"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

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 that time of year again. Suitcases are being retrieved from the darkest corner of the loft, sunscreen checked for "use by" dates and bathing suits - scrutinized, discarded and unceremoniously replaced. Discussions are held in-household, asking why we left it so late to do almost everything, and promises are made around wholly unrealistic departure times for Gatwick airport. Meanwhile, other-peoples-photos are already beginning to arrive on your phone, with other-peoples-

I recently stumbled across an article in Forbes magazine, comparing two pieces of real estate. The first was a 996-square-foot "tear-down" in West Los Angeles. I had to look up the term "tear-down". It is basically a house that no-one wants to live in, and is far cheaper to knock down and build from scratch, than to fix up. The second property, was a 4,806-square-foot Château in France on 24 acres, with 8 ensuite bedrooms and a guest house. They were both listed for the same

If there is one subject guaranteed to unite humanity, it is the weather. We simply cannot stop discussing it. It doesn't matter whether you're in Paris, Perth, or Pyongyang, "weather chat" is the small talk of choice. The ice-breaker, the introduction. The attempt to bash down the barrier of language, and a chance to stand on some familiar, common ground, where souls that collide in the far-flung corners or our little blue rock, can meet on the level. And what better leveller

I like looking up quotes. It is nice to see who wrote what and where it came from. As well as being little wordy gems, that represent "things I really wish I had said", quotes give us an anchor to a thought, or a state of mind - perhaps even a way to live life. Mostly, they are either clever or beautiful or deeply deep. And I think deeply deep down, we all crave a life that is quotable... Good quotes - the ones that resonate the deepest - engage us the mostest, because the p

In almost every film that involves the use of a map, there always seems to be a moment when one character looks around, stops the group and exclaims, “Wait… I recognise this.” It’s often a tree or a bend in the path, or some feature that painfully drags out the conclusion that everyone has just completed a giant, waste-of-timey circle. There is no sense of metaphor or philosophy here. It is entirely literal. How did we end up back here? It is generally framed as a cross betwe

There is a very sober, serious show on the BBC called "Panorama". It covers studious subjects, in great depth and head-nodding sincerity. On April 1st, 1957, Panorama ran a segment calmly informing the British public that spaghetti grew on trees. Literally. It showed a group of Swiss farmers (you might think that would have been a red flag..) harvesting strands of air-dried spaghetti from the low hanging branches of, well...a Spaghetti Tree. The BBC, certainly then and I thin

The word "Status" is probably still synonymous with a centuries-old meaning around something that can be physically seen . Things like rank, title, land, or visible wealth. It comes from the Latin verb "Stare" - to Stand. It is where we much more than figuratively stood. Status was a marker of position - worn outwardly and instantly understood by all. The trappings of status were the Bentleys, the Castles and the cash.. ..Our status symbols. It's a bit quieter these days. We

Vanessa and I were recently speaking to a company that was offering some service provision around "Digital Marketing". It's a curious term, which commands respect from me, simply because I have no idea what it actually means. I think it might be a buzz-phrase that we just need to have access to, conversationally. It deals mainly with harnessing the might of Social Media. Digital Marketing is a quiet power, that sits beneath almost everything we scroll and scan and click. A po