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The cave house next to ours is let out to weekly renters. A green-eyed German with a ponytail came out of his cave to stand on his terrace and look for the Blood Moon at the same time as I stood 30 yards farther along the ledge to look. There was no moon to be seen and we spread our arms and opened our palms to each other in that universal expression of frustration. I knew he had green eyes because earlier I had knocked on his door and presented him with two boxes of pastries, which I had been given, but Catriona cannot eat pastries because she is allergic

Saturday morning. Quarter to 12. Sit-down fish and chips at the Silver Grill: me, Oscar and Oscar’s cousin Atticus. Atticus lives with Oscar because his life is arranged by social workers and the courts. He is a year younger than Oscar, which is to say seven, and they share a bedroom with another, older boy. This is Atticus’s first weekend with Oscar’s grandfather (me) acting as host and entertainments officer, and it could be termed an experiment. The relationship between Atticus’s little bottom and the seat of his chair suggests opposing magnetic fields. ‘And what to drink?’ said the waiter. ‘Tango or Fruit Shoot?’ Atticus chose Tango. Oscar peached that

I flew from Marseille to Gatwick, rode the Gatwick Express to Victoria, and walked down the thoroughfare of Victoria Street eating a Marks & Spencer egg and tomato sandwich. In Victoria Street, I bought a shirt, pattern of flying ducks, from the House of Fraser selected menswear sale, to replace the sweat-soaked one I was wearing. Then I cut through the passage leading to Palmer Street and dropped in for an unpremeditated haircut at the Pall Mall barbershop. The chap who cut my hair was lively and talkative. Where had I come from today? France, I said. France? He didn’t like France. He’d tried it a few times but France

At 7 p.m., panting, I knocked on the door of room 201 of the Hotel InterContinental, Marseille, expecting it to be opened by Patrick Woodroffe, the man who has splendidly lit Rolling Stones gigs for the past 33 years, who would, I believed, hand over two tickets. With any luck, and on the strength of our slender acquaintance, I hoped these tickets would be upgraded to seats a little closer to the action than the ones we had paid quite enough for. Eventually, the door was opened instead by a timid woman wearing a hijab. She blinked at the words ‘Rolling Stones’ but they meant nothing to her. We ran

I heard the last and final call for flight 6114 to Nice while shuffling forward in the unexpectedly long queue for security. My chances of catching it now looked slim. They looked slimmer still when my bag was nudged into the line of those needing to be searched, and I despaired at my rotten luck. Eventually, my bag was placed on the metal search table and I presented myself as the owner. Across the table, I faced two women, both aged about 60. One was in command, the other subordinate. The commanding one had a smoker’s face with a touch of the eldritch about it that wouldn’t have looked out

Homesick for England, family and friends, I flew back, and the next day went for a long walk with my brother. We’ve both had the same cancer, my brother and I, and we’ve both been chemically castrated. We attend the same oncology department, and we are both recovering. (In my brother’s case this is almost miraculous, given that when his cancer was first identified it was found to be spreading as rapidly as Islam in the 7th century.) And for both of us, the shock of diagnosis, and the prospect of an early death, was quickly followed by a surprising joy, which intensified during treatment, then diminished as the tumour

Last year the BBC radio drama department received 3,797 scripts from hopeful authors, of which just 33 were recommended to BBC radio drama producers. I came across this sad statistic when I was well into my first attempt to write an hour-long radio drama set in a trench during the first battle of Ypres in 1914. My chances of hearing my poor little play performed on the radio were reduced from slight to negligible when I then read that the BBC will be accepting no more drama scripts until the end of the year; and from negligible to zero when I belatedly looked into The Way to Write Radio Drama,

On Monday night I went to a party at the Crazy Horse nightclub in Paris thrown by the oligarch Vitaly Malkin. He’s written a 500-page philosophy book called Dangerous Illusions and threw the party to celebrate it’s simultaneous publication in five European countries. Essentially the book is a polemic against religion. Enjoy life while you can is the message: there ain’t no after-life. Why a Russian billionaire should go to the trouble of writing and publishing atheist polemic then invite me to the launch party, and pay for my travelling expenses and a hotel room, was mystifying, so I googled him. According to his Wikipedia profile, Vitaly Malkin is a

We were standing in the tiny hall: me, Catriona, Annette and her toy Yorkshire terrier, Ahmed. It was our first Airbnb booking and Annette was welcoming us to her humble home. She was a mature, careworn, attractive French woman with a modest disposition and she spoke pretty good English. Her husband would be coming back from his work shortly and when he did she would introduce him to us, she said. Had we found the flat easily? Not that easily, in truth. The photo had suggested a house on a residential street, but a friendly black woman carrying a bag of laundry, who candidly admitted that she didn’t know her

Six Partido de Resina (formerly Pablo Romero) bulls for Rafaelillo, Thomas Dufau and Juan Leal. The first corrida of the week-long Nîmes feria. I haven’t seen a bullfight for 15 years; Catriona never. Catriona dislikes cruelty, but was persuaded to try to understand what those who defend the Spanish bullfight actually like about it. At Nîmes, the bullfights are held in the arena of a Roman amphitheatre. We sat in the cheapest, uppermost tier on a row of cut stone blocks. From there we could see over the rim of the amphitheatre across the city rooftops to the hills beyond. You could smoke up there and we had carried our