No Sacred Cows
Scepticism served medium rare
Category: memoir
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Les Passantes I was 18 and living in France when I first heard Antoine Pol’s poem put to music by Brassens. Along with Graeme Allwright, Dylan, Moustaki, Cohen and a few others, their words spoke to me, stirred something deep inside. Voices from an impenetrable and cloudy unlived future, beautiful yet disturbing in a way…
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I spent a night recently at the Sofitel Le Faubourg in Paris, invited by someone I am very fond of and respect. The hotel is next door to the American Embassy, in that small and polished part of the city where wealth, power, diplomacy and fashion seem to have gathered together for mutual reassurance. Approaching…
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I moved from Leigh-on-Sea to Harrogate in about 1969. Not long before that, when I was ten or eleven, my parents had organised a solo trip to London for me, including an overnight stay with a relative, for reasons I can no longer remember. Having never travelled alone anywhere before, except a five minute stroll…
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Family trees are strange things. They offer the illusion of order, a tidy branchwork of names and dates. But beneath the surface, they’re tangled with myth, omission, and the mess of human behaviour. Mine is no different. It begins in Scotland, detours through Jamaica, dips its toes in the abolitionist movement, and ends up –…
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Scientist, RAF officer, NHS leader and Lord-Lieutenant of West Sussex Dame Susan Elizabeth Pyper, née Harrison, was born in December 1951, the elder daughter of Ronald Harrison and Joan Harrison, née Wedderburn. Joan was my mother’s cousin, making Susan a member of my own Wedderburn generation of cousins. Her younger sister was Jenny. Ronald Harrison…
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Natthaya, 2014. She had grasped the principles of repentance, but not yet the importance of separating it from the funding application. The opening was strong. The closing demand may have weakened her case.
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A wry look at the British dream of Provençal life, from sun-drenched optimism to bureaucratic reality – and what became of one couple’s costly escape to the French countryside.
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New Year’s Eve. The local hunters were out in force, already well into their celebrations and firing potshots at anything that moved faster than a snail. Fortunately for the region’s fauna (including us), most creatures with the good sense to keep their heads down survived intact. The kids and I managed the hundred-metre dash from…
No Sacred Cows 