written in my kitchen

Whimsy and the French

Whimsy and the French

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...
Ahhhh! Bisto!

Ahhhh! Bisto!

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...
A Perfect day

A Perfect day

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...
My Kind of Day

My Kind of Day

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...
Cheese Tart and Champagne

Cheese Tart and Champagne

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...
My First Blog

My First Blog

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...