Well, not ducklings, actually, but baby coots seen this afternoon. They were obviously extremely young, and it was difficult to photograph them because they kept zooming and darting about. Their parents kept diving down to look for food, and while they were underwater, the cootlings bowled merrily about the surface of the lake like dandelion clocks.

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Like most other people in Britain I’ve been relishing the sudden quietness resulting from the closure of our airspace because of a drifting cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland. On Saturday I sat in the garden for ages, because it felt so special to be sitting  under the Heathrow flightpath with a totally silent sky (see photo). Well, [...]

Yesterday a friend was visiting Oxford and sent me this photo of my new book on the ‘welcome table’ in Blackwell’s bookshop. It’s the one with the black cover in the centre of the picture. As I haven’t yet seen any copies of the book in a store near me, I was very happy to see this [...]

It’s amazing what the arrival of a box of organic vegetables and farm produce can inspire. Hours after taking delivery of our box, Bob had made this superb quiche with courgettes, aubergines, leeks, olives, garlic, rosemary, crème fraiche and home-made pastry. Here it is, just out of the oven. The glorious yellowness of the custard is [...]

My piano tuner asks whether I’m happy to keep my piano at the usual pitch, A=440. Yes. Why wouldn’t I be?
Well, he says, some British orchestras are now asking for pianos to be tuned at A=442 Hz. Now that there’s so much musical traffic between countries, we’re under pressure to adopt ‘European’ tuning, and for [...]