Someone in the street recently wanted me to open a direct debit for charity. He suddenly raised his hand in front of my face. ‘Well, don’t leave me hanging here,’ he said disconcerted.  He wanted me to strike his palm with my own. A kind of clapping for people with one arm, well he was collecting for the disabled. It’s … [Read on]

Divorce is never at the drop of a hat. The final split comes after years of papering over the cracks, such that not only is a great sense of relief felt afterwards, but each half asks themselves why they persevered in a futile cause for so long. For the children, maybe. Or simply because the status quo seemed preferable to … [Read on]

The Archbishop of Canterbury is proposing to groups of MPs his intention to chair “citizens’ assemblies” to stop a no-deal departure from the EU. First question: who are the “citizens” who will make up these so-called “citizens’ assemblies”? Citizens – though, since the people of Britain are not French republicans, we call ourselves “subjects” – voted decisively to leave the … [Read on]

Channel 4 posted its annual report in June, revenues were up by £15m in 2018 and its digital audience had increased by a quarter. Strangely Channel 4 News viewing figures are down by almost a tenth, nine percent year on year. They blamed ‘Brexit fatigue,’ as many of us do. But there is probably a more obvious reason staring them … [Read on]

Wolves have returned to the neighbourhood in which I have my house in France. It borders the département in which the so called Beast of Gévaudun, presumably a wolf, a pair or a pack of wolves, terrified the population in the middle years of the eighteenth century, killing perhaps a hundred people. Three miles from my house, local people have … [Read on]

The man stares rudely at me as if I don’t know my job. ‘But my ears and my throat are painful so I need antibiotics.’ Patiently, I explain that his ear drums both look normal. His throat and glands are fine too, that his multiple symptoms fit with a viral infection, so antibiotics wouldn’t help. In any case he’s already … [Read on]

 ‘As you have utterly failed to unify these dark tones how are you now going to manage the half tone correctly?’ ‘What are these?’ She rasped. I tried to explain to the art course teacher that in trying to find the correct half tone I’d discovered a second colour which looked better. ‘So now you’ve got two of them?’ she … [Read on]