Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is alwayssimpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle fora living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partitions more plainly than our promises.
False promises — those people make not intending to keep — are easier to comprehend, for they are simply a species of lying: garden-variety violations of trust. But it is our true promises — those we have every intention of keeping — that, when broken, most imperil us, most reveal our contradictions, most painfully violate our self-trust.
Beekeeping has been booming in Slovenia for hundreds of years, and that’s reflected in a rich material culture. In particular, there’s a buzz around its rustic apiaries, whose stacked hives were – until the late 19th century, anyway – painted with naive religious imagery and folk tales, hunting scenes and harsh satire
Painted beehive panels, or poslikane panjske končnice in Slovenian, are said to have first appeared in the 18th century in Carniola, which was then part of the Austrian empire. Later, they cropped up in Carinthia and northwest Styria, both part of the nation today. According to Kristina Seljak, curator of the Museum of Apiculture in Radovljica, home to the largest collection of painted beehive panels in Slovenia (some 900 examples), they developed in those areas due to the use of kranjič hives. ‘The front planks of these were ideal for forming a kind of wall or mosaic due to their stacking structure,’ she explains. While in other regions, beekeepers used basket hives made of straw or branches, the simple, elongated boards of the kranjič hives could be decorated more straightforwardly.
Thanks to the presence of several notable figures, beekeeping in Carniola and Carinthia developed faster than in other regions. Among them was Anton Janša, considered the father of the modern discipline, whose supposed birthday has been celebrated as International Bee Day since 2017, when Slovenia successfully lobbied the UN. Beekeepers in those areas could therefore afford higher-quality and more durable painted panels, more often than not executed by late or post-Baroque craftsmen/artists, who otherwise created religious works for filial churches. Panels might also be decorated by the beekeepers themselves, or semi-qualified peasant painters, who also produced work on furniture or the façades of rural homes.
This panel, showing women making soup from trousers, riffs on folk tales about the battle for marital dominance. Radovljica Municipal Museums, Museum of Apiculture, inv. no. CM 1073. Photograph: Miran Kambič
What better way to ridicule the slowness of tailors in fulfilling their commissions than to depict them fleeing a snail. Slovene Ethnographic Museum picture gallery. Photograph: Blaž Verbič
‘Artists made their own paints by grinding natural pigments and mixing them with egg white or oil, often linseed oil. One of the first symbols painted on beehive panels was the morina taca or trutamora,’ Seljak says, referring to a circular symbol also commonly painted on to furniture or door frames to protect inhabitants from evil spirits. Some researchers believe poslikane panjske končnice developed precisely for this reason: to protect and to ward off misfortune.
That’s why religious motifs are older in origin than everyday scenes. The oldest-known painted beehive panel, for example, bears the year 1758 and depicts the Virgin Mary and Jesus. In addition to pious imagery, panels created throughout the 18th and 19th centuries feature caricatures, folk tales, carnival figures, hunting scenes and current events. Among the panels at the aforementioned Museum of Apiculture, for example, is one depicting a brutal triple murder which occurred in Luče in 1884. In a time before the internet, the painted panels helped disseminate information to a mostly illiterate public. Inevitably, they also reflected the social mores of that period; women were often demeaned, ridiculed or depicted as sinners (in one example, a woman’s tongue is rolled through a whetstone – a reminder to keep caustic comments at bay).
Beekeeping continues to flourish in Slovenia and is increasingly on the rise in cities. But in the 20th century, the custom of painting hives began to decline. Today, it appears on Unesco’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Those who maintain the tradition tend to use acrylic paints or prints, reviving or reinterpreting old motifs, or creating new ones altogether. Bojana Rogelj Škafar, curator for folk-art collections at the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, points to the 2022 initiative Queering Beehives. ‘The motifs of painted-beehive panels had disturbed a group of young people, who reinterpreted them in a queer context,’ she explains. Launched as part of Ljubljana’s annual City of Women festival, the goal of the project was to inscribe the experiences and perspectives of LGBTQ+ people into the history of poslikane panjske končnice, as in one example, which reimagined the image of a giant snail chasing a tailor. A recurring design in the narobe svet (‘topsy-turvy world’) genre, this was a tongue-in-cheek comment on the stereotypical slowness of tailors, while also satirising the perceived effeminacy of that profession. In their reinterpretation, one of the project’s participants depicts a rainbow-coloured mollusc chasing a couple off-panel. The artwork’s name? Gay_snail.
A version of this article appears in the July 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
What is actually worth buying used? – “Figures are in US dollars, taken from live eBay listings with shipping included. Everyone says buy secondhand. Nobody says where it actually pays. We track the cheapest live eBay price for every model we follow and compare it against what that model cost new, so you can see which categories are worth the hassle and which are not.
There is also a model by model table further down showing exactly how much value each one has lost. The used column is a live eBay price, rechecked daily, last updated 30 August 2026. The new column is the recommended retail price for each model, which moves rarely and is not rechecked on that schedule, so read the saving as approximate rather than to the dollar…”
As we wrap up the interview, Paul Theroux points a gun at me. His finger is on the trigger, so it’s lucky we’re talking on Microsoft Teams. “This is called a broomhandle Mauser,” says the 85-year-old travel writer. “Lawrence of Arabia had one. Churchill had one too.” It’s one of many artefacts from a lifetime of travel that fill Theroux’s study in Cape Cod, Massachusetts (his other home is Hawaii).
Theroux owns many guns, shoots every week, and jokes about becoming the oldest Olympic medallist. “A Swedish guy now has the record, who is 72. But I could —”
“Your time will come,” I assure him.
Theroux has had one of the longer literary careers, still going strong after publishing more than 50 books since 1967. Most are novels, but he’s best known for his travel books. His 12th, True North: On the Road in Canada, appears this month. He has also birthed a dynasty: his sons Louis and Marcel have followed him into the travel-recounting business. In his unplaceable transatlantic accent, the pioneer of modern travel writing relates how his work, the genre and travel itself have changed in his era.
He grew up in Medford, Massachusetts, one of seven children of a salesman and a schoolteacher. The family, he says, was “dysfunctional”. (His novel Mother Land stars a monster matriarch.)
“I never told my parents I was going to be a writer. If I had, they would’ve said, ‘But how are you going to make a living?’”
So how does he explain that three of his brothers are also published authors? “Reading and dysfunction. And reading and dysfunction give you one overwhelming urge: to leave. In a family of seven children, the only way you find space is by leaving.”
Theroux in New Delhi in 1983 while researching his book ‘The Imperial Way’
In 1963, inspired by John F Kennedy’s launch of the Peace Corps, he went to teach in Malawi. He arrived planning to become a doctor, but grew entranced by people’s stories. “I knew a lot of old men and women in my village, and I spoke the language. They remembered the first world war. It became very interesting to me to hear people talk about the past: the first time they saw a white man, the first time they saw a British soldier, the first time they saw a car.” I thought, ‘Well, I’m hearing this story and I can write it down. No one else is listening to it.’ It’s like the history of the common man.”
That approach became the basis of his travelling: going alone, leaving the beaten track, courting danger and prioritising people over sights. From Malawi he went to Uganda, and in 1967 published his debut novel, Waldo. When he sent a copy to his mother, she replied, “This book is trash.”
What did she mean? “It was a novel of the ’60s, of rebellion and disgust. If my mother had approved, I would have thought, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ My parents were never interested in my work, but that’s OK.”
You’re not bringing anything back of value unless you embed yourself in culture
In Uganda, Theroux met the writer who would become his mentor and frenemy, future Nobel laureate for literature VS Naipaul. The horror writer Stephen King once diagnosed Theroux with “a fabulously nasty sense of humour” and of “assassinating all of his characters”. Both characteristics describe his 1998 book on Naipaul, Sir Vidia’s Shadow. But what did the twentysomething Theroux learn from the great man?
“He was a very painstaking writer. He wasn’t a natural — he didn’t have natural fluency, let’s say. He really laboured over every sentence. And he noticed that I didn’t. But he taught me to look at every word. He taught me to avoid the cliché, and even precious writing. He thought Nabokov or Updike were too florid. Even someone like Martin Amis — somewhat precious, and clever, but there’s no heart in that writing.”
Naipaul’s basic message, says Theroux, was about “avoiding other writers, just writing your own stuff, trying not to be influenced. One of Naipaul’s things was, a writer needs a disturbing vision, and should write from a position of strength. The best thing Naipaul ever said to me was, ‘You’re going to be all right.’”
Naipaul also preached a habit that Theroux has stuck to: writing books in longhand. He holds up to the screen his latest efforts, handwritten on A4. “Somebody came to me recently and said, ‘Can I show you something I’ve written?’ And I said, ‘Well, the first chapter needs a lot of work. And the rest of the book, too. Here’s what you should do: copy out the first chapter in longhand.’ She said, ‘Are you kidding?’ I said, ‘If you do that, you’ll improve it. Anything superfluous, anything that seems boring, you’ll leave out, and you’ll improve the grammar, the perception.’ She said, ‘I could never do that.’ And I didn’t say, but I thought, ‘You will never be a writer.’ If you want to be a writer, you need to write every day. If you don’t, you’re an amateur.”
When you are among wealthy people, you will see nothing. No one’s gonna talk to you. And if you’re very comfortable, you’re not going to see anything
The young Theroux dismissed travel writing as written by bores for bores. He says now, “It seemed like it was always about the writer and not about the people. And there’s a certain way that English people in particular wrote about travel, which is to write about funny foreigners.”
Yet in 1972, living in London with a wife and two small boys, he sold a publisher on a book about travelling by train from Victoria Station to the Far East. He did it for the money. His wife was earning well, he recalled decades later, “but I still felt that I was the breadwinner and that I was not earning enough.” She was “very angry” to be left behind with the children. The four-and-a-half-month journey, he says, “destroyed my marriage”. He returned home to find himself “replaced in my wife’s affections by another man”. (However, Anne Theroux’s own memoir about the marriage breakdown notes he had already confessed to an affair the previous year.)
None of this is in the resulting 1975 book, The Great Railway Bazaar. Re-read now, it stands in the old tradition of painting foreigners as funny or worse. “Afghanistan is a nuisance,” he writes, a “barbarous country” that he jokingly urges Pakistanis to invade. Laos “seemed like a lower form of life”. Bengalis, Sri Lankans and Singaporeans are similarly dispatched.
When I suggest that his early work is acerbic, Theroux replies, acerbically: “You should sort of get it because a lot of what I’m writing is irony.” But he says he reserves that harshness for his writing. While travelling, “you can’t be rude. Some people are. Naipaul was.”
Rude as The Great Railway Bazaar sometimes is, it’s also the infectious story of one man’s escape from everyday life. It did more than just make Theroux’s career. “It set off a frenzy,” he says, “not only for travel but for writing travel books. Now there’s a glut of them. A lot are insufficient, selfish, uninterested in the culture. It’s about me, me, me, the parasitical thing.”
Theroux mocks today’s vogue for travel as performance. “‘Here’s my Instagram page. Here’s me eating a meal. Here’s me with a Maasai warrior.’ If you are a tourist, you’re not bringing anything back of value unless you embed yourself in culture and find something that you can’t find on the internet. And what would it be? It would be someone’s story.”
He says modern travellers often isolate themselves from the places they visit. If you’re getting WhatsApps from home, “you’re never wholly in a place”. Staying in luxury hotels is isolating, too: “When you are among wealthy people, you will see nothing. No one’s gonna talk to you. And if you’re very comfortable, you’re not going to see anything.”
He continues to take the road less travelled. True Northcompletes his trilogy about unglamorous bits of North America, after his Mexican odyssey On the Plain of Snakes and Deep South about the US.
Theroux was exploring Canada while Donald Trump was threatening to annex it, and though he notes an upsurge in flag-waving, he suggests that the country is too divided into “ethno-bubbles” to unite against American aggression. He observes Sikhs or Chinese who have immigrated en bloc, still living emotionally in the lands they left.
Theroux likes to quote local authors on the places he visits. He sees writers, in Doris Lessing’s phrase, as “almost like an organism, which has been evolved by society as a means of examining itself”. True North quotes the Indigenous Canadian writer Niigaan Sinclair on Trump’s threats: “Welcome to Indigenous life, Canada. You now get a taste of what it’s like to have one’s culture attacked, leadership demeaned, and economy undermined. Up next will be land invasion, resource exploitation, and the draconian systems that implement pain and suffering.”
Theroux’s conversations with countless Canadians, as he drives from coast to coast, add up to a portrait of the country. Yet I was struck by a passing admission: “It’s presumptuous for the wandering stranger to draw any serious conclusions on a short visit. Such intimacies are unknowable unless you’ve lived in the village for a long time . . . Now and then on Cape Cod I’ll have a visitor who, after a few days, will make a remark, attempting to sum up the village, and I’d think: You have absolutely no idea of what it’s like to live here.”
Doesn’t that argue for the long-term immersion of anthropologists, rather than drive-by travel writing? Theroux admires anthropologists such as the Briton Hugh Brody, who spent decades living among Indigenous Canadians. Shouldn’t Theroux, with his yearning to understand places, have been an anthropologist himself? He considers it. “One of the problems I would have found is that you have to stick to the complete truth. You can’t embroider anything. And I probably have a tendency to embroider a bit, or to favour one story over another.”
His sons have also become travelling storytellers, as writers and makers of TV documentaries. Theroux lights up when talking about them. “I can possibly take credit for setting them on a path, but not for the trailblazing they’ve done. And the great thing about children who write or make documentaries is that you’re seeing their private life, and you understand their life in a way that no other parent can. I’m eavesdropping on them.”
He’s now constantly identified as the father of. “‘Your name is Theroux, right? Any relation to Louis?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Marcel?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’ve written a few things.’ ‘Under your own name?’”
Older writers become “somewhat invisible”, he remarks. “People talk about identity, right? ‘He’s a Somali writer’, ‘a non-binary poet’. What’s the identity that’s not recognised? Old people.”
I remark that Theroux seems much nicer in conversation than the narrator of his early books. He admits to having “mellowed”. “I’m 85, I’m not an angry old man. I just feel very lucky that I still can travel alone, drive. I still feel vital. I was paddling my kayak the day before yesterday, and I’m thinking, ‘Well, I’m paddling here. No one else is paddling.’” And of course he’s working on a novel.
‘True North: On the Road in Canada’ is published on September 22 in the US and October 29 in the UK (Mariner Books/Penguin respectively)
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