I'm Lesley, a freelance travel & leisure journalist. Until recently I was based in stunning South Africa,  but after a major rethink about the future prompted by the Covid lockdown, I've reinvented myself as an English teacher for adults and moved to Santiago in Chile! I'm absolutely loving it, and you can read why in my Chilean travel articles!
Here you'll also find some of my quirky, warped and opinionated ideas on life, love, cheesecake and everything else crucial for survival. If you want to follow me on Instagram, I'm on @lesley_stones
Have fun, and travel safely.

Cine Shorts

Nuremberg: A must-see powerful psychological drama about the groundbreaking Nuremberg Nazi trials. Russell Crowe is belligerent yet charming as Hermann Goring  and Rami Malek falls apart nicely as the pyschiatrist charged with analysing the Nazi evil. Real footage from the concentration camps will shock you, even if you already know the horrors. *****

Reminders of Him: Sappy, predictable romantic fluff about a woman desperate to see the baby that was torn away from her at birth in jail as she served time for the accidental death of her boyfriend. I could spoil the plot by telling you that it all works out beautifully, but you already knew that. ***

Train Dreams: A slow, thoughtful and beautifully filmed story of the old logging workers in the US. Joel Edgerton is wonderful as the grizzled loner who finds - and then loses - the transformative power of love ****

Hamnet: Disappointingly dreary drama about the imaginary background that may have provoked Shakespeare to write his tragedy Hamlet. The final 20 minutes are captivating, the rest is a long slog through domestic life. **

Marty Supreme: An over-long mish-mash of a story with too much happening, yet strangely not enough. Timothee Chalamet as an ambitious world-class ping-pong player gets almost 100% screen time, but since his character is deliberately unlikeable, the endurance test is even worse. **