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The Pursuit of Love and Other Interests!
When I was twenty and longing to fall in love, I came across a book that seemed made for me. It was called The Pursuit of Love. But far from being chick-lit (a term which hadn’t been invented...
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Blogging and Eating !
I’ve put on weight since I started blogging. There aren’t enough hours in the day, so that instead of going for a walk I catch up on reading blogs – for as we all know – writing a blog is the quickest...
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The challenge of meditation
When a Korean soldier went berserk many years ago, and shot sixteen of his mates, his excuse was that they’d been making a noise when he was meditating. My children roared with laughter when they read...
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Goodness, peace and bloggers
Last night I read a novel by a distinguished prizewinning writer. I polished it off in a few hours, turned over and went to sleep. This morning I awoke thinking how depressing it was… not one man or...
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Is less really more – or less?
To keep or not to keep – that is the question. I look around my tiny kitchen and think I should de-clutter, simplify, get rid of all the surplus stuff overflowing on shelves and in cupboards. No good...
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Voices from the Void
My accident was a fascinating experience – in retrospect! I was driving happily down the main highway to the village crossroads in my little silver car about ten years ago, when a large, heavy old car...
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Art and soul – do they matter?
On Sunday I discovered that I am a member of a tiny minority. I belong to a group of around three million people world- wide who watch the live performances of opera filmed from the New York...
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Zen and the Art of House Maintenance
I think house maintenance has a better ring to it than boring old housework… this way, instead of being a housewife I could even be called a house maintenance executive, or a house maintenance CEO....
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The upsides and the downsides of being a woman
Something made me re-read a book for girls which my Victorian grandmother had pressed on me when I was seven. It was about a girl who’d lost her mother, and whose military father was absent. It...
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The good enough life
Back in the last century, a psychologist called Dr Winnicott coined the comforting phrase ‘A good – enough mother’ …. I looked back at yesterday, and thought, yes, I suppose it was a good enough...
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The Tragic and Hilarious Life of a Blogger !
Laughter and tears are not very far apart was the subject of an essay I once had to write at school. This is somewhat how I feel as I go once more into Spam, to clean out yet another of the daily two...
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Seize the day!
Today was not one of those days, but One of Those Days. Yesterday, as I watched the tiny, greenery- yallery birds we call silver- eyes in the trees, hunting for insects and the like, I thought how I...
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Rise up children and be free
How to make yourself very, very unpopular! Years ago I discovered that in the tug of war between the rights of women and the needs of children it can be dangerous to take sides. I gave up writing...
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Many lives or just one?
“To live is by universal consent to travel a rough road. And how can a rough road that leads nowhere be worth travelling? “ A well known philosopher, MacNeille Dixon, asked this question in a series...
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Food, fear and films
Village life takes ingenuity in a tight spot, and stamina – plenty of it! These are the times that test men’s souls! Well, we haven’t actually had any chicken stealing like Mr Woodhouse in ‘Emma’,...
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Testing, testing, testing !
When Dr Christian Barnard, world-famous surgeon who invented the first heart transplant, decided to sue me for libel I was both intimidated and exhilarated. It wasn’t an easy time for us at that point…...
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The longest journey
I’m sitting by the wood fire with the rain falling steadily outside onto the green garden. It’s fragrant with the scent of all the cyclamens I bought this year to put in pots. I hadn’t realised what a...
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My Wizard of Oz
He was a wizard, and he flew from Australia – always known as Oz in Down-under. So of course I called him the Wizard of Oz, even though he was basically an inspired and eccentric architect, and an...
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War and Peace
One night in early June, sixty nine years ago, I lay awake in bed and heard the thunder of hundreds of aeroplanes flying over my home, hour after hour, all through the night. I was six years old, and...
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Peace and the heart of blogging
Part of this has been re-blogged. Life’s rich pageant, as a comedian used to say, has run me over this week, so I’ve returned to the thoughts in this blog. I had read a novel by a distinguished...
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