Serener Skies

It’s that time of year again. The Summer Bank Holiday has passed, September is with us and the kids will shortly be back at school. As if on cue, the temperature across the UK has dropped from the freakish highs we had last weekend to something much more typical for the time of year. One might almost say that autumn is in the air. There is that sense of the passing of another summer, the beginning of that descent towards the turn of the year’s wheel, as the days start to shor

We British have many idiosyncratic behaviours that have been commented upon with admiration, bemusement or contempt by other nations, and perhaps none more so than our drinking habits. I have often thought in earlier times that there was a peculiar joylessness to British drinking. The Parisians can sit on the boulevards outside their cafes in that effortlessly stylish way sipping red wine, smoking Gauloises and talking about ennui; their neighbours to the east can uproariousl

I feel bound to warn the regular reader of this blog that the Second World War will appear regularly either at the centre or hovering...