Ages ago I was swimming in a hotel pool in northern Kenya when a friend came up and dumped a fossil tooth in my hand. He'd just found it, and didn't yet know much about it. "Hominid?" I asked, not all that tentatively. "Yes. Probably around 6 million years old." And I have to confess a little shiver ran through me. Daft, of course. But there I was, holding a very old tooth that almost certainly was nothing to do with me personally, and yet …
Up into Tuscany on Saturday, to meet an old friend and make a new one, thanks to the efforts of another friend who is one of those people at the centre of intersecting circles without end. There was much good conversation, in which a trifling gap of, perhaps, 15 years was of no consequence. And on...
There is something unutterably surreal about having what seems like yards of gauze pulled out of one's nostrils. For a start, who knew there was so much room in there? With only a finger as probe the cavity hardly seems big enough for a pea. Now I understand how mediums of old were able to produce v...
Prior to the great nose adventure, there was a great outdoors adventure in the Abruzzo National Park. We drove up last Saturday, and coming down the pass from Gioia di Marsi I remarked to myself that the trees seemed to have a wonderful pinky brown tint to their leaves. And that seemed distinctly od...
To England, for a long weekend, and as the plane dropped down towards Birmingham it was plain that people had been right when they told me that this was an extraordinary spring. The hedgerows were white with may blossom, thick and dense, as if it were in fact snowy January. But the fields, even from...
