A portal to the Dance
I’ve coveted an Adrian Daintrey sketch for years, and at an auction not long ago I finally got hold of this wonderful one of wartime Cairo. I like his decisive…
Two years of the gentleman poacher
Last Saturday marked two years since Porridge the lurcher came to live at Sunnyside Cottage. By now he has become part of the furniture (often, in fact, quite difficult to…
The green ink brigade
Green ink. Hue of choice for complainers and poison-pen writers, the famous ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’. Also senior officers, artists and headmasters. In the days before Excel, book-keepers often used…
Pontack sauce
Autumn foraging season is upon us, and there are some good-sized elders along the old green lane where I often walk my dog of an evening. I’ve always had a…
The Tin Face Parade is out in the world
Today is publication day for my first novel. The Tin Face Parade is 320 pages of rakish and bloody Edwardian crime, and my delight that people are finally reading it…
African jazz from a Land Rover
In 1964, not long before his 19th birthday, my father set off for Bechuanaland – or Botswana as it would shortly become. At the time, the country was about to…
The pleasure of the pocket cartoon
Don’t get me wrong, I love spending ages on a drawing – playing with textures and trying to improve my penmanship – but there’s also a lot of pleasure in…
Wild camping and open-air life
In some ways we’ve come a long way since the 1930s, and in others we really haven’t. In case you missed it, next week a Dartmoor landowner is taking the…
After hours at the museum
Among my various ambitions for this year, one is to get better with my pens and paints. I love drawing but I don’t practise it enough, so I don’t improve…
A return to travel writing
When the plague hit, I was in Øvre Dividal National Park in northern Norway, tramping between mountain huts in the powdery snow and learning the hard way that there is…
