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I’m off to South Italy for a few months having recently sold my late mother’s house and, if I can find a nice immigration lawyer, perhaps longer. This means my home is now full of cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, marker pens and panic. It’s a feeling I’m perfectly familiar with, having changed my living space (and country) more times in life than I care to count. The boxes won’t be going with me abroad. Instead, I’ll be renting local accommodation for my worldly goods: a storage space. Such austerity’s strictly for saints or lunatics, and most of us don’t make the grade as either The buildings that house storage spaces

For the first time in its 1,250 year history, Japan’s Naked Man Festival is to admit women to its sacred rites and rituals – well, one sacred ritual anyway. Later this month, a cohort of 40 women, clothed, will be allowed to participate in the naoizasa ritual where they will carry bamboo grass wrapped in cloth into the local shrine. While hardly a stunning breakthrough for women’s liberation, the decision is nonetheless revealing. Sanitising rather bizarre local events is unlikely to make much difference It is less a reflection of changing opinions than shifting demographics, with Japan’s vast underpopulated rural areas having to be more flexible with their ancient customs

Holed up with Covid recently, I decided to binge on some undemanding TV and selected property programmes, knowing that the genre satisfied some basic human instincts – nosiness about other people’s lives, other people’s taste, other people’s money and other people’s dreams. I was happy with my choice – confident that property programmes were the chicken soup of television, gently nourishing me back into health. There really is something for every aspect of the human psyche in them – curiosity, aspiration, humour, voyeurism, escapism Apparently, there’s a whole world of people who appreciate these shows. Jonnie Irwin, the presenter of A Place in the Sun and Escape to the Country

The look on the doctor’s face as he showed my parents the X-ray of my skull was quizzical but reassuring. ‘We were a bit worried by this line on the left,’ he indicated a very thin line from the top of the cranium, straight down. ‘But we saw that there is a line exactly similar on the other side of the X-ray, which persuaded us that it was a problem with the film, not your son’s skull’. The violent element in rugby has always been controversial. That is one of the reasons football came about We were free to leave, with advice to watch out if I felt sleepy or

We have in our kitchen a mug purporting to belong to ‘Romney Marsh Mountain Rescue’. There is, of course, no such organisation – the mug is a reference to a long-standing family joke, about how my brothers and I love mountaineering despite having grown up in one of the lowest, flattest parts of England. The Marsh has a handful of small hillocks – really just bumps with delusions of grandeur – but overall it is very flat. My Ordnance Survey map does not mark a single contour line from Rye in the south west to Hythe in the north east and from the Royal Military Canal to the Channel. Winter

It was standing completely still, about 40 yards away, partially obscured by a clump of hazel: a pure white deer. It looked almost iridescent in the gloom of an overcast winter day. My dogs were straining at the lead but otherwise all sense of movement ceased for half a minute, maybe longer. I managed to decapitate it with a twist and fastened the head and horns to my car roof with bungee cords Then something broke. The white deer twitched. It was only when it began to run that we realised it had been accompanied by half a dozen other, darker-skinned herdmates. In just a few seconds we were alone again. The