Well over a year has passed since my trip to England in the summer of 2023. I was there for just over two weeks, but reflecting on that period, the places I went to and the friends I met has provided these 22 articles for this facebook series. It has also instilled in me a delight in the pleasures of ...
I wrote last week about the sheer joy of spending much time with the puppies last June, when they were growing up so delightfully and estabilishing their individual personalities. But changes began then, for in June Bruno went away, to join his brother Blackie at Kithsiri’s. He had been meant for Getamanna, from where I had got Toby, but Jothini ...
I wrote last week about the sheer joy of spending much time with the puppies last June, when they were growing up so delightfully and estabilishing their individual personalities. But changes began then, for in June Bruno went away, to join his brother Blackie at Kithsiri’s. He had been meant for Getamanna, from where I had got Toby, but Jothini ...
I noted last week that I had planned to get to Heathrow early on the last day of my nostalgic visit to England this year, since John Harrison with whom I was staying at Eton was due to go to London for lunch. But it was Robert Binyon, a mutual friend, with whom he was to lunch, and I was ...
As the title last week indicated, this series of posts is a recycling of those that have appeared on my Facebook page. But given the difference in the readership of the blog, I wanted to share here too my joy in the puppies. And it has also been interesting to reread, six months later, what I felt in those long ...
Dinner with John Harrison was like dinner with Leslie Mitchell, for he could only do ready made food which he heated up. But like Leslie he also made excellent selections, and the wine was excellent, so we did very well. And then it was early to bed, though not to sleep, for I was carried away by the reading I ...
I wrote this piece in June, when I had got back after two weeks in England, to find the puppies that still remained – Blackie had gone away in early May to Kithsiri’s house – and was overwhelmed at how they had developed. Their exuberance and the joy with which they greeted me also carried me away, for I had ...
After lunch with Sam I walked back to New College in time to say goodbye to Miles and Lammy who were off to London. That afternoon I spent reading in my room, joined there in the evening by Regise, the dog, after the maid had left so that Regise and I were alone in the palatial lodgings. Before that I ...
Blackie left us early in May. We knew this was going to happen, for Kithsiri had asked for him, and it made sense for him to go to his new home when he was two months old, and had had his third vaccine. But it was still a wrench to part from him. As my niece put it, in one ...
While I was with Bruce he had mentioned a stained glass window honouring Oscar Wilde which had been put in a couple of years ago into the back wall of 9, Merton Street where I had lived in my last year as an undergraduate. In the same building, he said, were the etchings by Elizabeth Frink, illustrating aspects of The ...
It is fascinating, having watched the puppies grow up, to go back as I do here to a step by step account of their development, and how I registered it. All old hat now, but remembering the past of these now grown up characters is enormous fun, as they are in themselves. The third in size, at the time when ...
And so I was back in Oxford, for a couple of nights in the familiar setting of the top floor guest room in the Warden’s Lodgings at New College. The Warden Miles Young had kindly agreed to put me up, but he was hardly there and I saw him only very briefly. His partner Lammy was there to let me ...
It was still light on that Monday evening when we got to Sanjeeva’s house in a little town in Wales. It was a little house, and the children had been moved out of their room for me, but the downstairs had been extended so that there was substantial sitting space in addition to a dining room and a kitchen. And ...
There was only one girl amongst the big four, and she was easily distinguished for she had little white tips to her back paws. Neither Toby nor Lara has any white on them, though the light brown on Toby’s legs does shade towards white as it goes downward. I think she was the second to be born, for she was ...
It was marvellous to get back that afternoon to Bruce’s house, for it felt like home. It was good to lunch off the cheeses Bruce had in abundance, to lie in bed with Penny’s thrillers after that, to sit then in his sunny garden, and to walk for the last time on the beach with his dogs. He had got ...
My accounts of the two youngest members of my family will have indicated that the six additions have now soon enough took on characters of their own. It was fascinating to see them develop, from the identikit little creatures I left to travel to Canada when they were four days old. And they could not really be differentiated when I ...
Seeing the Chapel enthused me to revive more of my 1999 stay, though it proved even more difficult to find Hawthornden Castle. Though it had been only a walk away from the Chapel, the custodians there only had a vague idea of the place. Though we were sent in the right direction, and saw the occasional signpost, we kept taking ...
I wrote last week about the youngest is Lara’s litter, who had a problem, or rather several problems, with his eye and with regard to nourishment. But as I mentioned, under Dr Janaki’s treatment, he got better rapidly. The eye was not to be cured, we had to accept that in the end, but he did open it most of ...
We set off after breakfast from Graham’s, dropping in on Marilyn to say goodbye, and since we were making good time I asked Bruce if he minded taking me to Rosslyn Chapel which is a few miles outside Edinburgh. Way back in 1999 I had visited it when I was on a Writers Residency at Hawthornden Castle, a lovely little ...
From those days in April which saw all six puppies eating companionably and growing, in their different dimensions, I had about three months of tremendous joy in them, broken only by two weeks away in England for my birthday, in the latter part of May – though even then I saw them almost every day by calling and bothering Janaki ...
