I've belatedly got round to posting a story about my adventures in the hotel business which I did for CNN Travel earlier this year (2020), at the height of the Covid-19 lockdown. You can read it on their website using the link below. I've also copied it below in case they take it down. I … Continue reading My Basil Fawlty years: a cautionary tale
It's true, you can still find places serving all-day fry-ups with a large brandy on the side at the bottom of a Franco-era tower block that could give the Barbican lessons in concrete brutalism
At seven, I'd never been in a restaurant, thought rice was exclusively for pudding and understood dinner to mean a meal eaten at lunch time, that always involved potatoes
"It's no accident that Nineteen Eighty-Four again became an American bestseller when Trump was elected." - Norman Bissell on what he learned from writing Barnhill, his novel about George Orwell's final years and the creation of his masterpiece.
Heaven and earth seem closer here than they do in the city
The capacity to trigger unsettling emotions is part of the dangerous beauty of books and grief can resurface as smoothly and silently as a seal.
ON ISLAY TIME 