When I was 18 the only opportunity I had of foreign travel was to stand at the side of the road with my thumb out, and that was how I first saw the Mediterranean. I’d just sat my A-levels and my travelling companion was Malcolm, my sister’s boyfriend. He was a medical student. I’ve no… Continue reading…
Mail On Sunday. 27.11.16 Some couples celebrate their golden wedding anniversary by holding a feast for friends and family to show how successfully they’ve made it through the steeplechase of marriage. But that wasn’t for us. Instead, Plum, my wife, decided that we would join others of the Third Age and that she would educate… Continue reading…
Fifty Years On …. or what Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon, Michael Caine, Leonard Cheshire, Paul Raymond, Eric Morecambe, Mick Jagger, Terry Wogan, Elvis Presley, Dennis Hopper, David Attenborough, Lord Hailsham, Tony Benn, Charlie Watts, Enoch Powell, Marc Bolan and Jimmy Savile and many more told me… There are many good reasons… Continue reading…
At high tide the waves from the Atlantic really rush in at Beg Legeur in Brittany’s Bay of Lannion. It’s a pretty little out of the way place, with its yellow gorse and scattered groups of French families; a good spot for a holiday. But, as I watch my grandchildren play in the surf, I… Continue reading…
Daily Mail 17.3.2016 Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself. It must. How else can I understand that next on April 16, Plum and I will have been married for fifty years. It doesn’t seem possible. I always thought golden wedding anniversaries were for old people. But we’re not old. We were young only the other day.… Continue reading…
I appear to have rattled a few publishing cages with my recent Guardian article about my experiment in serialising my new novel The Sandman online on this site. That’s fair enough. Good to see my old friend and former editor Ursula McKenzie giving the publishers’ point of view in an answer in the same newspaper… Continue reading…
Evening Standard, November 16, 2010 Having your pocket picked on the Tube might not seem like everyone’s idea of a good start to a day out, but in the end that’s exactly what it was. It all began in mid-afternoon on a train between Fulham Broadway and Earls Court, just two stops away. I’d been… Continue reading…
Mail On Sunday, 2010 My father never visited France—although he is buried in the tiny village of Servel, near Lannion, in Brittany. He was on his way to the Far East when he died in October 1944, the huge tank landing craft on which he was a passenger, and which was being towed in a… Continue reading…
We’re hardly the best choir in London. We never rehearse and we only ever meet once a year when we sing Christmas carols in a shopping mall. And although we’re all English, we’re not exclusively Christian. This year, for instance, although we had three lapsed Catholics, a former Methodist, a chap who vaguely thought he… Continue reading…
Daily Mail, 2006 I wore my Elvis socks the day my mother died. Made of black cotton with the name Elvis embroidered in silver thread across the ankles, I showed them to her when, waking on the morning of her death, she found me at her bedside. The sight of them made her smile through… Continue reading…
