I was replanting my window boxes at the weekend. The pansies that had flourished in recent months had become leggy, so I pulled them out, added some fresh compost and started to plant the marigolds. Which is when I found the egg. Yes. The egg. As I parted the soil, there, nestled deep in the …
In the first week of June, I broke three needles in the sewing machine that Miriam, Esther and Silas gave me for Christmas, and I stripped and rebuilt my bike. So I ordered more needles from the venerable haberdasher's William Gee of Dalston, got on my clean bike and went to get them. I tweeted …
In all the strangeness of the last few weeks, it has taken me a surprisingly long time to realise that I have, in effect, been set free. I am furloughed from my job; I am not on the bus to Oxford; I am not obliged to be anywhere, to do anything or to talk to …
I didn't do too well in the first lockdown this year and I spent too much time feeling purposeless and worried, not really about getting ill but about losing my job. One day in May I decided to go for a ride on my bike to see if it would help. I tweeted as I …
In the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is this little, seventeenth-century Dutch painting, A View of Scheveningen Sands, painted by Hendrick van Anthonissen in 1641. Hendrick van Anthonissen, View of Scheveningen Sands, oil on panel, 1641 (prior to conservation); Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. (c) The Fitzwilliam Museum; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation. In 2014, …
Good Friday without church is the strangest thing. But this unique moment mirrors with eerie clarity the isolation that sits at the heart of what we people believe Jesus did, which is to give himself up utterly, to be lost and abandoned in solidarity with every lost and abandoned person who ever lived. On Good Friday, the promise …
One of my worst characteristics as a boy was that my intense desire to start things was never matched by my capacity to concentrate long enough to finish them. My childhood was littered with half-made models, the detritus of hobbies hastily begun and then dropped as soon as the next shiny, interesting thing came into …
For a long time now, I have hoarded toothpaste. By this, I don’t mean that in these straitened times I have panic-bought huge stocks hoping to make a killing on the dental hygiene black market. Rather, I have kept my own tube of toothpaste hidden away in the bathroom cupboard, so I don’t have to …
I once told the following untruth. During a rambling conversation about football, I informed my boys that Queens Park Rangers FC was founded in by a group of west London pig butchers by appointment to the royal court, and that their original name was Queen’s Pork Rangers. Unbelievably, the tale passed muster. Now this is …
So, last week water started dripping through a light fitting in my kitchen ceiling. Now let me be clear: this was not flooding. Flooding is a whole other universe of properly terrible. This was just an annoyance. But it was very, very annoying indeed. Naturally, therefore, I behaved as any rational person would, faced with …