If January is all trumpets and resolutions, asking too much, too soon, and February is the long, quiet endurance in the middle, what does March mean? It certainly doesn't feel like a total beginning, but it definitely seems like a bit of a hinge month. A calendar-page threshold, finally reached. Maybe March presents more like a menu - to the return of a subtle, un-named appetite for life. The first of this month arrived - at least it did on Platform 13 - with the same reali

Somewhere along the way, we took the word intimate for a long walk. We led it out of philosophy, psychology, and human experience, and ended up folding it neatly in a drawer, labelled - " Reserved - Date Night"... But why even take this subject on, when we seem quite happy for it to describe what we take off? Is intimacy all about the bodies beneath the clothes, or the self beneath the surface?

Red roses. Valentine’s Day. Floral messaging that has no room for manoeuvre or misconstrue. Important, perhaps becasue our February 14th intentions need to be absolutely legible. Our designs and desires must have clarity and meaning. The red rose then, is a comfortably predictable symbol, bought and sold by the dozen. In fact, 250 million red roses are produced globally, for this day alone. Beautiful, classic, fully unmistakable. Even if we feel that a red rose is actually st

"He started it..." Perhaps this is my earliest memory of me telling my side of the story. The instinctual, defensive DNA, with which we come into the world. I think we might be born wanting the facts straight. The imbalance of truth and blame perception, is the stuff of childhood panic attacks. On the surface, we actually care about needing the footnotes to be correct. The narrative accounts balanced. To intensely dislike being cast as the villain.  This, it turns out, is

OK, so firstly, we Brits did not know that Groundhog Day was actually a thing. It is a real event. In Pennsylvania, every February. To us, it still looks like a punchline that somehow escaped the joke. A fluffy, tired animal is lifted from its burrow, consulted about the future, and returned to its warm den, while a crowd applauds politely and then heads off to CostCo.

Many of us tend to have a dim view of February. It really does seem to be the black sheep of our calendar. Short-changed on day numbers, an awkward ending to the cadence of that rhyme to remember - "30 days hath November" - it feels like the month that also ran - the racing term for runners and riders that were not really worth a real mention.But let's forgive the slightly gawky floundering of February. It was never a month designed to feel like such a fly in the hearty, w

February 1st is associated, in France, as well as various other parts of Europe, with Sainte Brigitte - a saint who rarely grabs the headlines like "the popular kids" - Francis, Jude and Christopher. There are no medallions - none of her miracles come to mind...

Turns out this photo is a fake, by the way... Even though if it did fool the folks at Forbes magazine, but... that's OK. It says what I want to say, AI or not. It's a picture that "shows" French farmers protesting in Paris. They are there, by the way - as I type - with tractors and trailers, and even sheep , lining the grand Avenues and Boulevards of the Nations capital, hosing down Government buildings with the occasional muck-spreader. When French farmers are unhappy, they

Today is a particluar kind of Sunday. It's flea market day. Not any one in particular, just one close to us. In fact there is very possibly one taking place every day of the year in France. The French "brocante" . The word itself is pretty old. It comes from the 15th century verb "brocanter" meaning to barter or trade in small goods . It's roots are a bit more practical than poetic. The things for sale, were never supposed to be rare or carry any kind of prestige. It was all

The word surrender did not always carry the white flag with which we associate its use today. It comes into English from the Old French " surrendre" - formed from sur (over) and rendre (to give back). Its Latin root, reddere , means to return, to restore, to hand back what was borrowed .