I think I have just come across the second person, in my long life, who has taken a course on how to make friends or how to start a conversation through small talk. The first time was back in the Nineties when I was in England visiting an anniversary celebration in Manchester: fifty years of…

I am lucky enough to live in such a small town where it isn’t considered necessary to have the street lights on throughout the night, where people are not afraid to go out at night and where there are no areas, not even next to the paper factory, where you cannot see the sky and…

I’ve had my suspicions for quite a while, but it is something almost impossible to prove unless I take a deckchair and place myself, cup of coffee in the one hand and a book in the other, directly in front of my house and watch what happens. The theory is that our small post box,…

I would love to be able to return your greetings with tales of early spring warmth, sunshine, the smell of suntan lotion and my neighbour’s grill on full steam with happy, smiling faces around his new pond and music wafting from a box in the corner. The highlight of the Easter weekend, for me at…

It is strange the way a simple sentence, even a word, can conjure up a certain image in your mind, or bring back memories you had thought long forgotten. I was quite innocently taking a look through one or two areas where I often find things of interest when I came across your comment: …if…

If I stand at a certain angle, slightly to the left but not so far that I come into the adjoining room, and look out of the terrace window, my view is framed by new lilac curtains and leads out onto a garden filled with the early creamy-white blossoms of my cherry trees, the green…

I am faced with the blank sheet of paper once more, many good intentions and a thousand ideas streaming through my mind, but the intimidation of such a vast mass of emptiness is almost overwhelming. Not for the first time, I wonder how I have ever managed to begin such a project – whether it…

One of the interesting things, I have discovered, about writing to someone half-way around the world is the time difference, and I do not mean that of the ticking clock which accompanies us throughout our lives, but that of the delivery services we can expect. It takes time for a letter to travel across the…