Just after Christmas, my wife and I went for a week to our cottage in Brittany. Our key aim was to begin to prepare the garden for 2017. As usual, we stopped over for a day in Paris. There, the streets had the same tell-tale trappings as at this time every year. Dumped on the…
The talented Mr Ripley
Eating arrangements, like much else in my childhood, were very controlled not to say regimented, therefore delicious Sunday roasts and, for a short period, grilled sausages, were a welcome relief. Sunday lunch and the atmosphere were dominated by the main course, which might be roast chicken with bread sauce, a shoulder of pork with crackling and apple…
The seven year itch
It started with a shriek. A shriek that became an itch, an itch that gave me the germ of an idea that became the Greyhares blog. The shriek came from the direction of the shower one morning in late October 2009. My wife had noticed that Pears soap, a soap we’d both been using since…
Bohemian Reverie
It happened on last Saturday’s supper visit to my old friend Wilfred. He had prepared, as he always does, some superb roast chicken, backed by plenty of red wine and followed up this time by a digestif that he called Génépy and claimed to have brought back from the Alps, though I suspect he had…
A tale of monarchs reborn
Diana and Yvonne had been friends since university. They meet once a year to catch up, but last week their meeting was different. Diana had just come back from a brief stay in Moscow where her life had been turned upside down. She went there to be immersed in the language and, in passing, to…
The Great Penderbell Burglary
For all of his seventy-seven years, my Great Uncle James Penderbell suffered from cold feet. Every winter, and almost every night, his toes became an icy Arctic blue, and they burned, itched and stung. His brothers might scoff that James was stiff at both ends and could only expect to have one bright idea every…
It’s not you, it’s me
This is by way of being an apology. Etiquette dictates that those intending to dump their girlfriends or boyfriends should seem to apologise by employing the simple formula, “It’s not you, it’s me.” Passing a few hours online the other day, I happened across a rather attractive T-shirt for sale which bore the message,…
Air Mail
Expect nothing, you said and nothing is what arrived this morning in the first post. Nothing. Enclosed in a box ten inches by ten by ten all wrapped up in used brown paper and salvaged string. Expect nothing, you said Not a penny if you marry that spender of misfortunes that good for nothing,…