I am not a patient man. But I am quite capable of mistaking idleness for patience. It’s a clever trick. The mark of my last year has often been to do nothing and to think I’m patiently biding my time whereas in fact, I’m just impatiently and fretfully getting nothing done, hoping things will get …
Just before my fifteenth birthday, I went to America with the Scouts. We were supposed to go to Iran for the World Jamboree but they had a revolution instead and so we ended up in Fort Worth, Texas. Like you do. It was a world of hitherto unknown pleasures. Baseball. Tacos. Rodeos. And there was …
When I was a little boy, my parents threw a party. This being the early 70s, and my parents being sophisticated, modern people, this involved many small bowls of salted peanuts. Because in the 70s, along with cheese and pineapple on sticks, the salted peanut gave any social gathering a certain je-ne-sais-quoi, an indefinable air …