My cat, Sam, is barking. Yes, I know; I pointed out to him that this could be construed as letting the side down somewhat, but he just lay there on his back with all his paws in the air, a well-licked bag of catnip resting on his chest, and stared at me out of the tops of his upside-down eyes.
The Blog
Mrs J and I went on a cruise around the eastern Mediterranean, starting in the stunning city of Venice. We thought we’d stay for a few days before boarding the ship. That would be lovely. Wouldn’t it? …
This is a column for the excellent Expatriate Lifestyle magazine in Malaysia. It was first published in June 2013
In the continuing tussle between your courageous columnist and the forces of technology, a minor victory this week; I have discovered how to access a picture cache on my mobile telephonic device. It seems to hold a large number of photographs of my ear …
Suave. Sophisticated. Cool. Debonair. These are just some of the words that describe other people. I know this, but in what I like to think of as a laudable refusal to accept an unpalatable truth, I do sometimes aspire to a level which could charitably be described as presentable, yet, with monotonous regularity, I fall short.
No, it’s not a new fad diet which reduces your posterior by 50%. It’s what happened when I decided I really had to lose weight …
“Your sense of humour is as silly as mine!” – Chris Tarrant
Some of you will not know that Chris Tarrant is a talented, funny and seemingly – I’ve never met him – thoroughly likeable man. Well he is. He is also an OBE, so even the Queen likes him, because she doesn’t just hand those out to anyone, you know. He is now perhaps best known in the UK as the erstwhile host of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”, to which he brought his appealing brand of humour, gentle sarcasm, blatant, and therefore friendly, mickey-taking and the Tarrant talent as a consummate quiz show host.
This is a column for the excellent Expatriate Lifestyle magazine. It was first published in August 2013
My great aunt Cnythia had a penchant for performing chicken impressions in crowded shopping centres. She also smoked a pipe, though not while performing. And it was following an administrative error at the passport office, which she took to be divine intervention, that she changed her first name. Not her ‘Christian’ name, note, since Cnythia was a revivalist member of the ancient Caledonian deer cult.
This is a column for the excellent Expatriate Lifestyle magazine in Malaysia; it was first published May 2011
My dear departed mother – she left a few days ago for a holiday in Malaga – has always been something of a, shall we say, traditional British cook. She won’t mind me saying this, not least because so long as she hasn’t confused the Malaga flight with a Malaysia one she won’t find out.
