Our cat’s preferred brand of catfood has a disarming slogan: ‘As good as it looks’.  The layers of meaning quiver in front of your eyes almost as much as the meaty jelly does when you spoon it out. Obviously, ‘as good as it looks’ is meant to put positive thoughts in your head about the catfood, but it has [...]

Once again this year the azaleas of the Isabella Plantation, the botanical garden in the middle of Richmond Park, have all come out at once. In previous years they tactfully staggered their weeks of blooming so that different bits of the park came to life at different times, but last year and this year the azaleas co-ordinated [...]

After rejoicing that the BBC had improved its ‘Young Musician of the Year’ coverage so markedly in 2010, I had to grind my teeth with annoyance as I watched the ‘Eurovision Young Musicians 2010’ competition on BBC4 this evening. The young musicians were tremendous, but the presentation was horribly bland. Fifteen semi-finalists were whittled down to seven [...]

I was in Provence in the south of France last week and visited the Abbey of Silvacane, founded by the Cistercians in the late 12th century but long since abandoned. I thought it one of the loveliest churches I’ve seen. The  church, cloister, garden, chapter house, refectory, dormitory, scriptorium and so on presented one delightful prospect after [...]

I didn’t manage to catch many of the programmes charting the progress of BBC Young Musician of the Year 2010, but I’m proud to say that I did pick out the eventual winner, 16-year-old pianist Lara Omeroglu, when she first appeared in a keyboard category final. Not that it was really difficult to do. She seems to have [...]