Have you given up seeking reasons to be cheerful? Understandable. Nine months after the first lockdown, coronavirus infection rates are higher than ever. There are over 32,000 people with Covid-19 in UK hospitals. More than 83,000 have died. There have been over three million cases. But now there is hope. More than two million people,…
I am so looking forward to the Queen's Christmas address to the nation this year. "In difficult times such as these it is such a comfort to have one's family around one..." Leaving aside that Harry and Meghan have run away to California (which looks a better plan with each passing day), it's no longer…
My parents have lived in the same home since 1961: the newly-built semi in Upton we moved into when we returned from Indonesia (cost: £2,800). So, as previously mentioned, when I visit them I stay in the same room I slept in from the age of six to 18. Unless you belong to the landed…
Having lived in Wirral and Oxford until I was 22, I'd but rarely travelled on the Tube until I started working in Upminster. Even then, I travelled mostly by bus or I walked. It took me a while to work out where the lines were connected, how to avoid the interchanges with the longest walks,…
Of course there are more than a few. Ely, for example, which was an island back in the time of Hereward the Wake. Or the Isle of Dogs, more prosaically. But here I am referring to the gorgeous Isle of Purbeck. On the Bramble Bush Bay from Sandbanks to Shell Bay It does feel like…
A long gap between posts indicates nothing more sinister than me having better things to do. This blog is going to have more than a touch of "what we did on our holidays" about it. I fear it will only foment jealousy and resentment. Travelling back from Médoc via Mareuil-sur-Belle *** We are back in…
“And have there been any cases of Covid in La Bréchoire?” we asked. “Yes, one lady, ‘Madame X’, sadly passed away in a care home in Rouillac. Mind you, she was 102.” As I write, France has recorded well over 200,000 cases of Covid-19, with 2,500 or more new cases every 24 hours: the highest…
Here's a middle-class, 21st-century question. Where do you get your olive oil from? I am more than old enough to remember when the answer was almost invariably "Boot's". Olive oil in tiny Crosse & Blackwell bottles were sold in pharmacies for unblocking your ears. That was the only place I encountered olive oil until I…
It's really not something I like to do. Everything I've ever been or done revolts against the idea. It is like throwing away food: it's just plain wrong (and another thing I almost never do). But we have far too many, and at 65 I have come to recognise that most will never be read…
We finally made our way out of London on Bank Holiday Monday (how can you tell during a lockdown?) and drove south for an hour or so into Kent past Churchill's house, Chartwell. It was the first time either of us had ventured more than four miles from home for 10 weeks. It felt odd…
