek philosopher Plato in 360 B.C.? Or was it a “mother culture”, a real place with an advanced Stone Age civilization?

The answer is a bit of both.

The legend of Atlantis was passed down by word of mouth thousands of years before Plato first heard it, so it’s hardly surprising that some details got distorted over time. Truth became history, history became legend and legend became myth. Plato’s account is exaggerated, contains historical…