by Valerie | May 6, 2020 | childhood, General interest, history, people, travel, writing a novel
In those days when I was determined to read all the many volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, I did not choose to inhabit a padded room as Proust did. Instead, I was trying to read the third volume while walking up the steps to Montmartre followed by an...
by Valerie | Mar 4, 2020 | childhood, General interest, history, Italy, people, travel, writing a novel
Gretel and Zita It is a strange coincidence that a book about a mayor and a bear in a north Italian mountain town is published, just when young people worldwide are questioning the human species’ relationship to and role in climate change and the floods that devastate...
by Valerie | Jan 29, 2020 | 1950s, childhood, Fifties, General interest, history, people, travel
My earliest memory is uncannily relevant to the events remembered this week. I was sitting with my elder sister in our ‘tree house’ intrigued by the pulley with a basket at its end. We could lower it to be filled with sandwiches and, if we ate them, down again for a...
by Valerie | Jan 22, 2020 | art, childhood, General interest, history
On most Sundays, we set out in the car on a ‘magical mystery tour’ to explore places we haven’t been to before. Not many are left within a day’s reach, so we returned to another part of the ‘ings’ or flooded water meadows by the Derwent, now a vast silent mirror of...
by Valerie | Nov 27, 2019 | art, childhood, General interest, history, Italy, people, reading groups, theatre, travel, writing a novel
The loft – a child’s paradise. The place where parents put whatever they did not quite know what to do with but feared to throw away. Occasionally there is a sad moment when you silently watch bulging bin liners bumped down the stairs to a temporary store at the back...
by Valerie | Jun 19, 2019 | 1950s, art, childhood, Fifties, General interest, history, people, travel, Uncategorized
Most days I allow myself a few minutes of fantasy exploring a zone chosen at random on the large globe on one side of my desk. I pause to wonder at the amount of land in the northern hemisphere and the wide expanse of sea in the southern one – a seemingly chance...
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