Tag Archives: heatstruck
The Paths Untaken: Making the Most of Where We Are…
We’re all guilty of it: never visiting that National Trust property that’s only half an hour away; never getting around to trying that lovely looking restaurant passed every day on the way home from work; never walking the promising public footpath that cuts back across the fields just before the motorway turn-off; never exploring the …
Tree-Hugging and Forest-Bathing
‘Tree-hugger’ is a vaguely insulting term for those perceived as hippy environmentalists, used fairly indiscriminately to describe pretty much anyone from an animal rights activist to a bypass protester. It’s also an epithet that has come to be associated with Prince Charles following his mid-1980s confessions about talking to his trees and plants to encourage …
Dark Mornings and Grey, Rainy Days
This is, apparently, one of the most depressing times of the year for British folk. The sparkling fairy lights of Christmas are long gone, but the winter drags on – bitingly cold and remorselessly damp. The mornings are dark and, throughout the grey days, the evenings loiter just beyond the horizon, bringing back the night-time …
The English: A Field Guide, by Matt Rudd
A Homesick and Heatstruck Book Review Sunday Times writer, Matt Rudd, has quite selflessly spent the last couple of years loitering around grubby motorway service stations, dodgy B&Bs and East Anglian dogging hotspots in order to write this splendid book (at least that was his excuse…). Just like Homesick and Heatstruck and many of my lovely …
“A HANDBAG?”
Brace yourselves. This is going to be a highly controversial post in which I risk alienating myself from my more fashionable readers (that’s you. No, really…). Here it is: I don’t really get designer handbags. The marvellous Caitlin Moran wrote about designer handbags in her book How to be a Woman. Like me, she couldn’t …
Wanted! Wine Gums, Pain-Killers and Muddy Vegetables
Many an expat blog discusses the foodstuffs, home comforts and edible luxuries unavailable to them in their overseas posting. Sometimes I imagine them all – thousands of variously dispersed blogging Brits – soaking up the sun somewhere suitably exotic, and longingly salivating for a decent pickled onion or a packet of Scampi Fries. In Dubai …
Opposite, Above and Beyond: Ponderments from a Balcony
From my fourth floor apartment’s balcony I have a spectacular view of… someone else’s balcony. In our particular part of town, the apartment blocks are packed together so snugly that, should one choose to sit on the balcony and soak up some sun (for the seventeen minutes a day when it isn’t eclipsed by other …
The River Bank
I have always found it profoundly pleasurable to be beside a river. There is something wonderful about the way in which water moves, purposeful yet playful, full of cool, soothing promise; the gently shifting patterns of light have the same quiet, hypnotic effect on the viewer as the dancing flames of a log fire. The incessant …
Blow the Cobwebs Away
I’m feeling the need for a post-Christmas walk. Traditionally, my family head out for a long walk on Boxing Day or the day after “to blow the cobwebs away” (a lovely fairy-tale of a metaphor which suggests that, like Sleeping Beauty, we have inadvertently been colonised by arachnids whilst hibernating). After a few days of …
