"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

It was Paris Design Week. It's one of those things that I tend to go to as a bag carrier, rather than a fan. My taste in architecture, art, culture and cutlery looks mostly backwards rather than boldly towards a futuristic, cutting edge... I don't like reinvention for its own sake. For me, there is a huge difference between design and innovation. In fact the very word design should be legally obliged to be accompanied at all times, by a qualifying adjective. Interior design,

My father was recently telling Vanessa about how, as a pre-war child in middle England, he would see the Coal-man every week, drawing up in a heavy wooden cart, pulled by an enormous Shire horse. Every Tuesday, he delivered sooty brown sacks, full of fist-sized lumps of coal for the fireplaces, and bags of blackened coke, for the cooking stove. She sat listening to him and thought how marvelous it all sounded. A variety of household economies, all arriving at the front door b

There's a quote going round at the moment. It's one of those intellectualised aphorisms you see plastered all over Facebook and Instagram, generally superimposed over bucolic scenery - a lake at sunrise, or a woman sitting by her imaginary fireside, in expensive knitwear. You've probably seen it. “Nobody apologizes any more. They just disappear and call it moving on. Accountability died somewhere between pride and ego.” And then comes the line that actually does all the heavy

I walked past a shop in Paris the other day devoted almost entirely to mustard. OK so it was mostly mustard... There were some 'extras' hanging around - olive oil, cornichons and vinegars. But mustard was most definitely the business plan. A few streets later there was a cheese shop devoted, of course, entirely to cheese. All refrigerated and proper. A slaboratory of fromagey ingots, in various shades of yellow. Then one selling just brushes - brooms and dust-busters, with ma

Some time ago, in these very pages, I did a great deal of confident theorising about mice. You may remember it. If not, it's in my book Postcards from the Platform's Edge - so go order a copy, if you haven't already. There was a tear-down property for sale in L.A. and a Château for purchase in France, and somewhere between the two I set out my thesis: that the Town Mouse looks at the Château and sees lonely isolation, while the Country Mouse looks at the city condo' and sees

I arranged to meet Vanessa at Wagram. I said it without thinking, the way you'd say "meet me at the chemist" or on the corner, or by the tree. What I actually meant, more precisely, was "Meet me at Café L'Étoile 1903" - which is an old café-brasserie at the bottom of the Avenue de Wagram, almost in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe. We both know it well, and the coffee is excellent. "OK, I'll see you at Wagram"... It was only an hour later, sitting, waiting with my excellent