The 100-year-old opiate had lost none of its potency
Our neighbour Michael is a keen and knowledgable attender of vides-greniers, the equivalent of our car-boot sales. His focus is…
My battle with an ant
At eight o’clock in the morning a nurse injected me with a radioactive marker and told me to go away…
The joy of morphine sulphate
Two football friends, brothers, Mick and Pete, came to visit last week. We’ve been going to matches together since 1969,…
My three-night retreat with the nuns
We were four round the little table in the nunnery kitchen: a 90-year-old German lady and her man; a nun…
I had underestimated France’s affection for our monarch
The end that we knew must come eventually, the end we dreaded so much that we could barely think about…
When the bone pain gets bad, my inner NCO keeps me in check
In Frederic Manning’s classic Great War novel, The Middle Parts of Fortune, the shattered battalion shambles out of the line…
The intense heat is gone and so are the grandsons
Finally rain. None for months, then a violent tropical storm lasting two days. It marked the end of high summer…
My evening as a rapacious capitalist
An isolated Provençal stone farmhouse from the outside; from the inside a comfortable English country house. Sunk into the garriguea…
How I found perfect happiness
The view from the upstairs window was of other large and secluded houses perched on other still-green Surrey Hills. I…
Don’t bring me sunshine: a week in the Surrey hills
I’m staying for a week in an 1850s house in the Surrey hills that looks-wise might have been built for…
I’ve been bitten by the TikTok bug
In theory TikTok knows nothing about me. I have posted two videos: one of my grandsons kicking a football in…
The global elite and me
Here come the global elites. They love it here. Their spiritual second home. The heat, the rosé, the food, the…
The power of prayerful washing-up
My days pass largely in a state of inanition. The fit and able-bodied express their sympathy, claiming it’s much the…
The joy of a children’s choir
All afternoon I had been horizontal next to an electric fan, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake and sometimes halfway between those…
A journey backwards through my journals
I’m looking backwards: old journals, old photographs, old notebooks. What strikes me above all is the vigour and energy I…
In praise of a solidly, wonderfully French hotel
Nothing in the beach hotel was made of plastic. It wasn’t advertised as being a plastic-free hotel, but we noticed…
The art of breaststroke
I’m house-sitting for the foreign correspondent while he attends the funeral of his beloved father-in-law Toto, the last of the…
It is time for me to ‘get right with the Lord’
‘But you look so well!’ How many times have I heard that lately. Kindly meant by most, but for a…
Why I love Her Majesty
I’ve often wondered whether Her Majesty the Queen glances through The Spectator from time to time. And if she does,…
The art of oncology
The main side effect of the six-month course of chemotherapy was ‘fatigue’. The main side effect of the three-monthly hormone…
How not to fish
After two nights at Le Grau-du-Roi (the King’s Pond) and a night spent within the medieval walls of Aigues-Mortes (Stagnant…
In the footsteps of Hemingway
‘They were living at le Grau du Roi then and the hotel was on a canal that ran from the…
How a May Day car-boot sale gave me back my optimism
So that’s it. Is a third world war possible? It’s already begun, opined a retired US general in the newspaper.…
The call of opium-based analgesics and introspection
On the morning of my last day in England, I drew back a curtain and there in the garden, browsing…
The nature of luck
I was walking across a fallow field to the pub with my two grandsons. ‘What’s this?’ said my 11-year-old Oscar,…
