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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
‘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 […]
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 […]