Small Beds and Large Bears

Early autumn sunlight is like an orange spacehopper bouncing round the garden. It cheers up and buffets the landscape, turning it golder and golder as the sun sets, bleaching it back to normal colours as it rises again. This morning was weighted down under a low, misty raincloud, but as it cleared up the landscape [...]

The local branch of Sue Ryder is fed up of having post-carboot leavings dropped on its doorstep when it’s closed on a Sunday. Fair enough, I suppose: it turns out they can’t use the donations and have to pay a bit over a tenner to dispose of each bag.
In this age of PR and expert [...]

By now we’re pretty much (re-)settled in the rural idyll that is west Oxfordshire. We’ve almost entirely finished cleaning the old house—a nightmare to do anything with, as the slightest act of leaning on something to give it a bit of a wipe knocks something else off—and there’s now no furniture there that has not [...]

French cuisine is fucking awful, isn’t it? Not French food so much: I know people who’ve eaten some and enjoyed it. But cuisine, the artistry and craftsmanship of cooking, is pretty much dead in France. Ignorant, thick-headed, ritualistic, closed to new innovations, and just plain bad. Like Parisian architecture and the French language under the [...]

Paris was lovely, apart from the food (more on that later.) With alternately gloriously late-summer sunny and heartlessly mid-July rainy—like the most Parisian of love affairs—and with beautiful parks and fantastic architecture, it was a city to melt the heart. The métro was a smooth and cheap experience, with trains running till well after midnight. [...]

It’s raining in Paris. Great umbrellasful of rain, refusing to soak through surfaces as though they were newly waxed, and pouring off the tarmac into the tramlines by the Cité Universitaire, thence down those metal channels as though they were the city’s storm drains. Porte d’Orléans is kept dry by its hill; it doesn’t look [...]