There was a short detour to be made before booking into our restaurant-cum-hotel on the edge of Lochinver. Our aim was to pick chanterelles. In Scotland they are at their best in late summer and one September we had stumbled across a carpet of them growing in their favoured Eeyore environment - a damp mossy…
Goodbye to all that
I should, of course, have known better than to go back there at all. But I am not particularly prone to nostalgia; I appreciated that the place where I once grew up was, even in those days, in need of change, and I was curious. So it was that I did go back, just a…
The West Lothian Bus Question
Joe Collier asks the West Lothian bus question: "Got any change?" It was late one Saturday evening and we were in an unfamiliar suburb of Edinburgh. At that time buses are rare. The next was due in around two minutes and had we missed it we would have had to wait for almost an hour.…
Don’t mention the …
When cycling near my cottage in Brittany my mind often conjures up images of German soldiers. In the Second World War there were many thousands stationed thereabouts. I see them in their ones and twos strutting along roads and across fields in their 1940s uniforms. No doubt these persistent images would have been seeded in…
In a manner of speaking
The minute I hear a voice on the phone I try to guess who is speaking. For close friends, just the briefest of sounds will be enough - so just the 'hell' of 'hello' - and getting it right gives me a real buzz. It is an odd pastime but in my case one born…
Après le déluge, moi
Our dinner together that Thursday was special. Not only was it my wife's birthday, albeit celebrated two days late, but we both had lived to share the occasion. Her actual birthday had been lost during a hectic and horrible 24 hours earlier in the week. We were still on our holiday in France. At around…
Singing for Dr Zamenhof
It was the spring of 1944; one could discern the season as one glimpsed the young leaves hesitantly peeping out from the trees that lined the tramway along the Bristol Road. Beyond that, Birmingham remained its proud but grimy old self, much as Victorian industry had left it, licking its wounds now from the Blitz…
This orderly life
Some people are neat and tidy. So when my wife asks if I could bring her a blouse or some socks or whatever from her wardrobe, I know that I am about to be shamed. Everything on the shelves or in the drawers is laid out carefully, folded neatly and arranged logically. And the same…