David Cameron with his first son Ivan in 2002. Ivan died in 2009. It’s remarkable how often in families a death and a birth happen in quick succession. Poor David Cameron lost his father today just weeks after his wife gave birth to that darling baby. My wise friend Judith, who has seen [...]

  Ripe apples drop about my head;  The luscious clusters of the vine  Upon my mouth do crush their wine;  The nectarine and curious peach  Into my hands themselves do reach;  Stumbling on melons as I pass,  Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. The Garden, Andrew Marvell  (1621-1678) [...]

On Winchelsea Beach, the mud is dark sable. Sometimes, you slither across the top of it. But sometimes your foot sinks right in, mud spurts between your toes. And sometimes, you sink much deeper, over your ankles, up to the knees. When that happens, your feet encounter another texture, silkier [...]

This is from an old copy of the defunct magazine Punch. I can never see the joke, but it does seem appropriate. We had dinner with an entertainingly gloomy Irishman last night. He’s clearly enjoying the credit crunch a lot – because it means that he can wallow in deepest pessimism, [...]

I’ve been looking at pictures of the Biblical floods in Pakistan, listening to the statistics – more people affected by this than by the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. Is this possible? So I found a map and realised that the area being flooded is the Indus Valley itself, one of the [...]

The Sun’s gone into the sign of Leo now. It’s full summer, the time of the Lion, as hot as it gets in the Northern hemisphere. Leo is a fire sign of course and its ruler is the Sun, by far the brightest thing in our solar system. No wonder Leos have a reputation for […]

You know what, we big picture people are not the only ones to heave a huge sigh of relief when Saturn finally gets into Libra for a good long stretch. (Personally, I can already feel the pressure easing. ). Saturn himself is jumping for joy and kicking his heels in the air. Why? Because [...]

I was taking a shower this morning with my five year old and she started to play a game about a “vampire squid” which was attacking us around the curtain. (Yes, apparently there is such a thing.) That’s a pretty scary monster, right. Well, it also seemed rather a good image [...]