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Fumbling outside my door in dripping swimming trunks for my room key, I was hailed cheerily by the maid from a doorway further along the corridor. I hadn’t met her, but her greeting was not without a touch of familiarity, if not intimacy, I thought. The latter, I guessed, must be predicated on the fact of her coming into my junior suite when I was out and restoring it to a holiday-brochure photograph, then arranging my tawdry collection of toiletries into little islands on the marble counter. What she made of my penis vacuum pump, I couldn’t guess. I rather think that while she could only speculate as to its

Inspired by Harry and Meghan I decided to get on a plane. I hadn’t been anywhere for so long it was becoming ridiculous, and neither had my other half. No kids, no trips, no new cars… ‘If my carbon footprint gets any lower I’m going to have to eat coal,’ the builder boyfriend said, putting things into perspective. These celebs and royals are never going to stop lecturing us about taking flights we’re not taking. And they are never going to stop taking all the flights themselves. So one is inevitably going to become bitter unless one takes action. And the action I decided to take was a late deal

Mindfulness at our all-inclusive Turkish beach resort began at 11 o’clock. Our mindfulness teacher was a tiny, smiley, flexible-looking woman who was not much bigger than the wheeled amplifier she dragged in behind her on to the beachside ‘wellbeing’ platform. With her musical voice she led us in a few brief arm stretches and neck rolls, then asked us to lie flat on our backs and think about what we were thinking about. Our intention this morning, she said, was to bring our minds back from elsewhere in time and space to the here and now and try and keep it there. This is what mindfulness is, basically, she said.

When I was growing up, my Italian grandfather was my favourite person. He taught me to play a mean game of draughts. He told me stories about his childhood in a remote mountain village in Abruzzo. I couldn’t hear often enough about how he got the deep scar across the bridge of his nose. He was standing as a little boy behind his father who had a pair of shears slung over his back and they fell and sliced his face. He told me they had to stick the adhesive strip of an envelope over the cut. My mother told him to be quiet every time he gave me the

We gathered around in the sunshine and watched the coffin being lowered into the freshly dug trench. Stratifications visible on the interior sides of the excavation showed that she was being laid to rest in shallet (compacted broken slate) and I felt sorry for whoever it was who had volunteered to dig it by hand. The 180-year-old graveyard was perhaps seven eighths full; her allotted plot was in a pleasant, even beautiful spot, far away from the cold shadow of the church, with a small, wind-bent hawthorn tree close by and panoramic view of the blue bay. I think some of those present will remember this dazzling September and our

The Union Jack is flying on the front of my house. After a long discussion with the local council, planning officials confirmed that anyone can fly the national emblem on their home, so long as they don’t use a flagpole, which requires planning permission. I was advised by an official to drape the flag from an upstairs window, so that is what the builder boyfriend has done. It looks beautiful. I do hope lots of us will out ourselves as patriots in this way — a 5ft by 3ft flag is only £4.99 on eBay, free P&P. The next four weeks is a battle for the idea of the nation

So now I must find somewhere else to put my books and live sometimes. Dartmoor, I thought: one of the wildest places left in England yet just 20 minutes to Exeter St David’s station, if my car starts, and another 20 to Torbay hospital along the new bypass for appointments and treatments. What I have in mind is a miner’s cottage with bracken growing against the granite walls and an indefatigable little stream passing close by for use when the pipes freeze. There would be no wifi, no phone signal, no BBC radio or television. Final demands would be left in a postbox at the end of the unmade track

‘If we are going to Westminster to riot,’ I told my Brexit-voting friends over dinner at the Thai restaurant at our local pub, ‘then we are going to have to work out where to park. I don’t want to get a ticket.’ We shifted our noodles around our plates and chewed our sizzling beef strips thoughtfully. Outside in the country lanes of Surrey, the dark September evening was settling down, the owls hooted, and the screaming Remoaners in their EU berets seemed very far away. ‘Maybe we won’t have to go to London,’ said one of us, a farmer. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s a good idea. We could just take