Blog - People In Mind
The Olive-picking Wake
Olive picking in Tuscany has been the high point before Christmas. It happens in Keats’s ‘Season of mellow fruitfulness’ before the trees are bare and the earth hardened by frost. Or so it used to be. The persimmon tree in front of the house was laden with orange...
Autumn Colour or None
Olives eaten by bugs and autumn leaves blown off by gales – what a prelude to winter! Every year we drive to Rievaulx Abbey to see the autumn colour and walk along the terrace with a perfect view down to the ruined abbey in the valley below. It was one of the ones...
A Roundabout Nightmare
Every so happy often I meet my friend who is reading the first draft of my current novel and we discuss a few chapters at a time or, as this time, the dreaded synopsis. We live a two hour drive apart, so we meet roughly half-way at a rather nice country hotel. All...
Disconcerting News
It’s so mild that men are still wearing shorts, and we’re well into autumn! This morning I gazed at the chestnut tree in front of the Minster from my writing desk in front of the window. This week saw the start of serious editing of the finished manuscript. Already...
George I’s Proclamation
It was fitfully sunny when we gathered at the 1714 structure to protect people selling butter – hence ‘butter cross’ – on the day King George I’s 1714 declaration was read out to the populace gathered in Saturday Market Place (Beverley also has a Wednesday Market...
Georgian Feast
Beverley’s fine Town Cross was built in 1714, the year the first of the Hanoverians came to the throne. Strange, therefore, that Beverley was the only place in Britain to celebrate the coming of the first King George who, not being able to speak English, hastened the...
Sleepwalking
I’ve suffered from insomnia for almost as long as I can remember, and this summer was no exception. It wasn’t helped by a hacking cough right into September when I had a fever and was prescribed antibiotics. For years I have occasionally taken a sleeping pill if I was...
Never Again – a Party in Italy
We’d celebrated 30 years at the Casa del Mulino with a rousing party and fantastic fireworks. Now it’s 40 years and the next generation is taking over. Now’s the chance to invite close friends who have enriched all these years, to thank them and celebrate. It’s a...
Historical Character Assassination
We climbed up the side of a hill, and it was hot. Rock tombs this time, not tumuli like the ones we had seen at Tarquinia. Then, in the Etruscan necropolis near Pitigliano, we came upon the temple front carved out of tufa, columns only stumps sticking out of the...
The Death of the Pudding
A frivolous subject, but after having enjoyed one specially made for me, I feel inspired to celebrate the demise of what I, in my culinary ignorance, considered to be normal. I thought that most families who could afford it had a two-course meal once a day. Something...
A Summer in Love with John Donne
It’s not often that I’m alone and have time to spare – a great luxury. I was in London and thought I would see an exhibition. None of the ones I hadn’t seen attracted me, so I decided to wander through the National Portrait Gallery. Some time ago I asked my friend...
Designing from the Sky
Rain from a grey Italian sky has brought me inside from gardening; it has put me in mind of what we humans do to the earth’s surface. Or non-humans, for that matter. A few years ago I was a ‘hanger-on’ at a conference in Paris. It was on the 18th-century architect...
Party Time!
It's good to know your presence is needed for grandchildren, and that it leaves time for you to have your own life. We're just back from Daniel's first proper birthday party, shared with a friend Jago, a week older. (Here they are being photographed before blowing out...
Thoughts about Immigrants to Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries
I had visited Nymans before, but it was some time ago and I liked the idea of wandering through gardens in the south of England on a lovely summer’s afternoon. And so we did. The roses were stupendous in the walled garden, but I seemed to be impelled towards...
Lost Children
We’ve climbed the tower which the eccentric William Beckford built so he could escape from the social whirl of early 19th-century Bath to contemplate, in solitary brooding, the hills around the city, the Mendip hills of the Neolithic inhabitants long before the...
Roses and a New Start
Back at the start of my novel, now with a title but needing a character revision. This is the third revision, and I realise that the first chapter I always thought was so apt, isn’t at all. I need to think it out again. So I found myself contemplating roses on the...
Where the Fingers almost Meet
Then the Sistine Chapel. Such is the forced direction that one enters on the wall with Michelangelo’s Last Judgement; it is the way the priests entered under Jonah, a prototype of Christ. We, the lay visitors, should have entered at the other end, to meet under those...
Milking Michelangelo
There was nothing for it. We had to join the relentless one-way traffic to end up in the Sistine Chapel, the goal of the masses. People are said to turn up at the museum pointing one index finger towards the other and almost shouting, ‘Where? Where?’ We could,...
The Vatican Beckons
Sarah and I had discussed whether to spend the last night in Rome. Fortunately that plan was abandoned because of the lack of accommodation available and the sky-high prices. Two popes were to be canonised. The journey into Rome proved quicker and easier than...
Earthquakes, miracles and frescoes
We travelled north towards the Lake of Bolsena, the largest volcanic lake in Europe and the town where the miracle of Corpus Christi took place in 1263. Bolsena is on the Roman Via Cassia, often called Via Francigena (the road of the Franks) or Via Romea, the route...
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