LEARNING THE ART OF LIVING WELL
Idiosyncrasies are what make individuals so interesting, but they can also make them really annoying if they are totally at odds with your own learned and acquired behaviours. I find few things more uncomfortable than over-enthusiasm and gushy praise for ordinary things – like, say, waxing lyrical about something that appears, tastes, sounds or feels […]
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Travelling with someone you love is just like living with them, only more intense. I remember being in Laos with my late wife once and realising she hadn’t said a word to me for two days. She would go through occasional periods of silence back at home in London – usually when she had done […]
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Much to my surprise, I found this next entry in the notes on my iPhone yesterday afternoon. It was entirely written by my son on the first day of our six-week trip round Italy last summer, when he was just seven years old. I’ve tweaked the grammar slightly, but otherwise this ‘part two’ is in […]
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‘We can do this can’t we, Jackson?’ ‘Yes, Daddy. We can do this together.’ I asked my son this fairly rhetorical question when he was two and half years old and I was totally lost, trying to hold everything together just five months after his mum’s premature death. His response, I’ve since discovered, was characteristically […]
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A shorter version of this piece about was first published in The Times in July 2018, before the trip detailed below. One of the hardest things about being a sole parent, I keep telling anyone who will listen, is that you have to make all the major life decisions alone. “I can’t imagine how difficult that must […]
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