Random Views

New Year’s Eve is on us. Just time to salute Murasaki Shikibu in her jubilee year of 2008. Who was she? We really don’t know. She wrote an e...

Misty, our cat, is a fan of our life down here in Kehl, opposite Strasbourg. That’s not to say he dislikes his life in Stafford: on the cont...

Familiarity breeds contempt and the English and French are just too familiar with each other. A trip from England to continental Europe gene...

Faced with a mess, the noble thing to do may seem to try to clear it up. Sometimes, however, the best thing is to do nothing at all. When it...

We already have monuments to the Unknown Soldier. Somewhere in England we need a statue to the Unresponsive General Practitioner. It would s...

What a drive I had yesterday, from Stafford to Edinburgh. Even though Stafford is a long way northwards up England already, close to half wa...

At the end of the summer, the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, announced that the current climate of economic meltdown was ‘no time for...