ALEXANDER WAS HIS SURNAME and I don’t remember his given name. He was a handsome boy with dark curly hair. His father was a professor at the Lwow University, his parents knew mine and I was encouraged to play with him. Baches, again a surname, was a somewhat overweight boy and wore glasses. Again, his […]

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Have you noticed how seldom you hear people complaining about the weather forecasts these days? It seems only yesterday that no strong wind, freak hailstorm or lashing rain thundering out of a towering cumulonimbus was not followed by public or private outcry: “How could they get it so wrong?” As the Bureau of Meteorology prepares […]

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AS I LAY ASLEEP in Italy … Though not exactly Italy, but Herefordshire. David Wordsworth (a remote descendant of the poet) and I had decided to do some walking in the English countryside, and we agreed on the Golden Valley, partly because he also wanted to visit his mother and little (half) sister. His father […]

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In London my first job after arriving broke in July 1963 was as a plongeur, washing up in a Bayswater pub. At this point in life it seemed to me that I would have far better trained as a plumber or electrician, useful and portable skills, than spent four years and more studying economics at […]

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Midwife in a Yurt I was one of the very few Europeans able to speak some of the local words. It got me into a totally unforeseen situation. We were in the midst of the desert, building terraces for the rice fields. I was a team member of the military clinic, serving the builders. Our […]

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