Author Archives: Lionel Stanbrook

Ahem   For those interested I proffer a work update. I am drafting, editing and writing, now known as “content generation”, and content in so doing. This contrasts with my situation last year, when I was averaging one job application every two days and seemed able to do little else. In all, I applied for […]

Ahem   Alli’s 50th birthday took place amid a maelstrom of memorable events and in an oasis of hot and sunny weather. After considering and eventually rejecting as unnecessary my annual offering of revitalising cream, my two really big secret surprises, nurtured for several weeks, came to fruition despite weeks of warnings from Alli that […]

Ahem We shared the final days of our holiday at La Hune with our Belgian friends Laurence, Claude and their son Corentin, which provoked another round of applied gourmandising; the need for some additional explorations around the local vineyards and domains; and another visit to the Auberge de Bardigues. We came back by separate ways, […]

Ahem There are some smells in daily rural life that can only be described as irredeemably evil. Over this neck of the woods periodically wafts an odour (or should that be ordure?) which I am sure is the authentic and original smell of organic farming.  Can one be pro-organic but reject the smell of hell […]

Ahem   Ella has landed her first job in journalism, getting selected as the music editor for the Loughborough University magazine, Label. She has to manage the editorial section, decide what to write about, which articles should go in and which should go online, as well as manage the team of music writers. In the […]

Ahem   The first weeks of the month afforded few favors to those who regard Beltane as starting the light half of the year. The maydays were gloomy, only giving way in the last ten days to a speculatively cool half-spring, and, from the final weekend, a blue-sky summer. But the month of May is […]

Ahem   There has been a revolution in our household. Since I gave Alli an Apple Ipad as a wedding anniversary present, she has scarcely been off it. She uses it to listen to BBC Radio 2, receive, check and send emails, and also now to play a scrabble-type game with random people simultaneously from around the […]

Ahem   In these partially wooded fields of this corner of the Alsace on a weekend morning, single people in cars or vans drive around repeatedly trying to find somewhere wide open and uninhabited in which to walk their dangerous dog. You can tell them apart from drivers as they park uncomfortably somewhere off-road and […]

Ahem Snow fell repeatedly on snow; frosty wind moaned; the ground was iron and the pool solid. The avant-garde Tinguely fountains in Basel’s Teaterplatz  became post-modern icicles, and the barometer on our porch did not even rise to freezing point until St Valentine’s Day and once sank to a low of minus 25 C, killing […]

Ahem We continued to have extreme weather with hurricane force gales blowing a trail of destruction across Eastern France and South West Germany, depriving us and 400,000 others from the Vosges to the Black Forest temporarily of electricity. Although the Barbara Hepworth installation in the garden, Trampoline after the Hurricane, actually survived the latest assault […]