Armistice Day – 11 November, was a Friday. It was also my birthday. I drove that morning to Long Melford in Suffolk for a weekend with the family. The elegant Old School House in the shadow of Melford Hall was our home for the weekend. A few glasses of Louis Roederer later, we walked to…
Kleinbottwar Kleinbottwar is a small village in the Baden-Württemberg wine region of Germany. It lies halfway between Ludwigsburg and Heilbronn on the Murr river and is an outlying district of the town Steinheim an der Murr. The Summer of 2022 was sunny and hot. In the last week of August, I spent two days at my son’s house…
The hilltop village of Château Chalon on the Premier Plateau with vineyards on the slopes below it is a wine village in the Château-Chalon AOC in Jura, 37 km north of Clairvaux-les-lacs. The AOC, created in 1936, is regarded as the unofficial grand cru for vin jaune of the Jura. The soil is grey marl and there are…
Clairvaux-les-lacs is a small French holiday resort near two lakes in Jura. The day in Clairvaux starts with the visit to the boulangerie for fresh baguettes and croissants to be eaten with copious amounts of salty butter. The small CarreFour Express is the convenient grocery store. There is also an Aldi and a large Bi1.…
We were up early. The vineyards on the slopes across the road were bathed in sunlight. We had breakfast, said goodbye to Laurence and Charles, and drove south along the tollroad towards Dijon, stopping at a Total for a tank-full of E98 and at an Aire for a picnic lunch. We arrived in Clairvaux-les-lacs in…
The overnight P&O ferry from Hull docked in Rotterdam just after 7 in the morning and we disembarked thirty minutes later. Formalities were minimal. The Dutch immigration officer smiled, said ‘good morning,’ stamped our passports and said “Bring some champagne.“ The drive to Ludes in Champagne was made long and arduous because I forgot to…
After two years of stagnation due to the Pandemic, we are on our first family holiday. Clairvaux-le-Lacs is not an easy place to get to by train. Geneva airport is over an hours drive away and flights this summer are a mess. I decided to drive. “You can’t go to France in a 20 year…
My best Christmas present of 2021 was a subscription to Storyworth from my son & daughter. It required me to write a prescribed essay weekly for one year, at the end of which they will be published in book form. This is the second essay. In the 1960s, I spent four years in Kharkov in…
My best Christmas present of 2021 was a subscription to Storyworth from my son & daughter. It required me to write a prescribed essay weekly for one year, at the end of which they will be published in book form. This is the first essay. It was the summer of 1974. I was in my…
It was the second Covid Christmas. Omicron was rampant. A trip to London to spend Christmas with the children was not possible. It was another ‘home alone’ Christmas. Harrogate was dull and miserable but Knaresborough glittered with Christmas lights. From the castle ruins on top of the hill, the Nidd looked pretty. Passers-by said “Merry…
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