A Disorderly Retirement
A few years ago I decided I needed a change. I am no great adventurer and wasn’t planning to tour the world on a motorbike, join an Indian ashram or go to live off-grid on a remote Scottish island. I just wanted to live in a different place and do different things. Sir Ranulph Fiennes…
Someone once said that Christmas is a joke played on middle-aged women. I should probably follow my mother’s lead and claim to be middle-aged right into my 70s, but, although somewhat deluded, I tend to think of myself more realistically as being in the foothills of old age. I’ll let you know when I get…
I have to come clean right from the start: I love a silly hat. In fact, I’m a big fan of dressing up in general. I know that many people who open an invitation to a costume party suddenly find that their diary is very full, but I’m not one of them. Some of my…
I do love a survey, even though I think most of them are highly suspect. I find myself reading the results of the latest survey with great interest only to realise that, rather than a scientific inquiry involving a large, varied sample of people, it was just a journalist canvassing a few of their friends…
I am doing yet another of my 30-day French challenges in my vain attempt to understand spoken French. This one’s great, though – it’s all about Christmas. Many of our traditions overlap, but it surprised me to learn that they don’t really have much in the way of Christmas films or music. Although the English-speaking…
I know that winter is not universally popular. People in frosty northern places often welcome the first snow, but after a few months of freezing temperatures, slippery sidewalks, icy windscreens and piles of dirty snowbanks at the side of the road, winter starts to lose its appeal. In southern England it’s the rain we dread….
I‘ve just come back from a week in Italy. I went to visit a Canadian friend who was spending two months there. I hadn’t seen her since before the pandemic and I love Italy, so it was a perfect opportunity to spend time with an old friend in a beautiful country. Things don’t always go…
Age is a tricky thing to get your head round. From the age of about 25 onward I’ve never quite believed that I was as old as my birth certificate. Although I have to be honest, it’s looking pretty shopworn by now. As you get older, birthdays start to take you by surprise. Not another…
I have just come back from Boston, Massachusetts, where the leaves remained stubbornly green rather than glowing in fiery shades of red, orange and yellow as they should in the autumn. Still, the sun shone and it was perfect touring weather. The first thing dedicated tourists do in Boston is to embark on the Freedom…
Right now our news is dominated by stories of schools and hospitals on the point of collapse because they were built with substandard materials. Just to cheer us all up. They’re no longer ‘fit for purpose’ and probably never were. It’s making me wonder about the people who use these buildings – are we fit…