Too Many Things To Do!

All my friends seem to be saying it. Where does one begin? One moment I feel like finishing off a particular task. That might make me feel better, but it takes longer than I thought and I haven’t been able to start clambering through another pile of papers as planned....

NEIGHING LIKE A MARE

It all started two years ago when the bilingual 5-year-old son of a friend pointed to my nose and said,  ‘There is sangue.’ I thought he wanted to know what sangue meant, so I said, ‘blood’.‘Yes, blood,’ the small child persisted, so I went to look at myself in a...

The Consequences

I sit thinking. Pen and paper on the table in front of the window overlooking Beverley Minster. The sky is blue. The red cross of St. George on the left tower hardly flutters. The sun is setting and I watch a shadow climbing horizontally up the west front as I...

Idiosyncratic Italian Bureaucracy  

  Every spring I traipse into a thirteenth century castellated building and follow the signs to ‘Tributi’. For many years I climbed up worn stone steps to the second floor, but now they have fitted a slim lift into the stairwell following decades of complaints...