Soon after her seventieth birthday, Rohan had a dream - for her eightieth she would go to Uzbekistan. In particular, she wanted to visit Samarkand and Bukhara, towns with histories going back two and a half thousand years and which, as early as 100BC, were important trading posts on Rohan’s much-loved Silk Road. Over the…

All this week I have been on holiday in Uzbekistan and consequently have been unable to find the time I would need to write this Saturday’s blog. I’ll be back in London in a few days and plan to publish again next Saturday (18th October). In the meantime, this week’s illustration shows a photo of…

Increasingly, I treasure moments when my mind has time to think. Soaking in a warm bath offers one of the best opportunities; a close second occurs when gardening. I am not talking about gardening that is demanding, such as picking, planting or building; rather it is weeding, and recently this has been the ‘order of…

On most days each week I go to the gym. In London it has been my after-breakfast routine for around ten years; in Tréguennec, my visits only started this summer. Importantly, getting to the gym in London involves a twenty-minute walk, while in Tréguennec each trip is a little shorter as I drive through the…

Over the summer, the house next to ours in Brittany is used for holiday lets. With each ‘new’ neighbour, we usually exchange ‘hellos’ when they arrive and then, if they ask, we give advice on local matters such as the names of good restaurants or the day of the local market; usually, however, that is…

Around five years ago we started to make arrangements to help me better see the fine details on our TV screen. Last week, the final part of those arrangements was completed when the ugly cardboard ‘box’ that had been used to support a new television ‘temporarily’, was finally replaced by a made-to-measure box made of…

This blog was inspired by, in fact is a continuation of, a tea-party chat in Tréguennec. I had been invited by Annie, a friend and neighbour, to meet four of her close friends  who share a particular interest- all read and discuss the French versions of my blogs! It is rare for me to spend…

This blog is about a surreal moment on the London-to-Paris Eurostar. Following a troubling observation coupled with some careful negotiation, it was me, not the train manager, who made one of the announcements over the train’s public address system. I don’t know how many of the 900 or so passengers heard what I said or…

This is the story of an ‘Australian’ family’s courageous experiment that worked - and worked wonderfully well. Ten months ago I wrote a blog about the arrival in Tréguennec of Tom (a consultant psychiatrist) and his partner Sian (a lawyer) who decided they would ‘drop’ everything in Australia and spend ten months in France with…

This blog is about two of my most constant companions; more precisely, it tells of my shoulder bags without which I rarely leave home. Those I now use are the fifth generation of a series that started almost thirty years ago. My first, then referred to as a  ‘man bag’ - a term I dislike…