The Person Behind the Passport

I grew up in Swansea, in a house where foreign travel was the sort of thing other families did. We never owned a passport — not until I was twelve, the year my parents scratched together enough for a fortnight in Lisbon. Two weeks of cobbled streets, salt-cod eaten at a plastic table, and ferry rides across the Tagus that felt, to a Welsh kid who'd never left the mainland, like crossing into another world entirely.

That trip rewired something. I spent the next decade trying to suppress it with a perfectly sensible career in logistics management — spreadsheets, warehouse rosters, the satisfying click of a well-organised supply chain. Genuinely useful work. Not remotely what I needed to be doing.

Eventually I traded the spreadsheets for a one-way ticket and worked my way through a loose circuit of hostels, house-sits, and freelance copywriting gigs. That circuit eventually led to Valletta, which is where I've been loosely moored ever since. Malta was supposed to be a few months. It became something closer to a creative anchor — a small, dense, historically layered city sitting precisely at the crossroads between Europe and North Africa, and full of travellers who pass through without ever quite slowing down long enough to understand it.

A Magazine That Reads Like a Letter

World Sphere Mag came out of years of scribbled notebooks, too much bad coffee in airport lounges, and the conviction that travel writing could sit somewhere between a proper guide and a personal journal without feeling awkward in either direction. I wanted it to read like a letter from a friend who knows which bus to take — not a glossy brochure selling the idea of adventure to people who already know they want it.

The lifestyle strand grew naturally, because how you eat, rest, shop, and dress on the road is inseparable from the travel itself. Nobody packs a suitcase without making a series of lifestyle choices, and those choices are worth thinking about honestly — which is, I'd argue, exactly what this site tries to do.

What Genuinely Living Somewhere Taught Me About Writing

Living in Valletta for an extended stretch gave me something I'd been lacking in years of moving fast: the experience of watching a place actually change. Seeing the same café rearrange its furniture for the winter. Noticing which streets empty at noon and fill again by evening. Learning that the best thing on a menu isn't always listed — it's what the cook felt like making that day.

That's the kind of understanding I try to bring to everything I write here. Not expertise in the academic sense, but the specific, accumulated knowledge that comes from actually staying — from showing up consistently, paying attention, and caring enough about the truth of a place to let it complicate your first impression.