Stephen Phelan

THE same sun that rose in the Far East this morning is now setting on the hills above the Scottish Highland village of Tomatin. It glints along the blade of Jock Brocas’s sword and casts his shadow on a gold and purple landscape. In this light, Brocas looks as much like a mythic Japanese warrior as he ever will.

THE terracotta warriors came to Dublin when I was a kid. A small detachment of them, anyway – perhaps a dozen life-sized clay soldiers from an army of thousands. Most were infantrymen, arranged in marching formation. A couple were cavalry, mounted on sepulchral horses and frozen in mid-trot. Their eyes were open, their faces angled and shadowed in a way that made them seem splendidly charismatic, if also potentially wicked. They didn’t quite look alive, but you wouldn’t want to turn your back on them either.

I moved to Buenos Aires the weekend before the 30th anniversary of the first day of the Falklands War. I knew enough not to call it that in Argentina, where those islands are known as Las Malvinas. To refer to them by their British name is a political statement if deliberate, and a dead giveaway if accidental.

AN ex-banker named Guillermo Benitez swings a sawed-off hockey stick in each fist, bringing both of them down on an old computer keyboard like a furious gorilla locked inside a school supply cupboard. His girlfriend Lorena Dominguez is more methodical, lining up empty wine and beer bottles on a metal rack to smash them one by one with an axe handle. The Ramones are playing loud and dumb over the in-house PA system. Through the bunker-like slit of the observation window, it looks and sounds as if these two are having a wonderful time, and this is the entire point of The Break Club.

ALMOST 100 years ago, a young apprentice from a Japanese sake company was sent to Scotland to study the art and science of whisky-making. Masataka Taketsuru travelled the highlands and islands and took menial work at various distilleries – learning by getting his hands dirty. He also took a local wife, marrying one Rita Cowan in Campbeltown before returning with her to Japan in 1921.

CHRISTMAS in Uruguay marks the start of the high season. Perhaps this sounds like a giddy little pun on the fact that marijuana is now legal here, but that would not be in the proper spirit. Arriving in Montevideo just as this landmark legislation is being rubber-stamped by the Senate, I quickly learn that foreigners tend to get much more excited about it than most Uruguayans, who kindly request that we please be cool.

IF you’re going to Lake Baikal, you’re going to Olkhon Island. And if you’re going to Olkhon, you’ll be staying at Nikita’s Homestead. This is the babushka-doll logic of a Trans-Siberian itinerary, especially as the railway passes through Siberia itself. In theory, you are wandering one of the world’s great wide-open spaces. In practice, you are following the same route as every other foreigner aboard the trains here, and probably making all the same stops.

THERE is a fat, goateed man in a leather jacket standing far too close to a Magellanic penguin. He is giggling nervously – the man, not the penguin – and slowly extending a finger towards the animal’s soft white belly. Surely, I am thinking, he is not actually going to poke this poor bird, which has just swum thousands of miles from the Antarctic to join its colony here at Punta Tombo, a thin, chilly strand of Patagonian desert on the coastal edge of Argentina.

VIEWED FROM outer space, the traffic in Edinburgh and Glasgow doesn’t look particularly bad. In 2002, the European Space Agency launched a new satellite – Envisat- to monitor air pollution levels across the planet. Envisat sees the spectral traces of man-made gases, such as nitrogen dioxide (NO2), as they rise in vertical tropospheric columns from power plants, shipping lanes, centres of heavy industry and major urban road networks. Compared to places such as northeast China in those terms, Scottish cities form an almost negligible part of a global picture.

A GIANT red robot soldier stands over 20 feet tall in the long, wild grass of a roof garden, atop a pastel-coloured building surrounded by trees and hedges. It’s a strange sight, even for Tokyo, but also dimly familiar, like something you once daydreamed or doodled in primary school.