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A DUTCH friend gave us some Roomboter Waffeltjies, or some such name, the other day. They're a sort of papal-strength wafer soaked, steeped, clarted in rum butter. I had one with my afternoon tea (a Lapsang Souchong-Russian Caravan mix) and felt t

THERE WAS time enough for an apéritif outside before the first distant thumps and rumbles of thunder came too close for comfort. Easy-peasy, relax, stay cool, as Sir Francis Drake might have said, eyeing up the lie of his bowls as he glance

"YOU'LL BE a man, my son" wrote Kipling at the end of "If", a poem which warms the heart of some as much as it really gets up the nose of others.

After all the hype, puffery and scramble for sponsorship surrounding the F

3am. What they call the wee sma' hours in Inverness and les petites heures here in the south of France. It's been one of those nights. The cats, Pinot and Merlot, won't settle. It's not just their nature, it's not that they're always on the wrong

I sometimes wonder about Frédéric Mistral. You've never heard of him? Nor had I, until I came to live in France. I knew the word 'mistral' as the name of the icy wind that roars off the Alps down the Rhone valley, chilling many a Provençal holiday-maker to the marrow, but the man himself, apparently named after a wind, remained a closed book despite having a street in practically every southern French town named after him.

MAJOR SUCKER for pomp and circumstance here, I'm afraid. July 14th – la fête nationale, the anniversary of the 1789 revolutionary mob breaking into the Bastille, the Paris prison/fortress symbolic of royalist rule – July 14th fou

THERE'S AN unexpected duel going on inside our letter-box. You wouldn't have thought it, just looking at it from the outside, but inside its placid green exterior there's goodness knows what Gallic mayhem and brouhaha going on . . .

The spi