Low life
Our neighbour Michael is a keen and knowledgable attender of vides-greniers, the equivalent of our car-boot sales. His focus is…
Low life
At eight o’clock in the morning a nurse injected me with a radioactive marker and told me to go away…
Low life
Two football friends, brothers, Mick and Pete, came to visit last week. We’ve been going to matches together since 1969,…
Low life
We were four round the little table in the nunnery kitchen: a 90-year-old German lady and her man; a nun…
Low life
The end that we knew must come eventually, the end we dreaded so much that we could barely think about…
Low life
In Frederic Manning’s classic Great War novel, The Middle Parts of Fortune, the shattered battalion shambles out of the line…
Low life
Finally rain. None for months, then a violent tropical storm lasting two days. It marked the end of high summer…
Low life
An isolated Provençal stone farmhouse from the outside; from the inside a comfortable English country house. Sunk into the garriguea…
Low life
The view from the upstairs window was of other large and secluded houses perched on other still-green Surrey Hills. I…
Low life
I’m staying for a week in an 1850s house in the Surrey hills that looks-wise might have been built for…
Low life
In theory TikTok knows nothing about me. I have posted two videos: one of my grandsons kicking a football in…
Low life
Here come the global elites. They love it here. Their spiritual second home. The heat, the rosé, the food, the…
Low life
My days pass largely in a state of inanition. The fit and able-bodied express their sympathy, claiming it’s much the…
Low life
All afternoon I had been horizontal next to an electric fan, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake and sometimes halfway between those…
Low life
I’m looking backwards: old journals, old photographs, old notebooks. What strikes me above all is the vigour and energy I…
Low life
Nothing in the beach hotel was made of plastic. It wasn’t advertised as being a plastic-free hotel, but we noticed…
Low life
I’m house-sitting for the foreign correspondent while he attends the funeral of his beloved father-in-law Toto, the last of the…
Low life
‘But you look so well!’ How many times have I heard that lately. Kindly meant by most, but for a…
Low life
I’ve often wondered whether Her Majesty the Queen glances through The Spectator from time to time. And if she does,…
Low life
The main side effect of the six-month course of chemotherapy was ‘fatigue’. The main side effect of the three-monthly hormone…
Low life
After two nights at Le Grau-du-Roi (the King’s Pond) and a night spent within the medieval walls of Aigues-Mortes (Stagnant…
Low life
‘They were living at le Grau du Roi then and the hotel was on a canal that ran from the…
Low life
So that’s it. Is a third world war possible? It’s already begun, opined a retired US general in the newspaper.…
Low life
On the morning of my last day in England, I drew back a curtain and there in the garden, browsing…
Low life
I was walking across a fallow field to the pub with my two grandsons. ‘What’s this?’ said my 11-year-old Oscar,…
