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Hosted by Jonny McBee of The Browning, Burn This World is a metalcore focused podcast with professional guests telling their stories, and reviews of underground metal bands.

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The Browning Announces European Tour with Silent Screams

The metal band, The Browning, have announced a co-headlining European tour with Silent Screams, for November and December. Capture The Crown and Walking With Strangers will be on the tour, as support. You can check out the dates, details and poster,…

Digital Tour Bus

The metal band, The Browning, have announced a co-headlining European tour with Silent Screams, for November and December. Capture The Crown and Walking With Strangers will be on the tour, as support. You can check out the dates, details and poster, after the break.

Nov. 27 –  Willemeen – Arnhem, Netherlands Nov. 28 –  ResonanzWerk – Oberhausen, Germany Nov. 29 –  Underworld – London, United Kingdom Nov. 30 – Ivory Blacks – Glasgow, United Kingdom Dec. 01 – The Key Club – Leeds, Uk Dec. 02 – Rainbow Courtyard – Birmingham, United Kingdom Dec. 03 – The Globe – Cardiff, United Kingdom Dec. 04 – Engine Rooms – Southampton, United Kingdom Dec. 05 – Kavka – Antwerp, Belgium Dec. 06 – Batofar – Marseille, France Dec. 07 – Saint des Seins – Toulouse, France Dec. 08 – Kiff – Aarau, Switzerland Dec. 09 – Feierwerk – Munich, Germany Dec. 10 – Elyon – Milano, Italy Dec. 11 – Flex – Vienna, Austria Dec. 12 – Kvlt – Budapest, Hungary Dec. 14 – Hydrozagadka – Warsaw, Poland Dec. 15 – Magnet – Berlin, Germany Dec. 16 – Headcrash – Hamburg, Germany Dec. 17 – Arena 29 – Gothenburg, Sweden Dec. 18 – Beatpol – Dresden, Germany Dec. 19 – Chez Heinz – Hannover, Germany Dec. 20 – Schwarzwaldhalle – Karlsruhe, Germany

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The Browning

Latest setlist, the browning on april 23, 2024.

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All About The Rock

The Browning On tour with Chelsea Grin

THE BROWNING kicked off on a European tour last night with CHELSEA GRIN Thursday, March 6th – in Munich, Germany.

The band will be trekking around Europe in support of their latest album, HYPERNOVA , just one day after wrapping up a US tour. Also appearing on the European dates are MORE THAN A THOUSAND and SILENT SCREAMS .

Don’t miss THE BROWNING on tour in Europe at the following shows:

THE BROWNING w/ CHELSEA GRIN, MORE THAN A THOUSAND, SILENT SCREAMS

Mar. 06 – Munich, Germany – Backstage Mar. 07 – Vienna, Austria – Arena Mar. 08 – Trondheim, Norway – Trondheim Metal Fest Mar. 09 – Hannover, Germany – Musikzentrum Mar. 10 – Berlin, Germany – Magnet Mar. 11 – Gothenburg, Sweden – Sticky Fingers Mar. 12 – Stockholm, Sweden – Arena Satelliten Mar. 13 – Hamburg, Germany – Markthalle Mar. 14 – Rotterdam, Netherlands – Baroeg Mar. 15 – Manchester, UK – Sound Control Mar. 16 – Cardiff, UK – Clwb Ifor Bach Mar. 17 – Glasgow, UK – Cathouse Mar. 18 – Wolverhampton, UK – Civic Hall Mar. 19 – Southampton, UK – Joiners Mar. 20 – London, UK – Underworld Mar. 21 – Brussels, Belgium – Magasin 4 Mar. 22 – Cologne, Germany – Underground Mar. 23 – Trier, Germany – Exhaus Mar. 24 – Paris, France – Glazart Mar. 26 – Romagnano Sesia, Italy – RnR Arena Mar. 27 – Aarau, Switzerland – Kiff Mar. 28 – Leipzig, Germany – Conne Island Mar. 29 – Karlsruhe, Germany – Stadtmitte

THE BROWNING ‘s new album, HYPERNOVA , is out now worldwide. The album was recorded at Planet Red Studios in Richmond, Virginia with producer ANDREAS MAGNUSSON ( THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER, IMPENDING DOOM ).

Get the album now from the Earache Webstore in Europe at http://webstore.earache.com/the-browning or in North America at http://uswebstore.earache.com/the-browning

HYPERNOVA is also available on iTunes, including two exclusive bonus tracks, at http://bit.ly/16w079n

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UPON A BURNING BODY / THE BROWNING 2024 US Tour Setlist Playlist

Recent setlist playlists of Upon A Burning Body, The Browning, Hollow Front, and VCTMS going on a US Tour in April 2024.

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#UponABurningBody #UABB #TheBrowning #HollowFront #VCTMS #SetlistGuy @UponABurningBody @TheBrowning @HollowFront @VCTMS @SetlistGuy

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THE BROWNING: Confirms US Tour With Industrial Metal Titans FEAR FACTORY

February 26, 2012.

Texan electronic metallers THE BROWNING have confirmed a US tour with industrial metal titans FEAR FACTORY.

The tour is scheduled to kick off on May 1st in San Antonio, Texas, and also includes SHADOWS FALL, THE DEVASTATED and LEGACY OF DISORDER.

THE BROWNING drummer NOAH "SHARK" ROBERTSON comments:

"We are extremely excited to be touring with such legendary bands in the metal scene as Fear Factory and Shadows Fall. We really look up to these bands that helped pave the way for the metal of today, and we're definitely inspired by their ability to stick around for so long doing this, especially Fear Factory, being that they are one of the pioneers of the industrial metal genre. Also, we can't wait to hit the road again with our good friends in The Devastated. This tour is gonna be insane!"

See THE BROWNING on tour at the following shows:

May 01 - San Antonio, TX - Backstage Live May 02 - Dallas, TX - Trees May 03 - Houston, TX - Scout Bar May 05 - St. Petersburg, FL - State Theater May 06 - Fort Lauderdale, FL - Culture Room May 09 - Winston-Salem, NC - Ziggy's May 10 - Philadelphia, PA - Theater of Living Arts May 11 - Hampton Beach, NH - Wally's Pub May 12 - New York, NY - Gramercy Theatre May 13 - Baltimore, MD - Sonar May 16 - Pontiac, MI - The Crofoot Ballroom May 20 - Denver, CO - Summit Music Hall

Get THE BROWNING's debut album, BURN THIS WORLD, on CD in North America at Earache Records US Webstore or in Europe at Earache Records Webstore

BURN THIS WORLD is also available on iTunes, with two exclusive bonus tracks, in North America at iTunes - Music - Burn This World by The Browning and in Europe at https://bit.ly/rexqm9

Watch THE BROWNING's new music video for the track, "Bloodlust"

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Armstrong Browning Library & Museum

A blog that explores the work of robert & elizabeth browning and 19th-century victorian literature and culture.

A Browning Pilgrimage

by Rachel Jacob, Armstrong Browning Library Graduate Research Assistant

Part of my duties as a graduate research assistant at the Armstrong Browning Library involve looking through our collections to answer research questions people ask. A recent question related to the Armstrong tours caused me to look through the unprocessed collection of the tour company which Mary Armstrong, Dr. Armstrong’s wife, ran for many years. In researching this collection, I stumbled across the Browning pilgrimage which the Armstrong Educational Tours company created.

Brochure for the first Browning pilgrimage.

In 1926, the Armstrong Tour company offered an exciting tour of Europe highlighting areas of the Browning’s lives. The tour was infused with literary references and readings. The tourists, or “pilgrims”, would even have literary lectures given by Dr. Armstrong and European Browning scholars at various stops on the trip. Dr. Armstrong himself described the tour:

“This pilgrimage to the shrines of the most virile poet of the Nineteenth Century is a spontaneous growth, out of the minds and hearts of Browning Lovers of America. The tour will include all the interesting features along the usual path through artistic and literary and historic and scenic beauties of Europe. But, in addition to these, there will be excursions along the trail of the Brownings. This means charming excursions in out-of-the-way corners of Europe, which lend to this tour peculiar and gripping interest.”

Photograph of the Browning pilgrimage tour at Fano.

On the tour, the group visited important places in Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s story including their home at Casa Guidi, Barrett Browning’s house at 50 Wimpole Street, the church where they were married, and the burial spot of Barrett Browning. The group also visited the Baths of Luca where Barrett Browning presented her Sonnets of the Portuguese to Browning. Another literary stop relating to the Browning’s works was the Piazza S. Lorenzo where the Old Yellow Book, the inspiration for the Ring and the Book, was found. The pilgrims even followed the trail of Pompelia and Caponsacchi while they were traveling. They were also able to visit Fano to see the Guardian Angel, for which Browning wrote his eponymous poem. During the trip, the pilgrims met significant people like Prince Fabrizio Cigala, the Governor of Calabria, professors at the University of Naples, and various Browning scholars and supporters.

Brochure for the second Browning pilgrimage.

The first tour must have been a success because in 1930 Armstrong Educational Tours offered a second Browning pilgrimage. This second pilgrimage had 19 pilgrims join on an even more expansive 5-month tour. The new additions to the tour included a trip to Ravenna to place a wreath on the grave of Dante and visit Ferrara which was associated with My Last Duchess. During their celebration in Rome for the fourth of July, the pilgrims met Contessa Zampini-Salazar, Count and Countess Vanutelli, and Donna Olivia Agresti-Rosetti, the niece of Christina and Dante Rossetti. While on the trip they even met the pope.

In discussing the second Browning pilgrimage, Dr. Armstrong remarked, “of all the twenty-odd tours I have made to Europe, this one was by far the most memorable.”

Although there was no documentation in this collection that shows the Armstrong tour company ever leading another Browning pilgrimage, Dr. Roger Brooks resurrected the trip in 1991. Dr. Brooks, the then director of the Armstrong Browning Library, offered a scaled-down   week-long version of the trip. During the trip, Dr. Brooks participated in the wreath-laying ceremony at Browning’s grave in Westminster Abbey.

Going into this collection, I only expected to find an answer to the original research question, but instead, I was able to witness the dedication and impact of the Brownings that is still seen to this day.

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The Rick Steves guide to life

Travel mogul. philanthropist. legal weed champion. the real rick steves is so much more complex than who you see on tv..

EDMONDS, Wash. — At first glance, it is hard to tell that Rick Steves is protesting.

In the center of his hometown, America’s favorite travel host is perched on the edge of a fountain roundabout engaging in some friendly civil disobedience. As cars circle the intersection, Steves smiles and waves, looking more like an Elf on a Shelf than an angry picketer. This is his way of reminding people he wishes they’d stop driving here.

Steves’s family moved to Edmonds when he was 12, and the 68-year-old is still happy to call it home. Rather than relocate to his beloved Europe, he dreams of bringing some European sensibilities to the edge of the Puget Sound, less than 20 miles north of Seattle.

When he’s not traveling around Europe, writing about Europe or running his multimillion dollar European tour company, the prolific TV host and author likes to squeeze in some local activism. The roundabout routine is his push to block off Edmonds’s very American Main Street for pedestrians. If you squint at it, you can see what Steves sees: this would be the perfect place for a lively town square.

“I like a lot of things about Europe but I love the urban energy of Europe. I love the piazza,” Steves said in a wistful tone you might recognize from PBS. “We don’t have a piazza.”

Unfortunately for Steves, the voting majority of the city does not love the idea of parking their SUVs farther away to shop. So despite his Boy Scout enthusiasm, the most famous man in Edmonds must keep up the perch-and-wave. This is not his only crusade.

Spend any amount of time with Steves, and you’ll encounter a total ham who loves a zany bit. But if you ask him about serious issues like car-free zones, he’ll bring up other causes that are dear to him: affordable housing, supporting the arts, creating senior centers for the elderly to age with dignity.

He’s anti-Trump and pro-cannabis. He does not care if that is bad for business.

The average Rick Steves fan has likely missed this side of him. On TV they see an always-sunny history lover who makes going abroad feel approachable for the average American. That’s an incomplete picture, like thinking you know Paris because you’ve seen the Eiffel Tower on YouTube.

Meet him in Edmonds, and he’ll fill in the rest.

It may look like a lot of gallivanting, but being Rick Steves takes a lot of work.

He spends three months of the year overseas, researching, writing, recording, refining tours, updating guidebooks. If he’s not planning or producing content, he’s often doing promotional events across the United States. This year Steves is celebrating the 40th edition of his first book, “Europe Through the Back Door.” Over the course of his career, he’s built a privately held company that generates $120 million in revenue a year, published 110 books, filmed 12 seasons of “Rick Steves’ Europe” and produced more than 750 podcast episodes.

“It’s just like coordinating a three-ring circus,” Steves said.

That is: really fun, sort of exhilarating and extremely complicated. To pull this off, Steves does not observe the French 35-hour workweek. He’s a workhorse with a reputation for keeping a frenetic pace year-round.

“It’s more of an American work culture,” Amy Duncan, Steves’s communications director, told me. “He’s an unapologetic capitalist but he is also a socialist.”

He makes enough money to fly first class, but he only sits in economy, claiming he doesn’t mind being cramped.

“It never occurred to me that I’m suffering,” he said. “As long as I’ve got an aisle and a seat that reclines, I’m happy.”

Actually, Steves believes airlines should only have one class. It’s part of his egalitarian worldview. He’s also anti-points and anti-miles, refusing to sign up for airline loyalty programs because he believes they bully us into complicating our lives.

Steves also enforces a self-imposed “ carbon tax ” on his tour company, which takes more than 30,000 people to Europe annually. For every customer, Steves invests $30 to atone for emissions created by their flights between the United States and Europe. Last year, that added up to $1 million donated to a portfolio of organizations, Steves said.

“I don’t need to be a slave to the quarterly profit statement. I want to be around and profitable in 10 years from now in a world that you can travel in that’s stable,” Steves said. “This is a smart investment and it’s an ethical expense that I should pay for.”

Rick Steves will tell you he’s motivated by making money; the more he can earn, the more good he can do with it.

“Vicarious consumption, that’s one of my things,” Steves said.

After amassing a windfall from the 2001 George W. Bush tax cuts for high earners, Rick Steves donated $1 million to support the local symphony and performing arts center. In 2005, he used retirement savings to buy a 24-unit apartment complex for the local YWCA’s use as transitional housing for women and children. He figured he’d eventually sell the complex and live on the earnings. About a decade later, he changed his mind and donated the complex valued at $4 million.

He also gave more than $4 million to help build the Edmonds Waterfront Center, a vibrant gathering place for seniors where his daughter had her wedding in 2021. And he gave another $2 million for a similar center in the nearby city of Lynnwood, which broke ground in mid-April .

“Rick puts his money where his mouth is,” said Nancy Leson, a former Seattle Times food critic who used to let Steves’s daughter babysit her son. She’s appreciated his regular presence in the community, like hosting events for local politics at his house and shopping at the farmers market .

“He changed travel,” local resident Karen Howe said on her way into the Waterfront Center with a friend. She’s used Steves’s guidebooks for years. “He’s introduced us to places that most of us would never think of going.”

Rick Steves hasn’t won his piazza battle, but he has brought European touches to Edmonds. At the Rick Steves’ Europe headquarters, there’s an E.U. flag hanging from the mocha brick facade. And gargoyles that drain rainwater, just like at the Notre Dame cathedral.

“Gargoyles scare away evil spirits,” Steves points out, unable to suppress his inner tour guide.

Here Steves employs more than 100 people: editors, audio producers, tour specialists and cartographers such as Dave Hoerlein, his first employee. That’s excluding the fleet of guides and drivers he contracts across the pond to shepherd tour customers.

Inside, he bounds through a maze of cubicles, his neck craned forward, always at an eager pace. His 6-foot frame appears leaner than previous seasons of his life, but his signature look is familiar. No, not khakis and a button-down. That’s vintage Rick. These days, he wears dark jeans and a button-down, plus a thin scarf and leather sneakers.

During a day of meetings, Steves’s fjord-blue eyes lit up at the minutia of the business. He went over new maps with Hoerlein. He and longtime co-author Cameron Hewitt addressed problems like finding a “less glitzy” stop on the Amalfi Coast that’s not Sorrento. They discussed whether a place is worth visiting after it’s gotten too popular, and Steves indulged in some gallows humor.

“It’s going to be like holding the corpse of a loved one who just died,” he said.

His critics argue the “Rick Steves Effect” can turn a charming village, restaurant or museum into a tourist magnet. Matthew Kepnes, the travel writer behind the blog Nomadic Matt , points to the Swiss town Zermatt, which he says Steves put on the map, and has since dealt with overtourism . You’re bound to bump into groups with Rick Steves guidebooks in Italy’s increasingly crowded Cinque Terre.

Whether Steves is actually to blame for changing a place is up for debate. There are plenty of destinations he’s covered that haven’t been inundated with swarms of Americans (see also: Gdańsk).

Steves says he assesses whether a place wants tourism, if it can handle it gracefully. If they don’t or can’t, he may mention it but not promote it.

He has faith — maybe too much — that his clients share his values.

“Does [my work] change the personality of a town? It can. Am I a dramatic impact on Europe? No,” he said.

“There’s a handful of places I really promote aggressively that I’ve had a serious impact on, but otherwise ... my travelers are the kind of people that take only pictures and leave only footprints ... they’re good travelers.”

You don’t have to spend much time in Edmonds to see why Rick Steves never considered leaving.

The city — population roughly 42,000 — sits on a majestic inlet. You can get to a major international airport in about an hour. The community is so courteous, it has an “umbrella share” program in case people forget their own on a rainy day. As Steves walks around town, he greets people by name. He lives within walking distance to both his favorite diner and a pétanque court, the French answer to Italian bocce. He plays bongos at his church on Sundays.

In 1967, Richard “Dick” Steves moved the family here because he was worried about Rick Junior.

“I was hanging out with dangerous kids and going down the wrong trail,” Steves said. Seriously.

His dad, an Army veteran, got by in the upscale suburb as a piano technician and importer. When Steves was 14, his parents dragged him on a work trip to Europe to visit piano factories; it was a radical experience that sparked his lifelong passion for travel.

Back in Edmonds, Steves started teaching piano, eventually turning his savings into trips abroad of his own — not only to Europe, but Turkey, Nepal, Afghanistan. He went to college nearby, earning degrees in European history and business from the University of Washington, where he played in the Husky Marching Band.

After graduation, Steves figured he could keep up his routine: give piano lessons during the school year, then travel during the summer. He started teaching travel classes in the same recital hall where his piano students performed. This was back when there was no internet and few guidebooks to consult for trip planning.

The classes were a hit. At 25, Steves turned his lecture materials into a 180-page book, and self-published “Europe Through the Back Door,” in 1980.

Four years later, he hosted his first European minibus tour group, serving as both bus driver and guide.

His businesses have evolved — his bus tours now take up to 28 travelers, a number Steves says is a sweet spot between making the tour more affordable yet enjoyable for customers and profitable for the company. But his mission has remained the same: to be the best resource for European travel and help Americans travel better.

“I just focus on that and I love it,” he said. “It takes my life out of balance — which is not good — but it lets me do a lot of stuff that I believe in and that’s good.”

Steves has been open about the challenges of being a travel mogul. As built his empire, he was also raising a family. Being “married” to both took a toll. In 2010, Steves and his wife, Anne, divorced after 25 years of marriage.

Up the hill from his junior high, Rick Steves’s modest beige home offers a window into his many lives. There are family photos on the walls, from older relatives to his baby grandson, Atlas. He hosts political fundraisers on the sprawling deck. A painting of Kerala, India, nods to one of his favorite countries (people forget Steves did four editions of “Asia Through the Back Door”).

Next to his grand piano, there’s a stuffed creature that Steves calls his “Silver Fox” baring its teeth and wearing novelty sunglasses with cannabis leaves on the lenses — a nod to two of his interests: taxidermy and marijuana activism.

“It’s the civil liberties … it’s the racism … everything about it is wrong,” he said of keeping weed illegal.

As for the toothy fox, Steves doesn’t do typical souvenirs anymore, but he makes an exception for stuffed animals.

“The wooden shoes and the pewter Viking ships are so obvious,” he said. “I like to do something a little more organic and a little more striking and it takes me back there — I like it.”

He’s a very good piano player. He can also play the sousaphone and the trumpet — which he did regularly during the pandemic, performing taps for his neighbors at sunset.

Covid-19 was a nightmare for the travel business, but a miracle for Rick Steves’s love life.

After running in the same social circles for years, he and Shelley Bryan Wee, a prominent local bishop, started dating at the end of 2019. They had a lot in common. Both are progressive Lutherans. Both are divorced with adult children. But neither worked a typical 9-to-5, and one of them spent three months of the year in Europe.

Then lockdown happened. Steves, who couldn’t remember if he’d ever had dinner in the same place 10 nights in a row, spent 100 nights at the same table with Wee. It solidified their relationship.

“Shelley is a constant,” Steves said. He still struggles with the balancing act between work and love.

When the stars align and they’re both in Edmonds, Wee cooks, and Steves plays sous chef. They walk Jackson, Wee’s labradoodle, creating their own version of the passeggiata, Italy’s traditional evening stroll. They play table tennis before dinner.

When the world reopened, they started traveling together. They’ve made time for a few big vacations: a trip to Morocco, where they were caught in a windstorm that blew the windows out of their car; a luxury barge cruise through Burgundy, France, “that was embarrassingly expensive,” Steves confessed, followed by a week hiking in the Swiss Alps; and another hiking trip between remote lodges on Mont Blanc.

Before their first trip, Steves edited the contents of Wee’s suitcase, because packing light is part of his philosophy.

“What do you say?” she asked. “You’re talking to Rick Steves.”

Editing by Gabe Hiatt. Additional editing by Amanda Finnegan. Design editing by Christine Ashack. Photo editing by Lauren Bulbin. Videos by Monica Rodman. Senior video producer: Nicki DeMarco. Design by Katty Huertas. Copy editing by Jamie Zega.

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‘I felt myself split into before and after’: how giving birth triggered a life-changing illness

Having a baby led to an unexpected disease and then surgery that altered Lauren Bensted’s body for ever. She talks about the pain she felt in being separated from her newborn, and her journey to learn to accept her new life

“W e’re going to have to disconnect you,” says the man at my bedside. Since I was hospitalised a fortnight ago, this man and his team have been trying to save my colon, a 5ft-long tangle of ulcers and inflammation. The speed and scale of my colon’s fury has fascinated doctors. I imagine them in their morning meetings, poring over my colonoscopy with the mystification usually reserved for the Voynich manuscript. But time is up. Unless they “disconnect” me, my bowel will perforate and I will die.

Disconnection, explains the doctor, involves whipping the whole colon out – here he mimes pulling a rabbit from a hat – and diverting my digestion through a hole in my abdomen called a stoma. He sketches my new anatomy on a piece of paper, quick as a high-street caricaturist. He cannot imagine what it is like to receive this news – to hear your body will change for ever and with it your whole life too – just as I cannot imagine what it is to break it. I want to grab his hand, ask him how. How does a body give birth to a healthy baby and then burst into flames?

I hadn’t planned to be living with my parents when I became a mother, but that’s what happens. My boyfriend, Will, and I have bought a fixer-upper whose every wall, floor and ceiling is, according to my dad, “completely pissed”. The latest in a long line of house-building Irishmen, he sets about restoring its broken bones for us with surgical skill. Meanwhile, Will and I Zipvan our lives back to the London suburb I snubbed aged 21. Now, up the duff at 35, I’m won over by it all – the quiet, the Costa Coffees, the middle-aged blokes reverently soaping their Qashqais. I feel unbelievably lucky to have this time with my mum and dad, this last gulp of being someone’s kid before I become someone’s mum.

I am invited for extra scans, having been classified as “high-risk”. “Because I’m 35 and ‘geriatric’?” I ask one consultant. “No,” she says. “Because of your Crohn’s.” I was diagnosed with the inflammatory bowel disease as a teenager. I don’t remember much, besides a few missed school trips and the dark thrill of no longer being the chubby one in my group of friends. I’ve had no symptoms since. “All looks fine!” beams the sonographer. The baby bobs under the ultrasound wand. It’s the only time my disease history is mentioned.

My son is lifted out of me one Sunday in early July, as Joan Armatrading’s Love and Affection blasts from the delivery-room speakers. Navy-eyed and howling, he is totally alien and powerfully familiar to me all at once . We bring him back to my parents’ house where my brother’s old bedroom is ready for us, shelves of school cricket trophies now stuffed with bottles, muslins, nipple cream. We swaddle the baby the way the midwife showed us – tightly, like a tiny nativity play shepherd – and cannot believe our luck.

I begin to feel porous. Leaking boobs, but other things too: sweat-drenched bedsheets, grinding pain, violent splashes of blood in the toilet. Even the smell of my own breast milk sends me running to the bathroom. I am determined to keep pumping, recording diminishing quantities on my phone: 40ml left boob, 30ml right boob . The baby screams , unsatisfied. I promised I’d go easy on myself if breastfeeding didn’t work out, but now the desire to feed him myself is fierce, irrational, like I need to beat whatever is eating me from the inside out.

When I describe how bad things got before I sought help, people assume I was trying to be invincible. They are thinking, perhaps, of those apocryphal women who lift cars off their young, oblivious to pain. But I’m acutely aware of my pain, I’m just unsure what it means. A suspicion takes hold that I am not tough enough for motherhood. For the sleeplessness, nursing, the magnificent horror of being sliced open.

Unable to get a GP appointment, I pay to see a private doctor, a kind-faced man retired from the NHS. I say I think childbirth has reactivated my Crohn’s. Unlikely, he says. Caesareans famously make the bowels grumpy. He prescribes antibiotics which I immediately throw up. Will drives me to A&E, where the triage doctor calls me “honey”, asks how bad the pain is on a scale of one to ten. Six? Ten? I don’t know the metric. Motherhood has made me an unreliable narrator of my own body. It’s almost a relief when, one morning, delirious with pain, I collapse. At least now there is no ambiguity, I think hazily. As paramedics wheel me out, the baby starts to cry and my mum dashes inside to change his nappy. I do not get to kiss him goodbye.

In TV medical dramas, the patients usually only feature in one episode and then they either get discharged or die. There is a rule that predicts their fate. Demanding patients suffer the most, because they need to be humbled and learn not to be a dick. Sweet, quiet patients – the ones who never press the call bell too often – die first. I hedge my bets and go for “friendly but forthright” in the hope I will make it out alive when the credits roll.

Having never been hospitalised before, there is an initial thrill in observing this ecosystem up close, with its otherworldly machines, bleeps, tourniquets. I am a tourist, just stopping by while the doctors work their magic, then I will step out of this hospital drama, back to my four-week old baby.

I spend the first day on a corridor containing so many patients that staff call it the “Corridor ward”, as if Mr Corridor is a trailblazing scientist. Since there is no space on the gastro ward, I am shipped to an A&E overspill area, where I join the miscellaneously broken. On the bay opposite are two elderly drunks who wind everyone up by singing the same three Beatles songs. Next door is a prisoner with an infected leg who threatens anyone who comes near with legal action. The nurses are kind and visibly stressed. The whole place thrums with the panic of a Panorama documentary, a sensation heightened by the steroids flooding my body.

After a colonoscopy reveals my flaming insides in psychedelic detail, I am diagnosed with severe ulcerative colitis. They will later conclude that my teenage Crohn’s diagnosis was erroneous. The idea is that the gastro doctors will visit me on the A&E ward, but after five days I’ve seen a consultant once. I cannot work out who to badger; it feels like all the people who can help me are elsewhere. A junior doctor mutters that the gastro ward should be renamed the Glasto ward: “That’s how impossible it is to get a ticket.” If only I could chuck on a bucket hat, scale the perimeter wall.

My confidence that I will make a Lazarine recovery falters, chipped away by the tedium of 30 toilet trips a day. I must chronicle them on a daily worksheet, a humiliation compounded by the Comic Sans font. Nevertheless, it sparks a nerdy satisfaction. I add an elaborate asterisk system to denote cramps, spasms, blood. I take it very seriously until the day I hand it in and watch the ward sister shove it straight in the bin.

We decide it’s not safe to bring the baby inside the hospital, as he hasn’t had his jabs yet. So, on the days I can get up, Will brings him to the car park or the garden. My arms are so weak that I’m scared to hold him. Will shows me new winding techniques his mum’s taught him, videos of his dad bathing the baby in the kitchen sink. Some days we laugh a lot. On others, our conversation is a careful dance, each trying to conceal the fullness of our sadness from the other.

Will and the baby are living out of a suitcase between our parents’ homes. I wait for the nightfeeds – midnight, 3am, 6am – when Will sends sleepy voice memos, the baby guzzling in the background. We should be doing this together, sharing the exhaustion and the dirty nappies, the magic chaos of it all. None of us are in the right place. “Has he smiled yet?” I ask. “If I miss his first smile, don’t not tell me.” The baby is changing fast, learning about the world somewhere I am not. This is the unbearable ache, the stone I cannot swallow.

I feel myself crossing over into what Susan Sontag called “the nightside of life”. I’m unable to recognise my own moonface, eyes hollow with insomnia. The kingdom of the sick is where I belong now and it’s no picnic for a people-pleaser. “I’m keeping my pecker up” becomes my party line, like a politician on a media round. But I can see the black puddle of despair in the corner of my room. I am scared to go near in case the questions come (Why me?) and I fall in.

I begin to absent myself from my body. The phlebotomist’s catchphrase comes twice a day – “Sharp scratch” – but I feel nothing when the needle goes in. In the middle of the night, I read about the plan to put people on planes to Rwanda, a newsreader’s sex scandal – things that would normally stir me. But they feel like missives from a universe I don’t exist in any more, so what’s the point? Sickness confirms my impotence to do anything about anything. The world is on fire and so is my body and nothing can be done.

After a weekend passes with no consultant visit, I find the private doctor’s email on his personal website. I say I’ve been diagnosed with severe ulcerative colitis and I’m getting worse. I feel a bit ridiculous, like one of those people who tweet Michael O’Leary for a refund on their Ryanair flight. What can he do, this man? He can’t invent beds on the gastro ward, nor time-travel me through to Monday morning when the consultants will be back. He is literally, according to his out-of-office autoreply, on a walking holiday in Norfolk.

He calls immediately. Apparently I am at risk of developing a very straight-to-DVD-sounding condition called “toxic megacolon” where the whole thing bursts. I need to be on immunosuppressant therapy immediately, he says. And something else: “85% of patients in your position end up needing a colectomy.” What is that? I ask. “The bowel is removed and the patient fitted with a stoma,” he says. “The last resort.”

Like you perhaps, what comes to mind is a bag of waste stuck to a stomach. That’s the visual, that’s the extent of my prior knowledge. I know it must cover something – the “stoma” presumably – but I have no interest in that. Because it will not, cannot be me.

The private gastro pulls the emergency lever all the way from the Norfolk Broads. He used to work here in his NHS days, it turns out. Consultants are paged, the immunosuppressant arrives. But it can only be administered by a specific nurse whose shift ends within the hour. A side-room frees up on the gastro ward, but due to staff shortage it has not been cleaned, so I cannot be transferred. My dad – straight off the scaffold, hair full of plaster dust – runs to find the ward sister. “I will clean that room”, he says, in a low voice that I know means he’s scared. My poor, lovely dad. “Please let me clean it.” Soon I am wheeled to a room on the right ward, hooked up to the new drug. “At last!” we all keep saying, as if that was the worst bit. But over the next fortnight, I will discover there is no limit to how terrifying things can get.

There’s the moment I realise no one has accessed my test results for days because the junior doctors are striking and the consultants don’t know how to log on. The evening an unsympathetic registrar tries to throw me out of my room, claiming a palliative patient has greater need. (I later discover this is a fiction: one of the alcoholic Beatles fans is proving too disruptive.) The moment a trainee stoma nurse tries to draw an X on my stomach where a stoma would go, despite no doctor having made the final call on surgery yet, despite me crying “No, please, I’m not ready.”

There’s the nurse who forgets to warn me she’s about to pull a thick tube from inside my belly (agony!) because she is so stressed, trying to teach junior nurses. The day I’m so desperate to see a psychiatrist about my hallucinations that I try to bribe a millennial female doctor with a Facetime from my bestselling author mate to make it happen. (I’d been asking for a week.) The rage when I discover on a late-night Google trawl that “one in three women with inflammatory bowel disease will flare after giving birth” and “women with IBD should be closely monitored postpartum.” How did I not know? Why did no one tell me?

But there are no villains in this story, I know that now. Just people under huge pressure, in an overstretched, underfunded system that doesn’t work any more, doing their best. And there’s no magic medicine, I know that too. Just good luck and bad luck as to whether the drugs will work, save your colon, save your life, save you from the surgery you think will ruin everything. It’s all luck in the end. And my good luck begins the night three brilliant surgeons walk into my room and promise me a stoma is going to give me my life back and I decide to believe them.

I really have no other choice.

I wake up from the eight-hour operation in what appears to be a large industrial storage unit. No free beds on the recovery ward. Something strange surges in me. I feel stuffed full of love for the earth and all of its creatures. I am the Dalai Lama. I am John and Yoko’s bed!

“Is this the fentanyl?” I ask my surgeon, wondering if he’ll let me hold his hand. “Maybe,” he says. “Or you might just be happy to be alive.” I have questions. Who owns my colon now? “Nobody. It’s biological waste.” Where is my colon, exactly? “A lab in Winnersh Triangle.” This sends me into hysterics. I’ve finally cracked, I think.

I don’t want to ruin the lovely opioid high by looking under the sheets, but the nurse says I can’t be discharged until I prove I can deal with the stoma. So I take a deep breath, pull up my gown.

Most people are too polite to ask what a stoma looks like. Their imagination cuts out at the bag, the way mine used to. But the bag is just the figleaf: the madness is what it conceals. The common assumption is a little tube, discreetly passing waste from body to bag, like a tiny hoover. This is cute, but wrong.

Here’s what I can see. A red spout, 3cm across, protruding between my navel and hip. The end of my small intestine, I realise numbly. Covered with a clear bag for monitoring, it flexes and scrunches like a sea urchin. It feels appalling and amazing to see what I can see, this most private and shameful process brought into daylight. It seems improbable that it should actually work – the bag seems so DIY – but I eat a jacket potato and feel the thing murmur into action.

There’s so much paraphernalia to get my head around: bags, seals, sprays, powders. It’s like I’ve taken up a hobby with a dizzying amount of kit, like vaping or golf. “Some people give their stoma a name,” says the nurse, “to help them accept it.” No chance, I think . It’s not a Tamagotchi, it’s my intestine for god’s sake.

I imagine stepping back into my old life now. Teaching, writing, pubs, gigs, sex, holidays. How could I forget for long enough to enjoy anything? It hits me that no one I know would want to have this body – a very particular kind of loneliness.

The doctors love a metaphor. They refer to my plumbing. Pipework. Shuddering, loveless imagery that recalls our fixer-upper, with its wretched old drains. But their favourite metaphor is “disconnected” . I see it in a letter to my GP: “The patient was disconnected on 18 August.” It’s a good metaphor, maybe too good. It’s not only my bowel that has been disconnected, but me too. From everyone I love. From my old innocence, whoever I used to be.

After Will calls to say he is on his way to visit, I try to rejig my bedsheets. A healthcare assistant called Hassan comes by and I’m suddenly in tears. I don’t want Will to be scared by the drains ferrying awful liquids from my body, I explain. Hassan leaves and returns with a pot of raspberry jelly. “You are feeling shame for what happened to you,” he says gently. “But it’s not your fault.”

No doctor has been able to tell me why having a baby made my body burst into flames. I am all arson with no perpetrator. In the absence of a culprit, I have cast myself. What if I had known more about inflammatory bowel disease? What if I had eaten differently, given birth differently, got myself to hospital quicker? Could things have fallen out some other way?

Hassan’s words reach out to me in the dark. I do some more crying, eat the jelly he has brought me.

It is late summer by the time they discharge me. It feels like a jailbreak. Will and I roll down the car windows, sing along to Rusted Root’s Send Me on My Way. My parents are waiting on the doorstep with the baby – eight weeks old now, plump as a peach. I’ve been away half his lifetime.

The doctors warned my mood would crash when the drugs wore off. I wait for the black puddle to turn tidal. Instead, I find illness has shifted the world by a few centimetres. Jokes are funnier, conversations more sincere. Everyday things feel like unbelievable acts of magic. Cooking dinner with my mum. Making up a song for the baby. Life hums with a kind of Technicolor, like falling in love. My opioid high has mellowed into something as warm and steady as the September sunshine. The surgeon was right: I am just so happy to be alive.

I had planned to tell only those closest to me about my stoma. But at some point I realise that discretion’s closest relative is shame and cannot stop talking. I pick up a sandwich from the Jewish deli and am there half an hour, telling the bewildered owner about my exploding colon. I develop a pathological intolerance for pleasantries. Will starts calling me the Truthbomber on account of my tendency to blow up pointless small talk. Friends visit and I gibber away, pulling stories from my ragbag of hospital traumas, prone on the sofa like Elizabeth Barrett Browning on speed. I write long emails about what happened to family, friends, colleagues, finding release in the way I can control its contours now, find something meaningful in the darkness.

In the quiet of the bathroom, I shower and dodge the mirror’s gaze. The baby trills happily in his bouncer, unaware I bring him along for moral support every morning as I tend to my stoma, change the bag. He’ll never know me any other way than this. I need to face my new punctured body, still stained with orange surgical dye. Unwire all of my shame, old and new. I want to learn to look at myself the way the baby does – with uncomplicated, uncritical love.

I try to think of my body as a collection of stories. The freckles inherited from my mum. The scar from a pair of GHD straighteners on my neck, ultimate badge of early noughties girlhood. The queen of hearts tattoo on my wrist my best mate and I got two summers ago. The curve of a belly that kept the baby safe, the five-inch cut where he was prised from me. The laparoscopic holes, incredible portals through which surgeons cut five feet of disease. I think of my body as an old friend I have lived in for 35 years. And though I no longer trust it, I cannot hate it.

When winter comes, we move into our house and throw a party. We lug beer back from the Wembley Tesco Extra, pick up a firepit in B&Q. At some point, I realise I want to make a speech about Will. About the way he’s held me fast, his love unflinching. “We’ve been together six years,” I tell everyone. “But you know how the old adage goes. You never really know a man till your colon explodes.” Our friend Adam gamely conducts a shamanic ritual over the firepit in the garden, wearing a pagan hood off Amazon. We huddle in the cold, pass round Biros, scribble down the worst things that have happened to us, cast them into the flames. A friend brings a piñata emblazoned with “Fuck 2023” which I take great pleasure in thwumping. Surrounded by everyone I love, I feel the threads between my old and new selves begin to reconnect.

The first year of a baby’s life is peppered with milestone moments, not all of them showstoppers. Many happen without ceremony, as you stoop to unload the dishwasher, fish a stone from your shoe. Sometimes there is no “first” time at all, just a seamless switch from nothing to something. The baby’s first smile comes a few days after I get out of hospital. Just the corners of his mouth, then an unmistakable full beam. I had been so convinced I’d miss it. “He saved it till you got home,” says my nan.

I’ve become aware of all my firsts too, since illness split me into a before and after. First time in a swimming pool. First Christmas. It’s been a long time since I got to do things for the first time. I watch the baby’s face flood with shock and delight as he collides with the world. First ride on a double decker. First taste of pineapple. One day, I’ll tell him how he saved me. How, in the moments that I replay the darkness, his little face pulls me back to the present. I’ll tell him how much he taught me in our first year together. Eyes wide open, looking at the big bright world, both of us brand new.

• The Observer
• Health & wellbeing
• Parents and parenting

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The Browning European Tour 0

Posted in concerts , events.

@Talschock, Chemnitz

The Browning begin their European tour November 22nd in support of  Hypernova.

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Cheapest destinations to see Taylor Swift concerts from 'Eras Tour' abroad

Are you a Florida Swiftie with “Eras Tour” FOMO?

It’s definitely too late to find a ticket to Taylor Swift’s October concerts in Miami for less than $2,000. 

But you can see an “Eras Tour” show in Warsaw, Poland, on Aug. 1, 2024, for about $500 cheaper than the cheapest concert ticket for a Miami show in October (including a roundtrip plane ticket to Poland, from Miami ).

Travel website Islands.com just released a study on the cheapest overseas destinations for seeing Miss Americana on the European leg of her tour. 

To calculate the cheapest overseas shows on Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” this summer, Islands.com aggregated data on each city to find the average most affordable concert tickets, the average cost for two days of spending on hotel rooms, meals, drinks and transportation in each city and each city's safety score.

Here’s the Islands.com list of the cheapest shows on the next leg of Taylor Swift’s tour and how much the cheapest plane tickets from Florida to the cheapest European concert are.

Does “The Eras Tour” come to Europe?

Yes! After a wildly successful first run of “The Eras Tour” in the U.S. in 2023, Taylor Swift extended her tour to an international one and will start performing in Europe this summer before returning for more U.S. shows in the fall.

Here’s Islands.com’s list of the Top 10 cheapest places to see Taylor Swift in Europe this summer, including two days’ worth of hotel, food, drink and transportation costs for each city:

• Warsaw, Poland: $443 cheapest concert ticket price, $712 total lowest average cost
• Gelsenkirchen, Germany: $387 cheapest concert ticket price, $749 total lowest average cost
• Hamburg, Germany: $411 cheapest concert ticket price, $903 total lowest average cost
• Stockholm, Sweden: $406 cheapest concert ticket price, $935 total lowest average cost
• Paris, France: $313 cheapest concert ticket price, $971 total lowest average cost
• Munich, Germany: $472 cheapest concert ticket price, $1,000 total lowest average cost
• Lisbon, Portugal: $507 cheapest concert ticket price, $1,028 total lowest average cost
• Lyon, France: $582 cheapest concert ticket price, $1,047 total lowest average cost
• Cardiff, UK: $679 cheapest concert ticket price, $1,061 total lowest average cost
• Vienna , Austria: $496 cheapest concert ticket price, $1,089 total lowest average cost

Does Taylor Swift perform in Poland?

Yes! Taylor Swift will be performing for three nights in Warsaw, from Thursday, Aug. 1, through Saturday, Aug. 3.

The cheapest ticket to see Taylor Swift perform in Warsaw, Poland in August is about $1,500 cheaper than the cheapest ticket to catch one of her Miami shows in October.

As of April, via Google Flights, you can buy a roundtrip plane ticket from Miami to Warsaw (with two layovers) for around $800 .

Add that $800 plane ticket to the around $500 it will cost for a concert ticket and the extra $200 to $300 you’ll spend in two days of visiting Warsaw, and the grand total comes out to a maximum of around $1,600, which is still $400 cheaper than the cheapest ticket to a Miami show.

Bengals re-sign Jake Browning on 2-year exclusive rights deal: How well does he stack up?

The Athletic has live coverage of NFL Draft Rounds 4-7 . Follow along with our picks tracker , best available and The Beast . 

The Cincinnati Bengals have retained trusty No. 2 quarterback Jake Browning as they re-signed him on a two-year exclusive rights deal, the team announced Tuesday.

Browning played excellent in relief of an injured Joe Burrow during the 2023 season. Browning threw for 1,936 yards with 12 touchdowns and seven interceptions, resulting in a 98.4 passer rating. Cincinnati went 4-3 with Browning under center.

We have re-signed exclusive rights QB Jake Browning to a two-year contract through the 2025 season. 📰: https://t.co/axEzOdtbiB pic.twitter.com/oUUYbAdPzG — Cincinnati Bengals (@Bengals) April 23, 2024

The 28-year-old’s advanced metrics are even more impressive. It’s a small sample size, but here’s a glimpse at where Browning ranked among qualified QB seasons the past two years (95 qualified individual seasons) using these metrics via TruMedia and Sports Info Solutions:

• Expected Points Added (EPA) per dropback
• Passer rating
• Total QB EPA
• On target pass percentage
• Catchable pass percentage

EPA metrics

On-target/catchable percentages

The Bengals seemingly liked what they saw and you can’t blame them.

It’s pretty typical for a team to hang on to a player eligible for an exclusive rights deal, a contract for a player with less than three accrued seasons on an expiring deal in the previous season. These deals are also usually for one year. Adding a second year to the contract shows the Bengals wanted no part in letting Browning walk away in the near future.

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Browning went undrafted after a successful college career at Washington. He hopped on with the Minnesota Vikings in 2019, but never made it to the 53-man roster. The Bengals signed Browning to the practice squad in 2021 and he worked his way to backup status.

Bengals reward Browning

The Bengals did right by Browning, who proved himself in relief of Burrow last year. Browning was an exclusive right free agent set to make $915,000 on the minimum coming off his breakout year. Instead, Cincinnati added security in the backup spot with an extra year, providing more money for Browning in the meantime.

The confidence the staff and players have in Browning after what he did the final month-and-a-half of the season was an easy investment that gives Cincinnati one of the better starter-backup combos in the NFL . — Paul Dehner Jr., Bengals beat writer

Required reading

• Which NFL teams’ quarterback depth charts are in the best shape heading into 2024 NFL Draft?
• Jake Browning’s Bengals rise: What happens when Mr. Blend In becomes Mr. Breakout?

(Photo: Ryan Kang / Getty Images)

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