A friend of a friend has been staying for a few weeks until her new house is ready to move in to. She is 50 years old, divorced, never stops talking, works with deaf people. She is as shallow as the Thames at Southend when the tide’s going out, but I quite like shallow. I’m
Deep breaths. Swap ‘Hound Dog’ Taylor for Toumanie Diabaté. Wind window down, rest bare arm on sill. Feel warm breeze on bonce. Tell self to overcome anger as only hurting self. Tell self to count blessings, live in moment. Tell self kids back at school next week, after which fewer holidaymakers, traffic less horrendous. Tell
I turned up at Trixabell’s massage studio in a lather. It was a hot morning and I’d been rushing. Sweat was trickling down the sides of my face and soaking through my shirt in the usual places. I’d better have a shower, I said. There wasn’t one, she said. Nor was she worried about a
I’d been away for three weeks and when I came back the lockers had been moved. I was directed to a space on the gym floor between the drinking fountain and the rowing machines. On the rowing machine nearest to the lockers was a woman with the face of Gina Lollobrigida and the body of
Cursing myself, I rushed out of the house in my pyjamas. I’d forgotten to put out the brown recycling bin for the fortnightly collection. I lifted the lid on next door’s bin and peeped in. Empty. I must have missed the truck by minutes. Now I was in trouble. Putting the recycling bin out on
We circumnavigated Iceland in a clockwise direction, calling on successive days at Reykjavik, Grundarfjordur, Isafjordur and Akureyri. At each of these places we disembarked and took an excursion led by a local guide. At Grundarfjordur, I took the Snaefellsnes national park coach tour. Our guide was a smartly dressed, highly educated Icelandic woman who spoke
Last weekend I returned from France on a cross-Channel ferry. The decks were crowded with young people jabbering away in French, German, Dutch, English. It occurred to me that whichever language they spoke these kids were very much alike in dress, conduct, outlook and lack of physical fitness, as though a European cultural union had
When the cabin crew capo spoke on the public address system, she expected nothing less than our undivided attention. We had to suspend our conversations ‘right now’ or ‘right at this moment’. Her accent, I think, was Sydney suburbs. But this one passenger had the sheer gall to continue reading his Daily Mail right through
I was in Ypres, about which Churchill said, ‘A more sacred place for the British race does not exist in the world.’ Thousands of members of that race were knocking about in the town. We were easy to spot among the more prosperously dressed Belgians. But not always. I said bonsoir to this bloke who
I was lolling in a deckchair with a vanilla ice cream, watching the literary types in their interesting shoes pass to and fro along the cobbled path, when, 30 yards away, across the grassy courtyard, Martin Amis appeared in a doorway and lit up. I recognised the face instantly. I watched him carefully. He must
Two buses a week leave from the bus stop at the lonely crossroads on Thursday and Saturday. I’d caught the Thursday one as the first leg of a journey up to Westminster, to attend The Spectator’s summer party. Dressed in a dark suit and party tie, and attended by a herd of heavily pregnant cows
On Saturday I went to a wedding and didn’t touch a drop of alcohol and it was fine. I enjoyed myself more, I think, than if I’d been slinging them back. On Sunday evening, pleased with myself about this, and seriously considering permanent sobriety, I went to the pub. The England v. Germany match had
The lintel across the kitchen doorway comes up to my collarbone so I need to duck as I go through. A grinning toy duckling suspended by its neck from the lintel by a piece of cotton attached to a drawing pin is there to remind me. Usually I stoop just low enough to feel his
My laptop is a year old. The granite boulder on which it rested was, according to the guidebooks, 290 million years old. The granite was coarse-grained stuff, studded with oblong crystals of quartz and feldspar, and furry with lichen. My laptop is made of shiny black plastic, usually marred by my greasy palm prints, though
No radio, no telly, no internet. No mobile-phone signal. The stone cottage I’m staying in for the summer lies at the bottom of a steep, curved valley, well beyond reach of the 21st century. The day I moved in, a slender young deer in the next field watched me trundle my possessions down the path
‘Carry-on luggage,’ said the trip organiser by email. ‘If we all take only carry-on luggage we won’t have to do any hanging about at the airport.’ I spent the evening before I left packing, unpacking, sifting, making new decisions and repacking my smallest suitcase until I was more or less satisfied I had made the
This is how it goes for flibbertigibbet morons like me. I’m at the laptop processing words and it’s not going well. I’m beginning to bore myself. With so much to see and do within reach of the tip of my middle finger, I take a break and go shopping. A click on ‘save’, another on
Opinion behind the counter in the busy, family-run Silver Grill fish and chip shop was sharply divided. The grieving Leicester City supporter who ran the place thought that Portsmouth had every chance of pulling it off. In the betting shop next door they were offering 33–1 on Pompey winning 1–0, he said, riddling the chip
‘What’s Taki like?’ is a common response to my telling someone I’m a contributor to this magazine. ‘What’s Taki like?’ is a common response to my telling someone I’m a contributor to this magazine. People seem to think we regular contributors are jolly shipmates together, living out of hammocks in the hold. The prosaic truth
My boy and I have fallen out. It happened like this. He decided to drive his newborn son, his partner and his partner’s three kids up to the Outer Hebrides, where his partner’s mother lives. The mother wanted to see the baby, and my boy and his partner were keen for her to see him.
