Who can still make a Sunday joint last a week?
Sunday lunch was always roast beef and, in the traditional way, the Yorkshire pudding was served first with gravy, supposedly…
For now, age isn’t just a number
When I told my seven-year-old granddaughter, over Zoom, how much I missed being with her, I added: ‘Maybe it won’t…
Lockdown productivity? Let it go
On the day our A-level exams began some wit wrote on the blackboard: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time…
Stepmothers, and other bad apples
Fairy stories were not originally aimed at children, and we do not know what the first audience responses were; but…
An outbreak of bad manners
It all started on the day after the Brexit referendum. People who do not get the result they voted for…
The big success of small shops
From time to time, usually when things are quiet, the government brings on the dancing girls. David Cameron made Carol…
This war is the same as any other
‘We don’t talk about the war.’ Yet those of my generation and older reference it daily. The coronavirus is an…
The spiritual richness of solitude
A psychiatrist once told me that it takes one’s subconscious about three weeks to catch up with a significant life…
Lockdown in the little coronavirus café
‘Now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in To saucy doubts and fears.’ Shakespeare got there first, as ever, and…
Diary
Exactly 50 years ago I drove, for the first visit of many, across country to Aldeburgh in Suffolk, following the…
A Halloween short story: by The Woman in Black’s Susan Hill
‘This is a true story…’ Right. Only this time, it really is. There are no wails, whistling winds or taps…
Everything under the sun: The glory of garden centres
Don’t you just love garden centres? You have to be mad to go on a sunny Sunday morning in the…
Everyone hates Maggi Hambling’s ‘Scallop’ – but I love it
Benjamin Britten was adamant that he did not want any memorial sculpture of himself in Aldeburgh, the Suffolk coastal town…
The boy who dreams: A Christmas short story by Susan Hill
‘Wake up, boy! Wake up…’ My father was shaking me and I was confused because it seemed that I had…
Sarah Perry’s Melmoth is a great read, but not a great novel
‘What might commend so drab a creature to your sight, when overhead the low clouds split and the upturned bowl…
Susan Hill’s diary: The return of the eels
The swifts had not arrived by June, nary a one, though a Yorkshire Dales friend reported their return, and there…
Diary
I don’t know why party conferences no longer take place in Scarborough. As a child, I saw many an important…
Diary
A trip to the supermarché at the beginning of our French month yielded many of the necessary things one also…
Frank Matcham
Go inside the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, preferably when it is empty. Look round. Look up. And there it is, with…
A bookseller’s duty
To my mind, a bookshop is like a library — the only difference is that you buy the books, you…
A bookseller’s duty
To my mind, a bookshop is like a library — the only difference is that you buy the books, you…
A bookseller’s duty
To my mind, a bookshop is like a library — the only difference is that you buy the books, you…
Diary
February Fill-Dyke. But north Norfolk is dry, at least in terms of rain. Instead we have coastal flooding. Three years…
Diary
February Fill-Dyke. But north Norfolk is dry, at least in terms of rain. Instead we have coastal flooding. Three years…
TB or not to be
If you are 70-plus, the shadow of TB will have hung over your childhood and youth, as it did mine,…
