A Disorderly Retirement
Yesterday I escaped to London. I needed a break from the seemingly endless house search. After a while it becomes compulsive and hours spent staring at a screen are no good for anyone, whatever the reason. I decided that not only did I need a change of scene I also needed a break from my…
Do I really need any more challenges in my life at the moment? Yes, seems to be the answer. One of my long-held ambitions is to improve my French. I studied French at university and was briefly a translator, but that was many years ago and what knowledge I had has receded to the distant…
I think by now I must have accumulated great stores of wisdom and that young people should be gathering around my chair clamouring to hear my piercing insights into life, my shrewd observations about… well, anything and everything. I have noticed, however, that the only gathering going on around my chair is in the form…
Well, it’s actually happening. We’re really leaving the house we’ve lived in for 30 years. So far it’s all felt a bit unreal, but now that we’re talking about moving dates, the reality has sunk in: we don’t know where we’re going. There’s not much on the market at the moment and we haven’t found…
Here we go again – I’ve been overcome by a fit of self-improvement. It’s what happens when I don’t have a trip to plan and my mind is looking for something else to occupy it. I’m on another of those endless and fruitless quests to improve my French. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy these…
I can’t believe that it’s nearly a month since I wrote my last blog. I had got into such good habits during lockdown. Back then, with oceans of time available, it was no problem finding a few hours a week in order to write a short piece based on whatever thoughts happened to be flitting…
We recently spent a few days in Buxton, Derbyshire, where we stayed in a wonderfully traditional English guesthouse and generally felt as though we’d travelled back in time. This very proper spa town has a long history of genteel people visiting to take the waters to ease their various ailments, including Mary Queen of Scots,…
I wonder if everyone is still madly doing Wordle? After conducting a brief and highly unscientific survey of half a dozen people I would guess not as much as they were. We love novelty, but only while it’s still novel and then we get bored and move on. I think the man who invented Wordle…
I have just read about a Microsoft study claiming that the average person has an attention span of 8 seconds, 1 less than a goldfish. A quick Google search revealed that the study was done in 2015, so it’s hardly breaking news and I don’t know why it’s being reported now. Perhaps our ability to…
It all started when I got lost in the woods. This is particularly embarrassing because the woods are directly across the road from our house and I have been walking in them for 30 years. Everything was fine until I decided to be adventurous and head off down a new path. On the whole, I…