There was a hint of musical chairs about my train journey home last Monday. It started when a young woman plugged into her mobile sat down beside me. It was impossible to escape from her chatter so after a few moments I upped and moved down the carriage. There I found a space with no…
Hand me downs
Peter was a quiet-spoken man with a beguiling laugh. He was also the ‘father’ figure of the local allotment where his fruit and vegetables, neat paths and absence of weeds made him the envy of us all. Around twenty years ago he had retired from his work as an architect specialising in the restoration of…
My personal best?
Neil Taylor wouldn't lose sleep over being on the scrapheap My oldest son, has just completed his first Ironman triathlon, which is the small matter of swimming 2.4 miles followed immediately by cycling 112 miles followed immediately by running a marathon. The world record for covering these 140.6 miles in this manner is 7 hours…
Friends in high places
Luck was on our side when we bought our Paris flat. By chance on our doorstep were quality shops and restaurants, plentiful public transport above and below ground, and a traditional newspaper kiosk. But there were drawbacks too, particularly at street level. First, the pavements were often so narrow that when it rained, passing with…
As I say in my book..
Vivien Perkins gets her book reviews out in time for the Christmas rush Walk into any bookshop or WHSmith from now to Christmas and you’ll be welcomed by smiles – they belong to authors whose photos appear on the covers of the new crop of Autobiography and Memoir. At the moment they face the public…
The only way is Sussex
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.…