My sister-in-law insisted I view the five headless corpses on the rug in the back bedroom. Professionally butchered, they might even have looked beautiful if your taste ran to such…
We have a lion. A real one? I’ll return to him presently. As I write, we’ve been in Fes for exactly four weeks, acclimatising to some exceptional heat. After a…
It’s some years now since we used to load up our car in Edinburgh and set off on the road to Morocco, via Hull-Zeebrugge and Algeciras-Tangier, and then on to…
The war in Ukraine pounds on without sign of let-up or solution, but as the clocks have leaped forward and the days conspicuously lengthened, I’ve been getting out of the…
My husband is bemused by our tradition of sending Christmas cards. He doesn’t see the point. Where he comes from, no-one, or no-one he knows, sends Christmas or any other…
Browsing in a branch of Waterstones out at Fort Kinnaird some weeks ago, I noticed a paperback called The Stray Cats of Homs I hadn’t come across before. The author’s…
I had difficulty deciding on a suitable topic this week. Partly because I’ve been unwell. Some three weeks ago, my partner and I rolled up at our local pharmacy for…
It was something of a shock to open up my daily Euronews link on 2 March to see an image of Mikhail Gorbachev on his 90th birthday. He’s much stouter…
I’ve been troubled in recent weeks by a new trend of government ministers being interviewed with a union jack prominently on display beside them. I imagine this is an attempt…
That’s what it feels like, as I sit here spitting pins and tearing my hair, as night falls far too early and my partner’s away attending to unfinished family business…