Gstaad I have never experienced such a long, continuous blizzard, and I’ve been coming here for 63 years. The ski lifts are closed, as are the hotels, and it’s been coming down for a week non-stop. My Portuguese handyman Fernando now lives on his snow plough, clearing the private road that leads to the house,
Applying for a French bank account is like trying for a permit to open a Christian bookshop in North Korea. Failing twice, I thought I’d try instead for a post office account. I went for an interview armed with passport, proofs of address, pay slips, old school reports and my inside-leg measurement. But it wasn’t
The rope riders came down the driveway slowly, their horses veering this way and that, side to side, forwards a few steps, then backwards nearly as many. It took them an hour to trespass from the bridleway that crosses the top of the drive and make their slow, dangerously shaky course between the paddocks full
We all have our own ways of getting through these dark days. I might have put on a shed-load — nay, a detached-garage-with-a-two-bed-flat-upstairs-load — of weight during lockdown, but my strategy of eschewing all social Zoom calls in favour of ringing two chums a day for a natter and seeing one chum a day for
I was walking with our one-year-old cavapoochon on the way back from the baker’s in Acton on Sunday morning when I spotted a man with two greyhounds coming towards me. At least, I think they were greyhounds. They looked like they’d been injected with steroids, making their muscles grow and pop and giving their faces
Q. A dear friend of long-standing has a propensity to make friends of our friends — people she has first met in our house. She invites them to hers, some even to her principal abode nearly 650 miles distant, but doesn’t include us. Some have then invited her without us, some have even taken holidays
A year of lockdowns has certainly passed slowly. But there are topics for thought. One disappointment has been the Church of England’s failure to take its opportunity. It could have tried to position itself at the centre of national life. Even unbelievers should agree that if its Church were stronger, so would England be. What
‘Think yourself lucky,’ said my husband when I told him about poor John Stuart Mill’s mother, who had nine children by a man strongly in favour of birth control and who brought up his children ‘in the absence of love and in the presence of fear’. Parenthetically, I have only just discovered that the Mill
Each night at ten the fossoyeur powdered white with limereads the tally by the excavation.The trussed lie there hooded, tagged, after the weather the viewers sleep. The mice fear death, the unselected,for they have a pulse of finite beatsand even the rats along the foundationswhen exposed by the digger’s jawspin around each other like eels.Death’s
I am writing with a mild pain in one arm, having received my first dose of the Oxford vaccine yesterday evening. Alongside the scientists, I must also applaud whoever had the wit to call this the ‘Oxford vaccine’, rather than simply naming it after a pharmaceutical company. I’ve never been asked to advise on the
