Society

There’s a young girl at our gym who has recently burst into flower. She’s so extraordinarily beautiful she’s like a sport. Here’s one, you think, that even Nature herself is slightly surprised at. I can’t bear to look at her, either directly or obliquely in the mirror. If she enters my line of vision, I look away or down at the floor. Now that I’m a 50-year-old bloke, young feminine beauty of that magnitude, being as it is now unattainable in my case, not to mention highly illegal, makes me feel slightly sick at heart. I sometimes wonder if she’s ever thought about the ugly old git over there on

So, one more winter season is kaput, the best snow conditions in 50 years gone the way of all things. Like the song says, referring to a girl, every time I say goodbye to the Alps, or to the Med six months later, I die a little. Mind you, the sea is feminine, especially in her rages, but the mountains are as masculine as they come, majestic, dangerous and permanent. This has been the Madoff season, and I didn’t make any new friends by naming names and expressing certain opinions about them. How strange people are. They take innocents down the Swanee and then howl that they’re being hard done

East Ilsley is the ideal English village, with a pub, a church and a village duckpond, where moorhens pick their spinsterly way across the mud fringes. Blackbirds trill a welcome from the mellow brick walls. Round the corner, past the allotments is Summerdown Stables, where a feisty two-year-old colt is banging hell out of the horsewalker as a second lot prepares for exercise and grooms empty mucking-out buckets into a trailer. The tidy yard with its brick arch and traditional stable clock is particularly friendly. There wasn’t a mucker-out or work rider from Ukraine or Swindon, Poland or Pakistan who didn’t offer a smile and a cheery good morning as