Buenos Aires, home of sleek design and fashionable people, has a less salubrious alter ego: cartoneros, slum dwellers who travel into the city centre each evening, uncomfortably squeezed into the backs of rusty, barely roadworthy trucks. On downtown street corners, in close proximity to the wealthy upper classes and tourists parading in and out of smart restaurants, impoverished families spend the night ripping open malodorous rubbish bags, in search of cardboard and paper they hope to sell for a miserly 30 centavos (roughly nine cents) per kilogram. It’s hard to imagine salvaging anything positive -let alone aesthetically pleasing-from these disgusting heaps, but that’s just what Eloisa Cartonera, a publishing house with a social conscience, has done. Their novels and poetry collections are printed on recycled paper, purchased from the cartoneros at six times the going rate. The pages are manually photocopied and the corrugated cardboard covers designed and hand-painted by the cartoneros themselves. It’s a labour of love, with no two volumes alike. The community project’s lofty aims are multiple: to assist the cartoneros financially, help them acquire new skills, offer a possible route out of their penurious existence, and, perhaps most importantly, give them the opportunity to dispel prejudices by proving themselves as artists.

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For me, the destination is only ever a premise, a context for the real discovery. Wherever, whenever I travel with my beloved, it’s she I come to explore and better understand. A weekend away from the job, the kids, the parents, the phone, the car, the family, and the bills means a chance to monopolise each other as when we first met. An opportunity to marvel at my chosen one in new environs—to replenish the reasons we’re together and affirm myself into the bargain.

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Photographer: EMMA HARDY

It’s Monday morning at Highbury and Islington train station, north London. The Victoria line is running with severe delays due to “signal failure” and the ticket hall is overrun with people haphazardly queuing to renew their weekly travel cards. The platforms are packed six people deep and everyone is wearing their winter coats, although the temperature must be approaching 45 degrees. I quickly realise that I have more chance of seeing photographs of Rupert Murdoch wearing a tutu on the front page of the Sun newspaper than I have of squeezing on to an underground train.

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Photographer: FLORA HANITIJO

The convertible thing is relatively new to me. It’s a badge of honour in the car enthusiast world to look down on soft-tops. After all, with convertibles structural rigidity, light weight and handling finesse are sacrificed at the altar of seeing and being seen. Which perhaps more than anything speaks to the limited relevance of any of these dynamic qualities in the real world.

I think it helped that the first convertible I ever drove (perhaps five years ago) was an ancient VW cabrio belonging to my then girlfriend. It was red with a white vinyl roof, an erratic electrical system and an unshakeable smell of something like mildew mixed with a dead body. And it was hugely fun to drive. Things that in a car with a fixed roof would have been massively irritating (a radio that would play only one station, for example) simply added still more character. Somehow convertibles are able to transcend the limitations of the normal cars from which they are created, I think because each trip with the top down, no matter how mundane, is elevated by wind in the hair and a general sense of being more connected to the world outside.

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Driven from Radio City Music Hall by mediocre music and a lack of premium spirits, my friends and I saunter into Central Park. The spring evening is warm, and we’re glowing from too much Johnnie Walker. Talk gradually turns to love: specifically, being in love. Janet, the youngest in our group at 29, confesses with certainty she has never been in it. Astonished, I ask, “Is this possible? Growing up here with so much flare and culture and thousands of beautiful human specimens?”

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