Category Archives: 2013

Ahem The morning wreaths of mist could not conceal the huge weather variations throughout the month, with sunny, ice blue skies as well as persistent rain over Christmas and frequent fogs. The snow could just be seen crouching half-hidden on the higher hills but mostly it left us alone. Alli and I went to an […]

Ahem November is the most useful month of the year. It gets used a lot. For example, as a considered pause before the rush of Christmas. November is an excellent month for contemplation and reflection, the calm before the storm. Even the weather, grey, white and black, is silent and somehow expectant, although peaceable. The […]

Ahem Marrakech is very bamboozling. The local compass somehow swings around every few minutes, with the effect that clever people with impeccable orienteering credentials, for example, I (Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, Bronze medal, 1972) got completely lost within ten minutes of sallying forth from our snug bolt-hole for the first time. But the magnetic center […]

Ahem One of the many drawbacks of living in a house full of women (where even the dogs are bitches and the chickens are hens) is that a bad haircut cannot easily be downplayed. I have endured the past three weeks with an unlucky haircut that left me a dead-ringer for a bilious Greek cruiser […]

Ahem The intensity of our 2013 holiday continued to streak across the summer like the shooting stars that exploded like fireworks across the night sky in the exceptional Perseid shower. Belgian visitors Claude, Laurence and Sophie came for a few days of gourmandise. We had a visit from Charlie and Liz of Barnsley on their […]

Ahem I can announce that I have crossed two major items off my imaginary personal bucket list. I heard Eileen Rose and the Holy Wreck play “Jolene” against the mountains above Sion and I led the communal singing in a French country bar karaoke session to Plastic Bertrand’s classic “Ca plane pour moi”. But before all that, […]

Ahem Some disenchanted summer has pitched up with light blue skies, greyish clouds, hawks spiralling the Wolfsloch field, and a white-skinned sun, allowing the false Spring to stalk off in varicose disgruntlement: puffing, wheezing, late. I swam for the first time this year on 13th June in the 16° pool, lovingly prepared by Alli, and just before […]

Ahem The month was kicked off in merry style at 6am in damp and swirling mists by the Ferrette Morris dancers at the Landskron Castle. Symbol of Leymen, the castle, built at the end of the thirteenth century, is the recognized skyline and logo of the village. Although the very top of the square tower of […]

Ahem Comrades, I have made a striking yet politically disappointing discovery. Our cousins the hens, known amongst themselves as “chooks”, are coop racists and colour-prejudiced in beak and claw. Whether this affliction is institutional or genetic I do not know. Certainly the management has done nothing to encourage this revival of brutish and ugly recidivism […]

Ahem I travelled to England for the weekend to see my earliest extant friend Charlie, who is now a teacher and part time taxi driver in Barnsley. Our friendship began at the Dragon School in 1965, both of us horribly homesick in that year as eight-year old boarders in a small 5-bedroom dormitory on the […]