Catriona Olding

My youngest daughter and her husband moved to New York last October. Three days after they arrived, she tripped on a step and broke her ankle. ‘So annoying, I was wearing such a good outfit, Mumma.’ They didn’t know anyone. In a boot and on crutches she tackled umpteen flights of stairs in search of

Provence Molly MacCarthy launched the Bloomsbury Memoir Club in the spring of 1920 with two aims. The first was to bring together the old Bloomsbury set who’d been dissipated by the first world war and the second was to encourage her dilatory husband, Desmond, to write his memoir. She was successful in the first but

My eldest daughter and her family are moving from a three-bedroom Art Deco semi with a garden and garage on the edge of a housing scheme to a top-floor tenement flat in a trendy family orientated area of Glasgow. They’re having to increase their mortgage to do so but think that the benefits to their

What hope is there for artists following the sale recently of the robot Ai-Da’s portrait of Alan Turing, entitled ‘A.I. God’, for a cool $1 million? Someone has perhaps paid over the odds for a 3D print with a few marks added by a robotic arm and a few more by studio assistants to areas of

Provence One of my daughters and a few pals, thinking I need company, have been urging me to get Bumble, the online dating app where women make the first move. I’ve thought in the past month or so that I might like some sort of relationship, but contemplating the reality is scary. When someone you

Provence My older, adopted sister came to stay. She suffers from peripheral neuropathy secondary to diabetes and is registered disabled. It’s a worry watching her negotiate the cliff path and the 12 stone steps to the front door with her stick, but she adores it here. Since reversing her insulin-dependent diabetes with an extreme fasting

Wes Streeting informed backbenchers this week that he is voting against the assisted dying Bill on 29 November, saying that ‘end-of-life care is not good enough for patients to make an informed choice.’  Experience of an issue, and I have too much on this one, can both cloud and inform opinion. I’m glad I don’t

Provence A few days before my middle daughter’s Oxfordshire wedding this summer, my youngest announced that she and her fiancé, who’ve been together for years, were getting married within weeks. They’re moving abroad and bringing their wedding forward would help, she said. Two daughters married in less than a month. Mrs Bennet would be proud

Provence My eldest daughter’s husband is from Como. In the early 2000s George Clooney caused a stir in the town when he bought a villa on the lakeside nearby, triggering what’s become known as the Clooney effect – a rise in house prices and the number of ‘bougie’ shops and restaurants catering for an increasing

Provence Summer has arrived. The evenings are warm enough to sit out on the balcony terrace and watch the lights come on in the village below. Each night at ten, the great limestone cliff, into which my little house was built, is floodlit for a couple of hours. On cue two huge baby eagle owls