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I’ve lived in Brighton and Hove since 1981. I’ve been surrounded by seagulls for most of my life, but somehow I’ve never really got used to them. There’s something unsettlingly prehistoric about those gnarled beaks and oversized, reptilian feet. While the feet can occasionally lend them a pleasingly comic aspect, the sheer size of the seagull makes its feelings impossible to take lightly. Their cries, so evocative from a safe distance, sound incredibly ugly at close quarters; I once lived near a nest, and it was like being trapped in an early Yoko Ono album. Granted, the place wouldn’t be the same without them – Brighton’s seagulls are its oldest and most

To finish or not to finish? The dilemma of whether to give up on books we aren’t enjoying or plough on to the end lasts a lifetime, but as we grow older it gets easier. We not only have less time, but also the increased confidence to decide that if a great novel isn’t engaging us, it’s possibly the book’s fault. What does it really matter if Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain defeats us, or Finnegan’s Wake sends us to sleep? We’ve survived much worse than that.  But in youth, such things torment you, and the more highly regarded the novel, the greater your shame in abandoning it. You still labour under the fallacy

The elegant, serpentine word ‘lesbian’ had a place in the sun only briefly. In the first real novel about lesbianism, 1928’s The Well Of Loneliness, the protagonists are gloomily and somewhat puzzlingly called ‘inverts’, conjuring up an image of some sad Sapphic wondering why she was condemned to spend her life upside-down. Amazingly, Christopher Hawtree, writing in the Telegraph in 2008, noted that the word ‘lesbian’ did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1976: During the four decades it took to create the 12-volume Oxford English Dictionary, completed in 1928, Lesbian appeared only in reference to the island. During preparations for its 1933 Supplement, one lexicographer averred: “Lesbianism is

It’s a painful process many of us must go through: culling a big book collection, amassed over a lifetime, before moving home. You know it makes sense, as you’ve struggled to house all your books – thousands of them – and they include quite a few you frankly wouldn’t miss. This chore awaits me at some point in the near future, but I do know that my 20-volume Encyclopedia Americana and its sister publication, the 20-volume children’s encyclopaedia called The Book of Knowledge, will be coming with me. Everything about its concept and design was aimed at fostering curiosity They were published by The Grolier Society of New York in 1957. They take up

It’s 7.54 a.m. and we are waiting for the doors of the Intermarché St Remy de Provence to open. A vast sense of excitement is building within our group that spans the ages of nine months to 68 years. My mother wants espadrilles, my husband wants wine, my brother-in-law wants cheese, the children want toys, et moi? Just the experience, the delicious joy of the French supermarché. And possibly some soap. I was even asked to show the bottom of my baby’s buggy to the cashier to check that we hadn’t stolen anything As the hour draws closer, we keep saying how civilised it all is: the plane trees that

My wife and I have only ever dated by accident. After our third date a decade ago (well, what I thought was our third date) that she texted me asking, ‘So was that just dinner and theatre, or was it “dinner and theatre?”’ To this day, she insists that she had no idea what was going on (despite my sudden interest in her after two years of just being acquaintances, the Skype calls, the hand-painted postcards… actually, I’d better not start). A few years later, early on in our marriage, when we were still childless, young professional Londoners, we thought we’d wildly treat ourselves to dinner out on a Thursday.