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Someone I met in February

He comes walking alongside us as we approach the end of Frenchmen Street. White beard, sandy coloured hat, guitar on his back, can of beer in his left hand, dog leash in his right. “They call me Chief”, he says, by way of greeting. “And my dog here is called Buster.”
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Someone I met in January

The City of London is filled with men (and women, but mostly men) in suits. Sometimes, just sometimes, one of those men seems to walk just a tiny bit straighter and prouder than the rest. You’d never even realise that it was the magic of Suited & Booted at work.
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Someone I met in December

The pub was packed with people. It was late April 2014 and it was King’s Day in the Netherlands. To honour it, several hundred Dutch had descended on a West-London drinking den frequented by expats. Everyone was dressed in orange and the beer was flowing.
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Someone I met in November

The envelope was buried beneath a pile of bills and take-away flyers. It was the kind of handwriting that looked like it could be from a grandparent, but I didn’t recognise it as being my grandma’s. The front of the card did not give anything away either: just a single, colourful flower. And then I opened it.
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Someone I met in October

After 31 hours of travel, Marvin Dulder (30) was one of the first people I met in Santiago de Chile. We were both there for the 12th Homeless World Cup, though I was merely a reporter while he was one of the street soccer stars. We had a long and deep conversation, some of which he asked me not to write about.

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Someone I met in September

“I know that you can hear me but I don’t care.” My neighbour had a point. I could hear her, giving out about me on the phone, just as I was giving out about her in the jail cell next door. There was a concrete wall between us but a big air vent near the ceiling transmitted our mutual rants word for word.