She gave me a shilling once, but that was long before I sat in the barber’s chair. He and I started on summer holidays, but went quickly...

Bear with me. It will get easier. There is an exquisitely complex theory about ecosystems, of the sort that I suspect I only read up on...

Back in 1962, the ex-wandering Jain monk and tireless campaigner for peace and the environment, Satish Kumar, started a walk from the...

If you were to google ‘making people happy’, you would find around 7.8 billion threads to follow up. Ironically, this is within 1% of the...

In the end, one shared glance was enough. Enough for that promise that just about any conscientious dog owner has silently articulated to...

After twenty-seven years of marriage, you notice things. And the thing that I had started to notice was that, every time Caroline found...

‘Do I contradict myself?’ ‘Very well then,’ continued the American poet, Walt Whitman. ‘I contradict myself. I am large. I contain...

Exactly a year ago at this moment, Caroline and I were jumping in the car to head down to the Crab and Lobster in Sidlesham for an early...

Normally, each October, I give up alcohol for the month. I haven’t this year, partly because I conveniently forgot to start, and partly...

In the garden of 73, Church Street in the Nottinghamshire village of Southwell has stood the same tree for a very long time, like about...

‘Nothing,’ a journalist who had stolen the idea from someone else once told me, ‘is ever as good or as bad as we lot make it out to be.’...

Dear Rishi First of all, thank you for my furlough cheques. To be honest, I normally thank myself each time one turns up, on the basis...

‘We are what we repeatedly do’ said someone who may or may not have been Aristotle. In which case, I am a Jaffa Cake. Whoever it was who...

These are strange days, but I still have 26 pairs of socks. Without wanting to lift a lid on my marriage, it would be fair to say that my...

‘The longer we delay’, said Ban Ki-Moon, one of a long line of UN Chiefs with delightful names, ‘the more we will pay’. When you become...

I was never any good at science at school, apart from locust sexing, the concept of which, being a normal 13 year old boy, I found...

You probably know all this. Newton’s third law sets out that, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. By this strange...

Annie Macdougal, who helped my Granny keep her Isle of Mull cottage clean and tidy each Wednesday morning half a century or so ago, had...

I think we can agree it was sub-optimal. Cricket is a statistical game for statistically minded people and, by any measure, the raw stats...

We all know her. We have seen her a thousand times in the rear-view mirror of our ageing lives. Because of her, we drive more carefully,...