A Disorderly Retirement
People say that life is short, but I think they’re wrong. Maybe it’s short compared with the age of the universe (13.8 billion years old apparently), but if you’re lucky I think it’s really quite long. I know this is true because when I look back on my 1960s English childhood it seems like something…
I’ve been wondering if you can take the philosophy of make-do-and-mend too far in peacetime. I relish that way of thinking, but am concerned about turning into a parody of myself. Although I suspect this happens to everyone by the time they reach 50 anyway. People just seem to become more and more of what…
Jasper (the cat) doesn’t realise how much of a threat he is to the environment and he wouldn’t care if he did. In fact, he enjoys the best of all possible worlds: living in a comfortable, warm home with regular meals and doting owners, while following his own natural instincts without any conscience or –…
We have just spent two wonderful weeks in Andalucía in southern Spain, largely because of my ambition to visit the most beautiful and iconic Islamic architecture in the world. (The delicious food and wine was just a bonus.) Iran has fabulous treasures and even though visiting the country is looking a little uncertain at the…
I have missed travelling. I know, it’s not a human right, but then neither is sloe gin and I’d miss that too if it were banished from my life. I know that many people have satisfied their urge to travel by touring around their own countries and discovering great beauty on their doorstep, which is…
I have just read an article about the importance of fun, which, predictably, made me worry that there wasn’t enough fun in my life. So I read the article very closely to find out if I was getting my allotted quota and if not, how I should go about it. Luckily the journalist Catherine Price…
A person can have too much excitement in life. As if the dancing Knickerbocker Glory and Liquorice Allsorts from Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker weren’t enough, I then went to see Russell Brand performing his stand-up routine at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. I woke up the next morning in a state of bewilderment – what had…
I have just completed a jigsaw called High Jinks. Now, before you get any ideas, it is a very sedate picture of bookshelves full of books written in the late 19th and early 20th century about and (presumably) for English girls. I don’t think boys read books about girls then and maybe they don’t now….
No-one wants to be reminded of Christmas in January. I have to admit that this Christmas was a great deal better than last year’s, which is not a time anyone wants to be remember, but still it’s just so last year, isn’t it? I was brought up in a household where Christmas did not officially…
It turns out that a state of torpor is harder to maintain than I had imagined. I thought that a bit of semi-hibernation in January would be easy enough – squirrels seem to manage it without much problem, although how would anyone know? Maybe after a day or two those squirrels are thinking that they’ve…