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We drove north and parked in the designated car park with a quarter of an hour to spare before the minibus was due to pick us up and take us to our holiday destination. On it would be up to six strangers with whom we were to spend a week in the confined space of a boat. Marvellous. Happy days. There was only one slight snag. Catriona and I would be enjoying the holiday for free in exchange for my writing an article about it. And the company sponsoring us had asked me not to tell the others, who were paying a great deal of money, about this arrangement. We

An angry villager accosted me outside my house as I came through my front door. ‘You’re wrong about those horses,’ she called. By which she meant the 123 horses taken from a farm down the road by the RSPCA. ‘They were never fed!’ she shouted at me. ‘They were starved! We have been trying to help them for years!’ I sighed. ‘Just a moment, please,’ I said, putting my handbag in the car. I walked over to where she was standing. ‘Look, those horses were all fat if anything. I’ve got leaked photos of each one of them taken by vets in RSPCA custody days after seizure. They look perfectly

In the Easter holidays, plus two school days, for which his mother will be fined or, as a serial offender, she will be summoned to appear in court (not that she’s bothered, bless her), I took grandson Oscar to Provence for a week. The flights cost us nothing because a neighbour passed on his air miles to us, plus an upgrade to Club Europe, which is business class. Grandad was excited about the upgrade because it would enable Oscar to see how the other half lived, and perhaps make his own judgment about whether a slightly wider seat on a plane was worth trying harder at school for. The night

With very little expectation they would care, I sent an email to Mole Valley Conservatives. It always amuses me, that name. It reminds me that in Ever Decreasing Circles the character played by Richard Briers worked at Mole Valley Valves. Martin Bryce, you may remember, was a narcissistic, obsessive, middle-aged man at the centre of a suburban community in Surrey. He was a relatively unsympathetic character, although Briers said it was his favourite sitcom role. I suppose I have much in common with the miserable Bryce. Bitterly, I sent an email to Mole Valley Conservatives. ‘To whom it may concern: We didn’t leave the EU but I can leave You.

We have a gardener, Philippe, who comes once a week. He lives in a ruin a little way down the cliff, which he is carefully and sensitively restoring using traditional materials and techniques. Philippe is in his late twenties, single, tall, slender, beautiful, hard-working, ambitious, educated, courtly, gentle, speaks good English and has a ponytail and a plaid leather bracelet on his tawny wrist. Catriona thinks he’s an oracle, as well as beautiful, and goes to him for advice on practical matters of every sort, as if she thinks that if we were all dominos I’d be a double blank and Philippe an ivory-backed double six. He stepped in for

After all that waiting and arguing, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed leaving the EU. The builder boyfriend and I celebrated by popping the cork on a bottle of Denbies bubbly and flying his old yacht’s backstay union flag in the dining room window, which saves me buying curtains. The builder b drank the Dorking bubbly. I’m teetotal so I stick to fizzy water. I don’t anticipate any problems getting Perrier or San Pellegrino in the coming months but there’s always Highland Spring. Of course, if Scotland gets antsy and imposes a blockade, I will have to invest in a carbonation machine. It’s a small price to pay for freedom.

I’ve swapped my carer’s tray in Devon for a barrow and spade halfway up a cliff in the south of France. Right next door to the modernised, carpeted cave in which we live is a concealed cavern, home for hundreds of years to troglodytes (the ceiling is black with soot from their fires) and their domestic animals. The floor is feet-deep in accumulated manure and debris that has turned over the years to a fine black dust. I’ve dug down to rock and now I’m working forward towards the door with three electric fans at my back directing the rising dust out of the cavern entrance in a stream of

‘This clean sock regime is really annoying,’ said the builder boyfriend, as he rummaged through his newly inaugurated top drawer. I had toyed with the idea of giving him two small drawers as I did last time he graced my domestic arrangements with his presence. But this time I gave him the entire chest: that’s four drawers in total. That’s a lot of commitment on my part and a fair amount on his, too. It scared him, understandably. ‘You’ll be wanting rent next,’ he said, grinning sardonically. ‘Aren’t you pleased, having all your clothes so nicely arranged?’ I had put everything away for him while he was at work and