Last year the BBC radio drama department received 3,797 scripts from hopeful authors, of which just 33 were recommended to BBC radio drama producers. I came across this sad statistic when I was well into my first attempt to write an hour-long radio drama set in a trench during the first battle of Ypres in
On Monday night I went to a party at the Crazy Horse nightclub in Paris thrown by the oligarch Vitaly Malkin. He’s written a 500-page philosophy book called Dangerous Illusions and threw the party to celebrate it’s simultaneous publication in five European countries. Essentially the book is a polemic against religion. Enjoy life while you
We were standing in the tiny hall: me, Catriona, Annette and her toy Yorkshire terrier, Ahmed. It was our first Airbnb booking and Annette was welcoming us to her humble home. She was a mature, careworn, attractive French woman with a modest disposition and she spoke pretty good English. Her husband would be coming back
Six Partido de Resina (formerly Pablo Romero) bulls for Rafaelillo, Thomas Dufau and Juan Leal. The first corrida of the week-long Nîmes feria. I haven’t seen a bullfight for 15 years; Catriona never. Catriona dislikes cruelty, but was persuaded to try to understand what those who defend the Spanish bullfight actually like about it. At
An 87-year-old friend, a former doctor, has been urging me for some while to have a look at the latest smart drug fad among affluent Americans, which is to go to work every day on a tiny dose of LSD. He’s an avid reader of the Scientific American and I think he must have read
Should I or shouldn’t I go and see The Death of Stalin, showing at the French village cinema last Sunday evening? To help me decide, I looked at what the compendious movie website Rotten Tomatoes had to say about it. The scores on the Tomatometer were disquieting. Ninety-six per cent of the 202 reviews by
‘Slight prick,’ she said. The nurses all say that before they slide the needle in the upstanding vein in the crook of my outstretched arm. The phrase must be in the training manual. The best nurses are professional and business-like as they prod the vein with a forefinger, then push the needle in. It’s nothing
Pig’s trotters. Lamb’s feet stuffed with their brains. Flayed wild rabbits, all sinew, muscle and eyeballs. Nude chickens with flopping heads, gaping beaks and scaly feet. A pig’s head with curling eyelashes lowered demurely. A tray of minced horse flesh. Our favourite shop window. The French, eh? Would we like the head on or off,
A week ago I plucked my eight-year-old grandson Oscar from the bosom of his rumbustious young family and took him on an orange aeroplane to Nice, and from there up into the hills of the upper Var to spend 11 days in our breeze-block shack. His second visit. On his first, last August, the temperature
A pair of anti-terrorism officers watched us check through into the boarding lounge. They stood behind the easyJet woman and took us in as we came through. One was about 30, the other about 40; both hard as nails. The younger did the Speedy Boarders; the other the common herd. What was remarkable about them,
My boy rang the other night. He said he and his wife had bought tickets to see Ed Sheeran at the O2 arena in London. ‘How much were the tickets?’ I said. They were over £400 the pair, he said, and I was about to say in a strangulated voice, ‘How much?’ Then I remembered
I go to the theatre but rarely because I am overpowered by even mediocre acting and find it exhausting. Theatre has the same effect on me, I imagine, as the Great Exhibition must have had on a Dorset peasant with a cheap-day return on the newly opened Great Western Railway. But by what strange magic
During the past three years I have spent quite a bit of time in a rented house in Provence. Volets Bleus is a rectangular breeze-block bungalow perched on the side of a hill. In front of it is a tiled south-facing terrace resting on concrete pillars. The terrace looks over the tops of the trees
The flight from Gatwick to France was cancelled and there was no prospect of another for three days. Paddington station was closed and the road to the south-west of England and home was impassable. Gatwick airport railway station was in chaos as train after train in both directions was cancelled due to snow. Then a
Earbuds in. Speed walking to Grant Lazlo’s ‘Heard It Through The Grapevine’. A corridor, a left fork, a moving walkway, a rack of free newspapers — from which I extracted an Evening Standard without stopping — and here, sooner than I’d imagined, was Gate 52. It was a quarter past five in the evening. The
Poperinghe, Bailleul, Wytschaete, Gheluvelt, Ploegsteert, Messines, Zonnebeke, Passchendaele. The other week I grandiosely claimed that I have been reading about the first world war, on and off, all my life. What I ought to have added was ‘with little or no understanding’. Because it wasn’t until a fortnight ago, when I bought a 1916 Ordnance
My hangover was what the great Kingsley Amis describes in his Everyday Drinking guide as a ‘metaphysical’ hangover. Apart from the usual feeling of being unwell, stealing over me was that ‘ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future’. Amis’s remedy was
I’m cooking almost full-time for my poor old Mum and learning on the job: shepherd’s pie, roast pork, cauliflower cheese. I’m slaving over the stove and recipe book for hours and she hardly touches any of it. ‘Come on. Eat up. Do you good,’ I say, not unconscious of the role reversal. The other day
I picked up my grandson from his mother’s flat and noticed the change in him the second I clapped eyes on him. He was taller than when I had said goodbye to him a month ago, and his spirit seemed more conscious of itself. I also noticed that my devotion to him (lately inviting criticism
At three o’clock I took half a bottle of Glenmorangie with me to Jimmy’s. That it was Burns Night, and Jimmy happens to be a proud Scot, was mere coincidence. When I walked in, Jimmy was putting finishing surgical touches to the back of a bullet-head. ‘Do you drink whisky, Jimmy?’ I said. ‘Oh aye,’
