Lifestyle

Lit candles in the intense summer, the trailing willow branches are snuffed out, their smoke and shadows burning in the canals of Shaoxing, our first home in China, two and a half hours by bus north-west of Shanghai. Here the washing women bang their laundry against the huge steps that descend to the ancient canals. […]

While reading an interview with Barry Hilton, the following revelations about his marriages caught my eye: “Then after I wrote off marriage and cursed it I met my darling Sandy, who is 19 years my junior, but you’d swear she is the older one in the relationship,” he told the interviewer. “When she met me […]

[Disclaimer: If you’re a religious nut who gets offended easily, please sit this one out.] Being the irrational believer in God that I am, I do actually believe that the Holy Bible is the word of God. Perhaps not always in the strictest literal sense, which is probably where the Rev Benny Hinn and I […]

Some of my best friends are people I have never met. Some of them are people I first got to know online, then met in person. And still others are people I may never see again, but with whom I maintain ongoing contact. Could an online friendship be as rich, as meaningful, and as rewarding […]

Last Wednesday I started going blind. I was seated at this exact spot writing when I noticed an unusual itchiness in my right eye. So I did what everyone does in these situations. I scratched my right eye. And then, in the interest of balance, I scratched my left eye. And then I scratched my […]

Picture the idea of taking a vow to say “yes” to any request made of you, to say “yes” to any event. Heck, I wonder if we would still be alive after a week. I would have to follow my wife’s suggestion, which I get from time to time of, “oh, why don’t you just […]

The one thing I hated more than smoking, when I smoked, was those infuriating reformed smokers whose holier-than-thou condescension had me red in the face. So, when finally the habit kicked me, I swore never to become a reformed ex-smoker — I just wouldn’t smoke, live and let live and all that. BUT. Yes, you […]

“They felt uncomfortable with him eyeing them off and I asked him to show some respect and take his clothes off,” said the manager of a nudist colony, who was explaining how a mini riot had started at the White Cockatoo resort in northern Queensland. “He then threatened to bash me, there was some argy-bargy […]

I now wish I didn’t know some of the Chinese language. Wherever I go in mainland China, and I mean wherever, I know people are talking about me in Mandarin. Look, a lawei (foreigner)! He is so fat, such a big tummy. Sometimes they run over to pat and stroke my boep which is shrinking […]

I’m so sorry to disappoint you all. I’d like to think Miles is sorry too. (See my post “Today Miles pitched up to make a difference in his own life”.) Well, he did … but. I’ve just called to inquire about him on his second day in a detox programme, to be told: “I’m sorry […]