The Observer, Sunday 1 April 2007

Stratospheric house prices mean even the bottom rung of the property ladder is out of reach for many. Carl Wilkinson meets the couch surfers and warehouse guardians who’ve found novel ways to save their rent

Location, location, location goes the trite estate agent’s mantra. But just what would you be prepared to do for the right location? Take this advert for a London flat posted last month: ‘Excellent transport links, close to Archway tube (Northern line) and Holloway tube (Piccadilly line). Excellent bus routes, 15 mins from Central London.’ It’s a bargain, at just £75 per week. The catch? You sleep on the sofa.

The last time many of us would have fallen asleep on a sofa would have been in front of Newsnight before retiring upstairs to bed. However, for a new generation of ‘property poor’ the sofa is their bed.

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The Observer, 21 January 2007

The snake was at least two metres long and eventually identified as a forest cobra, although I initially had it down as a piece of hosepipe. It was writhe-around-in-the-dust, nasty-way-to-go deadly. And it was in my shower. That I considered picking it up says little for my common sense, but the fact that I didn’t reflects well, I think, on the training I’d received a few days earlier while on CC Africa’s Bush Skills Safari.

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New Statesman, 15 January 2007

Carl Wilkinson made a journey to meet the Karen tribes of Burma - and found them in Thailand

It’s 6am. The sky is the colour of gruel as the mist clears, and there is the fine scent of old wood smoke in the cold air. From deep inside my thin sleeping bag I can hear nothing but a cacophony of pigs, chickens, dogs and buffaloes grunting, crowing, barking and snorting. Beside me is the rhythmic chanting of a Buddhist prayer as my 75-year-old host kneels on the bare teak boards of his house in the mountains of northern Thailand and prays to a small photocopied image of a Buddhist prayer wheel pinned to the wall.

It takes me a while to remember where I am and, indeed, why on earth I came. This has been the most uncomfortable night of my life. Nine hours earlier, after an incredible yellow curry, cooked over an open fire in the timber building by our guide Singh, we had stretched out on the cold wooden floor and tried to sleep. We had been driven into our sleeping bags by the cold, the noise of the animals and the darkness around us. Only once we’d lain down did I realise just how torturous the next nine hours would be: cold, noisy and painfully uncomfortable.

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