"If there is any substitute for love, it is memory." - Joseph Brodsky It's a hard sentence to sit with, because at first it sounds like a consolation prize. Love, like Coca-Cola, is the real thing - warm and fuzzy and present in the room. Then whoosh… the rug is pulled, and we seem to be left with just a bunch of memories. Which, in the great theatre of our lives, looks rather like the understudy - the picture, not the person. You'd be forgiven for reading it as a bit of a do

My Dad left me his watch. It no longer works particularly well, although it is certainly spot on twice a day, every day. But it's not about the watch. It's certainly not about being able to tell the time. Our smartphones carry the weight of that onerous task. So yeah... it no longer tells the time. But it tells me him. This is one item on a long list of peculiar things that happen when somebody close leaves us. Humble objects are suddenly promoted into classes way above their

Marcel Proust got there first, as he usually did, and at considerably greater length than necessary. In his wordy work "In Search of Lost Time" he describes in encyclopedic detail how a mouthful of a Madeleine dipped in his tea, prompted his entire forgotten childhood in Combray to come flooding back. The small sponge cake unlocking several hundred pages of Proustian prose. Most of us might have just muttered "nice" and got on with our day. But young Marcel was onto something

Vanessa and I live in a French Château. Ok. Here's the actual truth of it... We occupy the back corner of someone else’s château. We rent it, we don’t own it. The central heating doesn’t really work, so in November the warmest room in the house is still the car. But... it is a total dream to live there. So before you picture me, at 8pm in a smoking jacket, dismissing the under-butler for under-polishing my teapot, thank you, we already bear a sufficient weight of imposter syn

It’s one of those phrases we reach for without thinking, always meaning well. “You’ll get over it. Time’s such a healer.” We say it to the bereaved the way we’d speak to someone recovering from the ’flu or a sprained ankle, as though grief were a fence to be climbed, or a stream to be forded - a single, tangible obstacle, with a clear far side, after which normal service resumes. It isn’t. And the fence is just the wrong metaphor on almost every level. A grief counsellor name

If you have ever felt yourself in the middle of a big shift, you are not alone. Almost everyone I have spoken to lately, including all of us here at Platform 13, has felt some degree of change moving through their lives. Some of it is planned, and some of it arrives uninvited, like an unwanted house guest. The reasons vary, and it isn't really about astrological charts or timing. It is simpler than that: change is always upon us. Much like the waves, changes come and go, cons

There are few cake-related lies told with greater sincerity than “No thanks, I couldn't possibly...." Particularly when the last chocolate éclair on the plate is in play. The French pâtisserie counter is one of those rare places where adulthood briefly, but totally, fails me. We may have a mortgage, a pension and strongly held opinions about climate change, but put me - a grown-ass man - in front of twelve pretty cakes behind a pane of cough-proof glass, and I become eight ye

I hear that phrase on the news quite a bit, every time there is a live report from the scene of something dramatic or tragic. "Here's what we do know.".. It's the baseline of established truth. The poured concrete on which further clarification can stand. It might not be much, but it is solid and reliable and certainly good enough for most of us, given the circumstances. No educated guesswork. No stabs in the dark, no taking a shot at anything. Which brings me, as neatly as

Apparently, this is the year of the Great Reset. I keep hearing it. The dotty interpreters of Tarot cards and astrologers I tend to fall asleep to, seem terribly excited about this particular lap around the sun, with various celestial bodies changing signs, cycles ending, cosmic nodes re-aligning and energies shifting with the annual planetary diaspora. These are all apparently conspiring to encourage us to reconsider our relationships, careers, purpose and whether or not we

It is too hot. I know this because I have just returned from the Boulangerie, where everyone was queueing calmly, in the one-time weirdness of being in complete agreement. They were of one mind, chat-jacking each other's stories of "le chaleur" and when in the name of God's holy doughnuts, it will end. Today, the mercury will nudge 39 degrees Celsius - or 102.2 on the Farenheit scale - if you happen to live in a country that has put a man on the moon. Silly that we still use

Somewhere around fifty million years ago - give or take the casual margin of error with which only part-time Paleontologists and sloppy, tropical architects appear comfortable - a small semi-feathered dinosaur looked down at its short little arms and thought... Absolutely nothing at all. It didn't ponder for a second, and ask "are those arms still useful?" Nor was there a debate around them falling off to make room for wings, to serve the higher purpose of flight. It did not

Nostalgia. It's a beautiful soft, sepia-coloured word, isn't it? Comforting, cushioned and universally understood, although in terms of nuance, it punches way above its weight. Unlike terms that refer directly to longing, or regret, nostalgia isn't really about wanting to return to the past, or somehow have the past return to us, but much more subtly, it suggests a profound and meaningful gratitude that the past actually happened at all. Nostalgia has inherently soft edges. I

Somewhere, right now, a figure is sat at a kitchen table before dawn. The house is silent, the coffee beside them is a warm version of hot, and the only light is thrown by the open window of a glowing laptop. The rest of the house is fast asleep... I imagine them being tired. Not because they manage their time poorly, or enjoy working silly hours, but because this piece of personal sacrifice, was the only way to protect something else. Perhaps they promised the afternoon to h

There was a particular little shop that used to exist on almost every French street corner, and although most of them have quietly disappeared, their ghosts remain if you are lucky enough to spot one. You will be walking through some entirely ordinary town or village, when your eye drifts upwards and catches an old façade, it's painted signage faded and faint, but sure enough - perhaps above a mobile phone shop, an estate agent or some other high street blandness, you will se

An exhausted pizzaiolo, weeps softly in the dim light of a kitchen corner. Floury head, in floury hands. The culinary heritage that was boyhood, manhood and his very lifeblood, just died on the table... ...Rest in Pizza. Gone now, but ever-remembered - the classic beauty of what he called pizza - the disciplined, ascetic stretch of dough, frugally flavoured with a thick slap of tomato salsa, hand-torn mozzarella; perhaps a lean slice of local ham and a leaf or two of basil

There is a recognisable sort of chap standing beside a very clean car outside a top hotel. He wears two principal things - a peaked cap, and an expression of professional, unbothered serenity. He opens the door. He inclines his head. He says "Sir" and "Madam" with the respectful deference of a fellow who has said it many times. And when you have spread yourself across the leather interiors, he glides you smoothly across town without, it seems, doing anything so vulgar as maki

Closure. It's one of those words that sounds like it should solve something. Firm, clinical, faintly medical - the sort of word a doctor might use, or an estate agent. Somewhere between stitches and stitch-ups...It has the satisfying sound of a door shutting properly, seat belt fastened, an attaché case - closed and clicked. We reach for it constantly and perhaps a bit unconsciously. "I just need some closure..." "She never got closure..." "It gave me the closure I was lookin

I am a sucker for things that are not really traditional food parings. I mean I love things that do go together - fish and chips, buttered toast, and cream on jam, but I do like a new challenge. Enter, Roquefort & Honey Ice Cream. Found on a menu at a not-very-posh bistro in the stunning town of Sant Malo. There were clearly less challenging flavours on offer, and I could very much have made a far more vanilla choice, but something about it made me want to dive headlong into

There is a fine line between what we understand as appreciation and what we immediately deride as snobbery. Somewhere along the way, we decided that knowing too much about wine, coffee, or olive oil, made us a bit "too" something. You will know by now, that I love to look at the roots of words. The Etymology. The Verbal archaeology that whispers through history, where words and phrases orginiated and how we have skewed them to suit modern purpose. Frustratingly, the origins o

It's hot here. The sort of heat that suggests any kind of movement is a bad idea. Last night I sat in the pitch-black kitchen, with the fridge door open. It was not as effective as I would have liked. It was like being interrogated by the faint smell of Melon. Now then, if we played a word association game, and I said "Summer".. chances are someone would respond "Ice Cream". It is a horse-and-carriage relationship. A friendly rebellion against the sun - saying "OK if you want