All right, natural science correspondents, I may have got the deer species  completely wrong, but I couldn’t resist the pun.
After so much bad weather here recently, with autumn seeming ever closer, the wind dropped today and the sun seemed to gather itself for one renewed effort on the last day of August. The bracken in the [...]

I was in Italy last week and was lucky enough to be in Siena on the day the fragile mosaics of the cathedral floor were uncovered, as they are each summer for a short period. My photo shows one of the central mosaics, King David who was also a musician.
The cathedral was full of people [...]

I’ve been struggling to get rid of what the Germans call an ‘Ohrwurm’, a catchy tune that goes round and round in your head whether you want it to or not. My Ohrwurm is an early-20th-century Argentine tango, El Choclo, ‘the ear of corn’, which I heard played on the accordion by Pete Rosser in [...]

Went to the BP Portrait Award exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, which was packed with visitors. The technical standard of painting in many of the portraits was astonishing. Skin, hair, eyelashes, veins were depicted with stunning realism and skill. In quite a few cases, visitors were leaning close to the frames and peering at [...]

Walking over Waterloo Bridge the other evening I decided to pop into the Festival Hall. A very good Afro-Brazilian band was playing in the foyer and a large multi-cultural crowd, people of all ages, had gathered to listen. Many of the audience seemed to be South American and were gently dancing to the music. London [...]