My poor old piano has not been tuned for almost a year because of the lockdown. As the tuning became less delightful, I have practised ‘mind over matter’  – a kind of ‘fingers in ears, la la la! I don’t hear anything wrong’ approach. In fact, my piano has held up remarkably well, but the […]

A year ago, when lockdown happened and all my work was cancelled, I spent a lot of time walking around the streets of my neighbourhood – partly for exercise, partly to pass the time, and partly because we were not supposed to be taking the bus so there was no other way to get to […]

It’s now a whole year since concerts started being cancelled in anticipation of the pandemic. I remember very well that I had been to a birthday coffee party where the extended family sat around a big circular glass-topped table while our reflections ate scones and drank coffee in mirror image. I got home and there […]

In a cheese shop the other day, conversation turned to exotic cheeses and someone mentioned Gjetost, the Norwegian goat’s milk cheese which looks like a block of fudge and has a distinctive, caramel element to its taste. It’s a cooked cheese made with whey and cream, very rich and usually eaten in wafer-thin slivers. Mention […]

One of our regular walks in the nearby hills takes us past a cornfield, which we discovered in the first lockdown. It was Spring then, and the field was softly green. We were thrilled to see larks emerging from their hiding-places among the rows of corn, rising up into the sky and singing when they […]