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…

It is not the length of time that it takes, more the fact that a letter manages to get through the system and can be delivered and then, the highlight of all things, is replied to. The hiring freeze across all federal areas is only going to make things worse, so a good deal of…

I admit, there is a massive difference between stepping into something you know and have been able to prepare yourself for, and being forced into a situation where you have no knowledge whatsoever of what will happen, how the whole system works, and how you will be received in it; which made the description in…

Firstly I must admit that I have a copy of the complete works of Michael de Montaigne permanently on my writing desk and, when lost for a few suitable words, glance in its direction to remind myself that there is always something to write about or, as Pliny the Younger admirably demanded when Fabius Justus…