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...

Home alone yesterday morning, I devoted my breakfast exclusively listening to an hour of the Chieftains playlist on Spotify, in honour of...

On a bluff at the confluence between the Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers, you will find a monument, one whose implications are truly...

The first tiny shards of Spring were apparent yesterday; an exuberant great tit singing from the beech hedge here, a bold snowdrop there....

Mother Teresa knew a thing or two. And, in her own words, one of the things that she knew was ‘that the biggest disease today is not...

An urban myth runs that Dylan Thomas spent so much of his life drinking himself into a stupor at Brown’s Hotel in Laugharne, South Wales,...

‘There’s a silent voice in the wilderness that we only hear when no one else is around’. In a couple of weeks’ time, I have to walk...

I have read around 2600 books in my life. You’ve probably done the same, give or take a few hundred either way. Years ago, I had a rule...

I am in an ‘exceptionally’ high risk category, apparently. Having spent much of my life trying to be exceptional, this pleases me. It...

For the last thirty or so years, I have helped to run a roving cricket team. In exactly 400 matches of the club’s history, of which I...

There is a model of the old person I don’t want to become. He lurks somewhere in a damp pool of intolerance in a members-only golf club,...

In these digital days, the act of walking a letter down to the village post-box is a rare and slightly cathartic one, and there is...

My favourite character in Under Milk Woodwas always the mad Lord Cut-Glass, with his 66 clocks all set at different times, his dog-dish...

Not long ago, I was refused admission to an event, on the curious basis of my not wearing a tie. No big story there, I grant you. The man...

A new girl at the office asked me at lunch if I had photos of my grandchildren to show her. If my Budgens Creamy Coleslaw tasted a bit...

My spirit animal is a Manx Shearwater, and simplicity is why. Sometime in the late summer, the Shearwater takes off from its west coast...

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...

‘More often than not’ said the moral philosopher Peter Singer, ‘there is a compromise between ethics and expediency.’ Too bloody right...

There are 1,267,069 words in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, 9,609,000 characters spread over 3031 mesmerising pages. I expect that you...