There are no stairs or escalators to take you up to Terminal 4 from the underground Heathrow Express platform. Beyond the ticket barriers are four lifts, summoned by a single button. As lift buttons go it’s a big one, about three inches square. As I advanced, finger outstretched, I thought of the tens of thousands
For the last four years of her long life, this upstairs room and this magnificent sea view belonged to Mrs Lock. Mrs Lock never fully understood why she was living here and I’m not certain she knew who she was either. She had thick, strong legs and was prone to delightful auditory hallucinations, including pealing
Last night I watched a boxed set. Parade’s End is a small box set as box sets go, and quite old, but my snobbish vow never to watch one is broken. The lead character, Christopher Tietjens, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is an old-fashioned Tory aristocrat. His wife and almost everyone else in the film takes
I was on the back seat of a golf buggy being driven down to the marina from my beachside villa through grossly exotic tropical gardens. From the many seaside and sporting activities the resort had to offer, I had opted this morning for the ‘island adventure’. I would be whisked away by speedboat and deposited
In the Rwandan Genocide Memorial gift shop I bought a handy Kinyarwanda–Kiswahili–English phrase book. The tipping point in the decision to buy it were the phrases ‘This gentleman will pay for everything’, ‘Would you like to dance?’ and ‘What do you call this?’ Our Genocide Memorial museum tour was the sobering prelude to a cycling
‘I used to go to India for a few months every year. A couple of times we even drove there. You could in those days. One year I went to Benares. I rented a place for next to nothing and stayed about three months. Back then there were a lot of hippies in India. They’d
I just don’t understand it. Emigrating from Britain to France is a big step. Shifting from one culture to another takes courage and enterprise. Especially if you are of maturer years. But let’s assume it’s now or never and you follow through with it. You look for a house in France, buy one, go through
After the hostel breakfast, I stood on the tropical grass lawn smoking the first fag of the day and mulled things over. For the past three days I had been pedalling my electric power-assisted bike up and down Rwanda’s green hills. I was bruised from falls, physically and mentally tired, and prone, as I always
The backmarker of the peloton was Eric, a tall, stick-thin Rwandan. Under his cycling helmet he wore a baseball cap with a long peak which give the whole a fashionable Peaky Blinders look. Eric carried the peloton water supply in two rear panniers and it was also his job to ensure that nobody fell so
Our plane touched down in Rwanda at 7 p.m. Stepping outside on to the metal steps, I smelt that unmistakable peppery, earthy, decomposing smell that says you have landed in tropical Africa and that for the foreseeable future things will be different. I crossed the tarmac to the arrivals halls and, sweating already, lined up
I found the stone and the key underneath and let myself into the cottage — brr! I immediately made a fire in the wood-burning stove and put the kettle on. Could I imagine myself living here under this deep thatch, within these Babylonian walls, under these adze-scarred beams, in this 17th-century silence? This is what
‘Can I get a taxi around here?’ The man standing behind the counter of the convenience store looked at the floor and slowly shook his head. ‘What about buses?’ I said. ‘Taxis? Buses? You’re joking, aren’t you?’ said a chap standing behind me. He was wearing bedroom slippers and clutching a tin of processed carrots.
I’ve come back to the empty house for the second time in the six weeks since my mother died. The last time I came back, I felt her lingering presence: benign, modest, humorous. But this time she’s absent. Alison, who came once a week to clean, told me that my mother’s last words to her
Catriona and I had agreed that a terrace for smoking, eating, drinking and painting was a necessity rather than a luxury, blow the expense. One of the photographs of an Airbnb just above my price range showed an elegant round table with two romantic champagne flutes and an uninterrupted terrace view of a ridiculous sunset
Fumbling outside my door in dripping swimming trunks for my room key, I was hailed cheerily by the maid from a doorway further along the corridor. I hadn’t met her, but her greeting was not without a touch of familiarity, if not intimacy, I thought. The latter, I guessed, must be predicated on the fact
Mindfulness at our all-inclusive Turkish beach resort began at 11 o’clock. Our mindfulness teacher was a tiny, smiley, flexible-looking woman who was not much bigger than the wheeled amplifier she dragged in behind her on to the beachside ‘wellbeing’ platform. With her musical voice she led us in a few brief arm stretches and neck
We gathered around in the sunshine and watched the coffin being lowered into the freshly dug trench. Stratifications visible on the interior sides of the excavation showed that she was being laid to rest in shallet (compacted broken slate) and I felt sorry for whoever it was who had volunteered to dig it by hand.
So now I must find somewhere else to put my books and live sometimes. Dartmoor, I thought: one of the wildest places left in England yet just 20 minutes to Exeter St David’s station, if my car starts, and another 20 to Torbay hospital along the new bypass for appointments and treatments. What I have
The receptionist with brown lipstick showed my son and me into a faultless waiting room, whose centrepiece was a big colour photograph of out-of-focus lavender florets. A couplet written underneath said: I’m the colourful leaves when autumn comes around And the pure white snow that blankets the ground. Had we made an appointment, she asked.
These new tablets that will save or at least prolong my life have unpredictable side effects which only now, a month after starting to take them, are making themselves felt. Breasts, round and wobbling that I can cup in my palms and jiggle up and down; breasts, moreover, with painfully sensitive nipples. Fatigue: it is