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…
As with all legends, myths endure. Sir Sean Connery, who died last week, inspired a few. My own favourite dates from a time when the man from Edinburgh was at…
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…
The coming years will be difficult for those of us who keep our love for America close to the centre. Maybe it would be best if we took our feelings…
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…
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…
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…
Still here in Fes, Morocco. Forty-four degrees today, Sunday. Going outside is like entering an oven. We long for a welcome breeze flowing through our flat, as back in Edinburgh…
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…
Last Saturday afternoon, I persuaded my husband to come with me to see the film version of Where the Crawdads Sing at the Everyman cinema on the fifth floor of…