The French have a verb for a very specific pastime. The dictionary has it as - Flâner… (v) to wander about with no particular purpose. Pronounced - flan - as in pan and ay - as in hay. She (or indeed he - Le Flâneur) was an individual who elegantly ambled the streets and squares with no desire to get anywhere specific, but simply to be there. To observe. To absorb. To walk with no agenda other than the call of curiosity.

It is all well and good to throw buzz-words around, but one that often comes up in casual conversation these days, is ‘frequency’. Like most expressions, it can mean different things to different people and yet actually, is very rooted in science. Not in a “my frequency is like..so off today” as though you‘re just having a bad hair day, but involving physics…a real exchange of energy with the environment and people - total friends or total strangers. We’ve all been in a room

This is something I came to learn very late in life, having never questioned my beliefs or my decisions. I’ve since found so many areas in my life where I blindly accepted that my beliefs just are what they are, fixed in time, and my decisions simply followed. Turning things upside down to get a different perspective, allowing myself to question things and decide again, has become such a valuable tool. I like to think of it as “curiosity with benefits”. As young children, oft

Every nation tends to make a contribution to the great theatre of style. England gave us understatement, Italy provided road rage and France — with predictable irony — gave us austerity disguised as art. The word silhouette began not as a term of beauty, but of mockery. Étienne de Silhouette, was the well intentioned but disastrously unpopular 1759 French finance minister. He tried very hard tried to balance the Nations chequebook after yet another costly skirmish with the En

Self-talk is not something to be taken lightly. Saying things like “I can’t carry a tune, I’m tone deaf.” whilst it can be an expression of mock humility maybe it is true... for now. How do you know? What if saying this is why you haven't become better? Sing because you love to. If all people thought they had to be perfect in order to love something or try something, we'd all be sunk. What I wanted to say has nothing to do with singing, or maybe it has everything to do with i

The word sabotage is a genuine “drama picture”. It can conjure machines grinding noisily to a halt, partisans blowing up railway lines, or each of us inexplicably wrecking our own best chances.. It feels shivering, cinematic and rebellious. But sabotage has much humbler roots, in the clatter of a wooden shoe…

I love almost everything that is old. Old books, old times, old manners. One of the few enviable advantages of being British lies not only in how we have managed to preserve old things, but in how we continue to delight in them. We don’t simply store the past; we keep it in circulation, like a favourite chair, endlessly sat in.

There was a time when a social visit began not with a text message or a hopeful knock, but with a small, stiff rectangle. The calling card was both introduction and safeguard — a way to say, “I was here,” without barging into someone’s day. It was etiquette in miniature, a pocket-sized handshake.

Croydon Airport, Southern England, 1923. Aviation was still pretty new, with planes made mostly out of plywood and canvas. Crossing the channel could be done from the deck of a luxury liner, or for a daring few, in a propeller-driven tent, with 2 leather seats and a sense of direction. The pilots were just mechanics with benefits, but they had an understanding and a kinship with their craft. Radios crackling, announcing Ginger was trying to get in touch with Biffo, navigating

Perhaps the greatest barrier to worthwhile communication is that we no longer listen to understand. We listen only to reply. Our ears twitch, our tongues prepare their retorts, and before the sentence has even ended, we are already halfway into our counterpoint. What passes for dialogue is often little more than a polite duel to get one’s point across and be heard. But what if listening was something else? If we approached each other’s words with kinder curiosity, the intent