When you think about it, a little cottage with a white picket fence is the epitome of cosy, homy prosperity and orderliness. In fact, it's almost a cliché -- the shorthand proof-point of buttoned-down conformity and rigid domestic propriety. Yet pickets, derived from the French piquet (meaning 'pointed stick or board') have a grim military origin …
What's up with this year's spring? None of the expected birds or butterflies are doing what's expected of them -- I'm driven to ponder some comforting thoughts that stray dangerously close to cliché.
When I was a student, back in the early '80s, among the staples of our mixed tapes would be a song or two by moustachioed singer-songwriter Jim Croce -- he of 'Mad, Bad, Leroy Brown' and funereal weepy 'Time in a Bottle' fame. Although it rapidly became deeply uncool to like Jim as New Wave …
You may have intuited from the odd subtle reference herein that I do rather like to head out on a bicycle now and then, to explore the countryside hereabouts, air out the lungs, and best of all, give the psyche a good rev. Most of these expeditions are uneventful, which is a good thing when …
Well, it's not the first time your author has been wrong when it comes to natural facts. Bit it's the most embarrassing by far. Remember the piece I wrote about platypuses? I would hope it still may linger in the memory, being all of two weeks ago . . . But be that as it …
OK so this one is fraught with rabbit-hole risk, so I'm going to have to keep it tight. That's because it's about very complicated cross-cultural interconnections and disconnections -- boring really, with not much to reveal about life the universe or anything. As I so often have to say, though, bear with me -- there …
Platypus is back on the menu, photographically speaking. After months of raptor obsession, a change of approach is required, mainly because the good old Panzerwagen has finally rattled down the final curtain, making longer expeditions less frequent, but also because the season is changing (as they do) and other opportunities beckon. In addition, September was …
Archie turned three the other day; butterflies are starting to flutter by; the days are warmer and the nights shorter. So we mark another seasonal cycle as the earth turns and the planet circles the sun. With all this carrying on about the changing of the seasons and the passage of time, the unspoken element …
Yesterday, as I was out on a run with Archie, covering part of the same hilly dirt road we follow when stalking raptors, I had one of those disconnected meditative processes running seems to induce. It was on a long uphill gradient and into the teeth of a wind gusting out of the west at …
Running has not featured much – if at all – on these pages, not because it’s unimportant, but precisely the opposite. In truth, the last few decades’ messing about with bicycles, weights, swimming and yoga have all stemmed from your correspondent's wish to be a better runner. As my old dad used to say, “if …
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