Emily Chappell, Unfinished Journeys Journalist Profile

Articles

Not all men

1 week ago | emilychappell.substack.com | Emily Chappell

Unfinished Journeys is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Last week I had a conversation I’ve had many times before. This time it was with Tegan Phillips, whose work you may well know.
Lucky

2 weeks ago | emilychappell.substack.com | Emily Chappell

Hello all,It’s lovely and sunny in Sheffield as I write this, and I’ve just had confirmation that I’ll be doing events in Shrewsbury and Newport next month (14th and 15thdetails here). Tickets are on sale now, and I hope I’ll see a lot of you there – especially in Shrewsbury, which is where I used to go shopping when I was a teenager. We’re thinking of doing another one on the 13th, ideally in a place that forms a triangle with Shrewsbury and Newport, but haven’t worked out where yet.
We were all there

3 weeks ago | emilychappell.substack.com | Emily Chappell

“We’ll live with this for the rest of our lives,” said a friend of mine on the 16th of March 2020.1 And I realised, with a rush of fear, grief and solemnity, that she was right. This coronavirus would prove a watershed in our century, much like the World Wars of the last one. Nothing would ever be the same again. We’d lose much of what we loved, and look back on the pre-COVID era as a lost paradise. I started to accept that I would have to let go of the ambitions I had had for my life.
Finding a MacGuffin

1 month ago | emilychappell.substack.com | Emily Chappell

Hello all,In the middle of last week, I booked a ticket for an open-top bus tour around Madrid, wondering why I’d never done such a thing before. I’d been seeing these buses for decades, lumbering around the small medieval town where I went to university, and plying the streets of London when I was a courier. As I travelled farther afield, I started noticing them in other cities, and realised that these tours are offered by a few similar-looking companies, who operate all over the world.
The alchemy of tiny variations

1 month ago | emilychappell.substack.com | Emily Chappell

Hello all,Last week I was in England’s North East; this week I’m in Spain, on an Interrail holiday (i.e. travelling without a bike, if you can believe that) during which I’ll celebrate my 43rd birthday in Madrid1. Over the last two days we’ve made our way from Sheffield to London, London to Paris, and Paris to Barcelona, and somehow along the way I have exhausted myself. I have no complaints.
In praise of Middlesbrough

1 month ago | emilychappell.substack.com | Emily Chappell

Hello all,Last week’s speaking tour of Northern England couldn’t have gone better, and it happily coincided with what felt very much like the first week of spring. I know I’m lucky to get to do what I do, and one of the very best bits of speaking and writing publicly is the fact that people sometimes respond to what I’ve said.
Hazard perception

1 month ago | emilychappell.substack.com | Emily Chappell

Hello all,I forgot to update you last week, but for those who have been wondering, yes I did pass my driving theory test, despite my concerns about hazard perception. I have always been a massive swot, so by the time I say down for my test I had spent weeks working my way through textbooks, apps and flashcards, and taken numerous mock tests online.
An exceptional woman

2 months ago | emilychappell.substack.com | Emily Chappell

Hello all,This week’s piece is the third in an approximate series of articles, asking why we persistently forget about women’s achievements. The other two can be found here and here. When I announced that I was going to cycle round the world in 2010, a couple of people told me I’d be the first woman ever to do so, which even then I knew wasn’t the case.
Why I wrote a book about car-free adventures

2 months ago | elisedowning.substack.com | Elise Downing |Emily Chappell

I didn’t pass my driving test until I was almost 30. My mum had offered to pay for a few lessons for my 18th birthday but my motivation was low at the time. I would have still had to cover the rest of the cost of learning which felt pointless given there was no way I could afford a car at the end of it, not on the £4.28 an hour I earned working Saturdays in WHSmith. I ended up trading in the lessons for an interrailing pass to travel around Europe (on brand, it turned out).
A new standard

2 months ago | emilychappell.substack.com | Emily Chappell

Dear all,I’m very pleased to announce that last week an idea I had four years ago finally came to fruition – and what’s more, I had nothing to do with it, and someone else did all the hard work. Back in the days of Twitter (remember that?), I asked my followers for hints on how to get into hiking and mountain running as a non-driver. It seemed reasonably certain that I would enjoy it once I got started, but I was daunted by the logistics.