Last weekend we stayed in a cottage at Madron, an ancient granite village in west Cornwall. A church has stood at Madron since 500 AD and there is a holy well nearby. More recently Madron and the surrounding landscape was commemorated in the poems of W.S. Graham (1918–86), who spent the latter half of his
Back in July I booked a cottage in its own wood for the last week of the school summer holidays. I was fondly thinking of my boy and his partner’s five kids, aged between one and nine, and what larks they would have running free in Nature. I was, I suppose, romantically casting them as
My car is at the garage so often for repairs, the mechanics invite me to their Christmas parties. This year I was also invited to the World Speedway Championship, which they go to every year. I’ve never been to speedway before, I protested, but that didn’t matter, they said. It was easy to follow and
Then she rented us a luxury apartment at Penzance in Cornwall for a week. Sightseeing was not high on our agenda. Bring cable ties, she’d said. I’ve been a naughty girl. She went down by train; I drove. I drove due west for three hours through a rainstorm of tropical intensity. My new phone’s blue
Cider was her drink. Pint of. She was a reserved, deliberate, thoughtful woman, aged about 40. She went out hardly at all these days, she said, because she was raising a toddler. On the rare occasion when she did go out, nobody seemed to be having fun any longer. It wasn’t like the old days.
I was staying on Dartmoor at an old farmstead in an overgrown meadow next to a fast-flowing river. We built a fire by the river and sat around it on kitchen chairs drinking and talking. There was no phone signal, no radio, no internet, no telly, nothing. We didn’t even have music. For two days
I was on my back on the operating table for my long-awaited minor op. Three lesions had to come off under local anaesthetic: two on my chest, one on my shoulder. A Dr Mukopadhyay wielded the scalpel. This slight, shy, otherwordly man surprised me at the outset by diffidently placing a comforting, perhaps healing, perhaps
Well, I found the Adulis restaurant and my online date was there. She didn’t muck about, and neither for once did I, and when we parted at noon the next day, I was very tired. So I was relieved to be checking in later at a spa hotel on the north Cornish coast called the
I came up and out of the underground station into the busy Brixton Road. It was 9 o’clock on a humid, overcast summer evening. As well as being a bustling place of departure and arrival, the precinct in front of the station seemed also to be a preferred place for the locals to meet and
I’m at home watching the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ ‘Man on Fire’ video on the laptop. Talk about uplifting. I’m watching with my earbuds in, and loving America, when the phone rings twice and stops. This means my boy hasn’t credit on his phone and wants me to ring him back. I stop
In her profile photo she was curtseying prettily in a floral dress. In her written profile she described herself as a ‘nice lady, with a nice and open soul, and with common sense’. Not what I was looking for at all, but she lived quite near, and, with petrol the price it is, I was
After the launch party of Harry Mount’s How England Made the English, there was a second, impromptu, diehards’ party at a flat belonging to a book reviewer called Molly. Here I fell into conversation with a publisher who, while making a lunge for our hostess, invited me to another book launch slated for the following
I was already braking before I realised that it was Tom standing by the side of the road with his thumb out. Tom loves me. He got in and leant across and wordlessly clasped me to his bosom. He’s one of those small guys whom God made small because He is a compassionate God and
At midday, what must have been more or less the entire village gathered around the steps of the village hall (1952) to raise a flute of champagne to Her Majesty, give three ragged cheers, and sing the National Anthem. Then we were herded into the adjacent parish church car park for the parish Diamond Jubilee
Our Scottish visitors, man and wife, came bearing lavish gifts: a beribboned fruit cake in a Union Jack cake tin; a bottle of Bollinger; a bottle of Bailie Nicol Jarvie old Scotch Whisky (their favourite tipple); a bottle of nubile white Burgundy; four ‘Katie Morag’ children’s books; The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, which made
After a party the night before, those who had stayed the night were staggering around among the debris in a state of shock and disbelief trying to piece together what had happened. The headline news was that someone had driven his Land-Rover through a fence and abandoned it teetering on the edge of a cliff.
Listening to the BBC news and current affairs programmes, you’d think that Britain is a socialist republic. Which is odd because my entire extended family, on both my mother’s side (smallholders) and on my father’s (urban lower-middle class), is without exception monarchist conservative. From time to time there are rumours that somebody or other has
The day after her 96th birthday, and three days before she died, my next-door neighbour told me she wanted Jimmy killed and put in her coffin with her. She knew then she hadn’t long to go. The only thing I could do for her, she said, was put fresh milk in Jimmy’s saucer, making sure
I arrived at the hilltop crematorium an hour early. The car park was empty and there wasn’t a soul about. Behind the low crematorium building the sky was black and threatening. I found the door to the gents’ lavatory to be unlocked, however, and the water in the tap above the hand basin unexpectedly hot.
About once every six months I drive to a house to pick up a box of six sealed tubs of aloe vera juice. These tubs are not, I hasten to add, for your do or die low life correspondent. No doubt I have lost enough credibility already with last week’s cake forks. If I confessed