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We’re all born brainy !
When Catherine Windsor aka Kate Middleton drove away from hospital the other week with her day old baby she did an interesting thing. She waved to the ecstatic crowds with her left hand, but her right...
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A is for Dictionary
There was a framed photograph of me as a toddler on the wall, which just showed my head, with a mop of dark hair, dark eyes, and my neck fading away into nothing. When I was between two and three years...
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Time for a tea-break
I have kept my blogging vows: to write regularly, for better or worse – (you be the judge), for richer for poorer – (mostly poorer), in sickness – (sometimes) and in health, till circumstances do us...
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Robinson Crusoe has a message for us
My grandmother collected beautiful china and old books. My memories of the china was that it actually wasn’t beautiful… At eight I found her collection of Staffordshire figurines rather clumsy, and...
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Confessions of a bag lady
I am a bag lady. I cannot resist them. So when I passed a shop with the most beautiful handbag I’d seen for a while, I couldn’t stop myself going in to check the price. It was elegantly flat, not the...
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We are all witnesses
Who would have thought that when a group of murderous men attempted to kill a fourteen year old girl that they would have made her a global heroine and given her cause world-wide coverage? Malala...
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Birds of a feather
My heart was in my mouth. I was sitting at the traffic junction in our small town where six roads meet and compete for the lights. Would the traffic stop? A duck was slowly waddling across the road...
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A great-grandfather
While those who were interested in the christening at St James Palace were focused on his famous great- grandmother, I was more interested in the baby’s great-grandfather. The Queen’s husband was a...
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A perfumed garden and an old gardener
The white wisteria wafts its scent across the veranda. I can smell it as I sit here writing with the French doors open. The pale purple blossoms of the melia tree, sometimes called the Persian lilac,...
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Paradise is not lost
In this country the sun is reputed to shine twice as often as it does in England, and it shines with especial clarity on Coromandel, so called when a ship of that name anchored where the township is...
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So what is gumption?
“Use your elbow–grease,” my grandmother would chide me good humouredly… or ask: “where’s your gumption?” Where indeed? I searched my somewhat limited seven year old soul but could find no trace of...
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Talking about silence
A friend went for a happy break away with distant family, and returned home to find the bliss of silence awaiting her. She shared it with her readers, the deep need for solitude and silence, and how...
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Am I not a man and a brother?
My husband took one look at my ravaged face, and retreated to his study. I had just returned from seeing the film ‘The Butler.’ Instead of the gracious meander through history at the White House that...
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The magic of a letter
You cannot tie up an e-mail in blue ribbon and place it tenderly in a casket containing others like it, to leave for a grateful posterity to find and marvel over its touching sentiments, and even...
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Days of wine and roses
It’s been the one of those glorious days when ‘cherubim and seraphim are casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.’ Silence… a small white yacht gliding over the still shining water,...
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The feminine face of God
In the last hundred materialistic years I was fascinated to discover that there are 386 recorded instances of Mary appearing to people all over the world from Belgium to Japan, Venezuela to Burundi...
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A peculiar Christmas feast and the 4th Wise Man
Polar explorer Captain Scott and his team celebrated Christmas on their way to the South Pole in 1911. As a foodie, I find their feast a little lacking in… je ne sais quoi … After his historic...
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Midsummer Christmas, dawn to dusk
It would be good to find some quiet inlet where the waters were still enough for reflection. where one might sense the joy of the moment, rather than plan breathlessly for a few dozen mingled treats...
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The necessity of beauty
Pamela was my lodger. She was living in the third bedroom in my flat for the same reasons that Mr Micawber pronounced the immortal words:”Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen...
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Summer song
Walking around the cemetery on New Year’s Eve the sky was still and clear, no silver, almost transparent moon yet, rising above the sea looking like a silver sliver of dried honesty in the pale night...
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