A Disorderly Retirement
This week another illusion was shattered. It’s surprising I have any left. I have long been a fan of Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics podcast, but it has taken quite a grim turn in recent weeks with its in-depth reports on the opioid crisis and I’ve been giving it a miss. However, last week’s interview with Tom…
I have started to wonder lately about my tendency to hang random things on walls. Things that really shouldn’t be there and, if I were of sounder mind, probably wouldn’t be. It all started with a beautiful old mahogany wardrobe that we were forced to buy many years ago when we moved to England from…
I am always quite fascinated by those people who lurk in the corners of museums. I’m not talking about unsavoury characters, but the room attendants, the ones who stand there quietly and make sure that no one chucks red paint at artworks or glues themselves to the exhibits. Personally, I’d leave those gluers attached –…
It’s not something I thought about until I went to Louisiana. You don’t encounter alligator much in Britain, on or off a menu. Pescatarians eat fish and seafood, but what about cold-blooded creatures that live in the sea, like serpents and snakes? Insects and frogs are both cold-blooded, so can I eat them? I think…
Newspapers are so depressing I don’t know why we have one delivered every day. I flip through the actual news pages, reading a headline here and a paragraph there until I land with relief on the so-called lifestyle pages. Those articles I read with great interest. You know, the ones that tell you how to…
I am entangled in a destructive relationship and I need to get out. Something called the Oddbox is trying to take over my life. For those of you fortunate enough never to have encountered this manipulative little item, it is a weekly delivery of fruit and veg that are so unusual or misshapen that no-one…
What do you do if you wake up in the morning to see the rain lashing against the windows and the clouds scudding across the sky? My advice would be not to go out for a walk in the countryside. Now, admittedly, we’ve had such a wet and windy winter that it can be hard…
I do occasionally wonder why someone who leads such a safe and risk-free life feels the need to go overboard on holiday. I am not a daring person. I always take a cardigan with me in case it turns chilly and look three times before I cross the road. I don’t lead protest marches or…
I have been thinking about uniforms lately. Mainly because I’ve been looking for a winter coat that isn’t a quilted puffer jacket and they are surprisingly hard to find. Everyone appears to be wearing one of those jackets, usually in a discreet shade of dark blue or black. It would seem that although adults are…
I didn’t give Shakespeare’s famous Seven Ages of Man much thought until I turned 60 and then I started to wonder where I belonged. It’s tricky for a woman anyway because it really is all about men, which shows that when people insist that the term “man” refers to people in general they aren’t telling…