If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!There is perhaps an air of familiarity here for anyone who has already seen Amelie. Whether it’s the soundtrack, which borrows directly from that tale of a young French woman doing good in Montmartre, or the similar structure, which […]

Last week was the 50th Anniversary Eurovision Show, ‘Congratulations’. We watched it on Sky+ today. It was very, very poor.
I’m not sure whether it was the programme itself or the fact we had to watch the Spanish version as the BBC refused to show it, so we’d taped it off TVE. The Spanish commentators were […]

So we finally went to see Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit last night. As usual we’d left it so late that booking was a waste of time, as we found we’d been shuffled into one of the smaller screens, and the few of us in there were left to rattle around […]

I didn’t get to the Expo yesterday, in the end. Instead, I spent the morning in the officeI didn’t get to the Expo yesterday, in the end. Instead, I spent the morning in the office, signing off pages, and then headed off to the Hurlingham Club for rehearsals after lunch.
It’s a fantastic place, with a […]

I am very annoyed. I’ve lost my ancient silk waistcoat. Have you seen it? It’s about 50 years old; yellow, and with hand-stitched embroidery on the front. A hand-me-down, obviously, but very beautiful, and far too valuable to misplace.
It has to be somewhere in the house, as it’s never been taken away since moving in […]

I don’t reckon that was meant to come to me…

It was a very, very good weekend. Having dragged dad around Somerfield on Friday night I made him to it all over again in Sainsbury’s on Saturday morning, when it struck me that supermarkets seem to be the only places I spend money any more. It must be something to do with passing 30.
To rectify […]

The sixth installment in JK Rowling’s apparent seven-part series was much anticipated and, as with previous entries had been kept under strict guard to stop the storyline leaking out before its official publication date.
Nevertheless, the latest adventures of the now-maturing boy wizard were revealed when bookmakers stopped taking bets on which ‘major character’ had been […]

This last week has shot by. It feels like only a couple of days ago that I was cooking up a gallon of soup on Saturday morning and fish pie for Helen and Mike coming around for dinner on Sunday night. And now it’s Friday and I’ve picked up dad from the station and brought […]

What a strange email I got on Monday morning.
This is ____ ______ emailing from the Letters page of the Evening Standard; hope you don’t mind