written in my kitchen

Whimsy is not something that those of Anglo-Saxon extraction are truly comfortable with except when it combines with the sort of monomaniacal madness that only the French seem capable of. Then, even though we don’t quite understand it, we do warm to it. Such as that...

Bisto? In Burgundy? Surely not! Yet I distinctly heard the word. And, spoken in a crowded market in Tournus, a place that is about as close to the centre of France as you can get. We were threading our way through the crowds, made more dense by the addition of the...

How many of them are there?Perfect days? Too few just lately.How to recognise one? It is to be transported to another place, another time, another life; where all those niggles that come in the night, the daily irritations, the ceaseless concern about the future are...

Super indulgent - definitely! But there we are - someone has to keep up the hedonistic traditions - if only in a fairly mild-ish way; such was our day out last Thursday in the region of Beaujolais. In my head, I always think of ‘Beaujolais’ as a word-picture - one...

From Calais we head south: first stop, Cambrai. A truly northern French town. Pockmarks of shrapnel still scar the walls of those buildings that survived the onslaught of two World Wars. Yet Cambrai has a feeling of solidity and permanence, its name forever enshrined...

First Blog - phew! And so many directions in which to go. I could come over all sort of philosophical or maybe be a bit ‘preachey’? I could try to guess what you, my small audience, might want to read about and write something upon those lines or I could just get on...

It is a good few years since we were last in The Netherlands. Though we love the country and the people, the food was rubbish then and not a lot has changed since. (Perhaps that is a little harsh and I do admit to being fairly partial to street food - mussels, smoked...

All manner of eccentric life passes by as one sits snacking on a sandwich jambon and a glass of wine at the French equivalent of a car boot sale.This is the ubiquitous vide grenier, something found all over the country, otherwise known as a brocante, marché aux...

A short stay in our Burgundy ‘hovel’ by son and partner turned, as ever, into a quick gallop round some of the various growers whose wines we hold in high esteem. They, son and partner, live on the island of Majorca which boasts a lively and innovative wine industry...